West Brunswick, Melbourne, very early 2000s

I can’t remember whose idea it is to sleep outside, but we take our Thermarests and sleeping bags out into the garden and set up a bed under the smog of a Brunswick sky. It must be a weekend, and we are too excited and unsettled by the novelty of it all to really sleep, so we lie there chatting, laughing, reminiscing, singing.

When we were really small Paddy had an unerring instinct for how to piss me off. I distinctly recall sobbing to mum “I hate Paddy, mum. I really, really hate him,” on more than one occasion. He could turn on the charm with others, play the sweet chubby mulleted angel. And then with me: hellish little devil. Still mulleted. He knew where every button was and how to stomp on it.

As we got older, he slowly but surely became my best mate. We caught the school bus together, went running around Gilpin Park, kicked the footy, walked the mountains. It must have been one of these trips to the Victorian Alps that inspired the sleep out in our back garden. Paddy and I spent many holidays hiking in Gippsland: packs on backs, sweating, feeling that fierce independence that comes from knowing you carry everything you need with you, and that sense of belonging that comes from being in the mountains with friends. We were addicted to it, and escaped Melbourne on the Gippsland train every school holiday, eating soggy pies and fizzing with excitement.

Returning to Melbourne always felt like a slow deflation, but I had Paddy and our photos and stories and reminiscences to keep me going through the school term. I longed for open skies and mountains, physical work and companionship, stars and weather and cold.

The backyard isn’t the Alps by some stretch, but it’s all we have. I’m not sure who starts singing U2 first, but we start with ‘Beautiful Day’ and wind up singing ‘In a Little While’. When it gets to that moment in the chorus when Bono goes falsetto, Paddy goes high and loud and I have never found anything so funny. Drunk on not so fresh air, I laugh harder than I’ve ever laughed. Snorting, tear-leaking, wee-inducing, gut-aching laughter.

Most of my times of uncontrollable laughter have involved Paddy. Trying to light his farts camping on an island in the middle of the Snowy River, discovering he had put a huge rock in my hiking pack, vomiting after eating competitions, watching ‘The Office’. Just as he has always known how to give me the shits, he has always been able to have me in stiches.

We hope for a moon or a glimpse of stars, but all we get is the light in the lane behind our house burning into our retinas. At some point it starts to spit rain, and still hiccupping giggles and singing snatches of U2, we drag an old paddling pool out of the shed and tuck it around our sleeping bags. We don’t sleep at all. 

It remains one of my favourite nights.

North East Victoria, 2024

Now I watch my two children, a similar age gap, at 1 and 3 as they begin to play together. When I was pregnant with my second and packing for hospital, Bonnie asked, “Mum, can I come to hospital with you?”

In that moment I was hit by a wave of guilt and grief that I was bursting the single child bubble. Bonnie stared at me in puzzlement as I sobbed messily and gabbled “I’m not having another baby because you’re not perfect. It’s not that you’re not enough.” She gave me an absent minded pat, not understanding why I was so suddenly upset nor how her world was about to change.

Later that night, as I laughed about my meltdown with my partner, I thought about what I was giving Bonnie, rather than what I was taking, by giving her a sibling. Someone to piss her off, to teach her to compromise and share, to forgive, to defend, to love utterly and unconditionally. And if she is lucky enough, someone to kick the footy, catch the school bus and walk the mountains with, in a little while and for the rest of her life. Someone to make her laugh til she cries, singing U2 on a Thermarest in a small suburban backyard.

Stereo Story #812

Tess wrote this piece, her debut Stereo Story, after seeing our show for the first time, at Albury in mid-September.

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Tess Macrae is an English teacher and wishes she wrote more. She lives in North East Victoria on a bush property with her family and devours books, rides her mountain bike, and grows vegetables.