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original body weight. The confined booth of the bog has taken on a different atmospheric pressure due to the stink of it. I let out a last hoot of derision as I zip my fly. Then I stop. Hold on—that puke. That’s mine. That’s my puke . That’s what I did first before I finally unloaded the seismic pressure on my bladder … So what happened? And why am I still shaking?
    This is what happened.
    Five minutes ago I was sweating on the tartan seat of the train, in a kind of suspended state; a levitation or trance from the stress of remembering. The stress of encountering so much past in the present. This, after all, was half my mission, but I didn’t feel equal to it. Hamford isn’t a place I visit very often when trawling the archives. For a start, I haven’t been back for ten years. There doesn’t seem any point. Nor have I spoken to my father. After my mother’s second marriage (to Delph, who else?) ended in a trauma of broken furniture and immense vindication for everyone who said it would never last, she moved up north. Back to her people. Or what few of them there were, with her mother dead and her old man a toothless miner who, like Delph’s, sat wrapped in a travel rug by the coal scuttle all day, conjuring myths and roses from the flames. She was happy there, she said, with her own .
    So my mother was gone. I was barely nineteen. And then, around the same time, my father decided to emigrate. Always a man to take life’s blows lying down, always too easy ; always conforming to nomenclatural accident, he found himself involved with one of the research operatives Diatrix employed in Lille. Research operative was a euphemism for human guinea pig, those drifters and loners who willingly allow fearsome strains of newly patented drugs (in this case laxatives) to pass through their systems in exchange for francs. Usually people who’d tried everything in life twice already, and still hadn’t found their place in the world. Wasters, economic migrants, clochards —haggard survivors of bottom-dollar hotel work, stints of fry-cheffing, college terms of life modelling, prostitution, begging, smudging and skanking. This particular woman, Des’s chosen chérie , was a sparrow-thin ex-grape-picker named Emmanuelle Deborache. A woman who habitually found herself in Lille when the vine harvest ended, knocking on doors for cleaning jobs. The chance to take her life in her own hands (or at least, the future of her colon) by ingesting the sulphurous and virulent shit-inducers concocted by Des and his colleagues must’ve seemed like a gift from heaven. The money was fantastic; the hours great, although they often tested full-strength on a Friday to give the operative the weekend to recover. This played merry havoc with my father’s courtship of the Piaf-like Frenchwoman when cinema seats had to be hastily vacated on a Saturday night, or when entire restaurants were cleared by a single fart as new ‘X-Shift’ found its tenure in Emmanuelle’s digestive system.
    They married in a leaf-strewn registry office on a rainy morning in November 1990, six months after meeting each other. The best man was Des’s French boss, Didier. The witness was Emmanuelle’s scowling sister, Marie (as strikingly fat as Emmanuelle was strikingly thin). There were no other guests. A year later they emigrated on a whim to Sydney. I have often thought my father’s island upbringing, somewhere in the lost patterning of his subconscious, informed this move. And I am sure I have many emaciated and bald little half-brothers and sisters who are impressively bilingual. But I’ll never find out. Unless one of us picks up that telephone.
    So Hamford—that sweet Ithaca—isn’t a place I visit very much, physically or mentally. The long, elm-shrouded avenues must still dance with tree-thrown shadows under the blissful agitation of a June breeze. The mythologised sandpits and treehouses where I played (and once found a sodden, discarded flat cap