DEMONS

I was four years old when it happened. We were at Four Mile Beach for a family day out. My mum stayed on the beach with my baby sister. I followed my dad out onto the point, a rocky outcrop that caught the swell and shaped it into waves that ran along the reef towards shore. It was bitterly cold and windy that day, and I can’t recall seeing any surfers in the water.

My mum had a hard time trusting my father with me. He’d already proven a pretty unreliable parent: when I was just a few weeks old, he had drunkenly placed me, swaddled in a blanket, on the rear bed