I remember our old house in Narrandera, in southern New South Wales.

I must have been about five years old. I finished brushing my teeth, and tottered out of the bathroom into the hallway. My sister came stampeding along from her bedroom and didn’t see me. She bumped into me, knocking me down to the ground. My head cracked open as it connected with the corner of the skirting board. My mother heard the commotion, so she came to hear what all the fuss was about. As she stroked my hair, her fingers touched the wet blood escaping my head.

My parents took me to hospital to get stitched up. The nurse stuffed my face into a pillow to muffle my bawling. I awoke later in my darkened bedroom – the stitches hiding under the bandage coming loose from around my head.

This is the first bundle of things I remember. It’s a story that has been told and retold so many times that it feels like a morphed series of images of the original event – like something from a dream or TV show. I’m not sure which parts are what I was told, what was imagined and what I actually recall from my painful childhood experience.