Losing the plot

In this extract from her memoir, NZ poet and author KATE CAMP goes to Washington certain she will witness a historic presidential victory.

- KATE CAMP

Our bathroom had dark-blue wallpaper with birds and flowers on it, like the wallpaper in an English country house. The paintwork was putty-coloured, with a putty-coloured bath shelf that Dad had built for Mum. As well as room for Mum’s mug of Nescafé, it had a sloping holder with a lip to hold her book, or the latest issue of the Bulletin. Once I was having a bubble bath with a jar of hard-boiled sweets on the shelf, and Dad called me a little sybarite. In the bathroom cupboard was a wide-mouthed orange plastic jug. Its lip was shaped like an upper lip, with a cupid’s bow. This is the jug Mum would use to wash our hair, and as I write that, I can see my sister’s fine, straight hair being washed with it, hanging down her back while I sit in the bath behind. I used to like to force the jug under the bath water, filled with air, then let the air out in huge, transparent bubbles.

This is my first memory of American politics. I’m not sure where they come from, but I am in our bathroom and I have a sheet of satirical stickers about Richard Nixon. They are the kind of stickers that are cut into shapes, and when you peel them off, they will leave thin, odd-shaped pieces of blank white sticker behind. And I don’t think I know who Richard Nixon is, but one of the stickers has the phrase BUM’S RUSH on it and it shows Nixon in a hurry, with those speed lines and a cloud of speed dust behind him. Maybe it says