Barry Lee Thompson

Here in the southern hemisphere, winter is beginning to give way to spring. Different flowers are blooming: while out walking, the heady scent of jasmine has hit me once or twice, drifting over a garden fence or down a laneway. And the sun is setting later, by about two minutes each night. And though I enjoy spring, I’m already starting to miss the guaranteed chill and 5pm sunsets of deep winter in Melbourne.

There was a time when summer was the season I never wanted to end, when I was at school, in the UK. I loved the six-week holidays, the long, long break from the classroom. I also loved to sunbathe, worshipped the sun. How can it be that in memory, every moment of the hols was sunny and warm. I’d spend languid days in the back-garden, slicked in low-protection Ambre Solaire or Bergasol – suntan lotion, not sunscreen. I was on a mission to maximise my tan, measuring progress by the contrast of the tan-lines around my swimming trunks, in the process doing untold damage to my skin. I’d squeeze every bit out of a day’s sunshine; keen, or anxious, to not lose a drop. There was always music from the transistor radio at my side, permanently tuned to Radio One.

‘Phase’, the sixth story in Broken Rules and Other Stories, is a celebration of those summers, told through the eyes of a teenage boy who, like me at one time, adores the sun, adores Radio One. The boy in ‘Phase’ also adores the paperboy who delivers the evening newspaper in the neighbourhood, and he spends much of his sun-soaked afternoons anticipating the daily sighting. He believes this infatuation is hidden, but there’s a chance his father might have cottoned on to his secret.