In Queensland, the humidity could just about kill you. Unlike other Australian states, where people talk about experiencing a “dry heat”—something you’d encounter in a sauna or during menopause—the heat up north is more like a steam room, this wet blanket of air that hangs over you like a drunken fug and smothers your brain like you’ve swallowed something narcotic. It’s what you’d call equatorial weather, the kind of climate where the pores on your face spontaneously open up on their own, and primary schools send pupils home when classrooms start to fry, which happens more often than you’d think. All over the state, old men’s noses swell up and mutate into red, tumorous cankers from sun exposure, and young boys develop inflamed, peeling shoulders that look like textbook cases of leprosy. You can tell which women wear sunscreen from the ones who don’t. The ones who skip sunscreen have skin like their grandmothers. And their grandmothers don’t have skin at all, but a rich, tan, saddle-quality leather over their face instead.

It always struck me as insanely cruel that I’d be born into these conditions. Even though I’m Asian, I’d always thought of myself as more suited to Scandinavia, somewhere Norse and cold, where everyone read sagas and ate herring, and no one ever surfed or swam. It didn’t help that where I lived, no one’s houses were designed for the heat. Builders and architects were in denial, and our living room prioritised decoration over ventilation with its heavy ground-to-ceiling windows that didn’t open, and magnified the heat on its way in before trapping it like an oven. In summer, you could bake a cake in the ensuite, make pudding in the sinks.

On Christmas holidays, my siblings and I would lie in front of a rotating fan, rubbing ice cubes over our temples, waiting for the moment the fan would point in our direction to offer us sweet relief.

“Mum,” the five of us would groan. “Muuuuum.”

We didn’t even know what we were asking for; the five of us sounded drunk. All we knew was that we wanted the pain to stop. As we moaned, Candy, Andrew and I sprayed ourselves with a spray bottle, while Tammy and Michelle lay down on bed sheets on the floor, wearing nothing but underwear bottoms saturated in sweat.

“Muuuum.”

Our mother would come out, sweating and wearing rubber dishwashing gloves covered in suds. She hated when we complained.

“You think this is hot?” she’d ask. “You don’t know hot. In Malaysia, it’d get so hot you’d want to rip your skin off, but we’d still have to wear a full school uniform. Three layers. Three.” She held three gloved fingers up accusingly, all of them moist and dripping. The way she did it made it look vulgar. At her school, she added, there were nuns in full habits who stoically walked through the searing Malaysian heat without ever flinching or complaining. Could we imagine what these nuns’ bodies must’ve looked like at the end of the day—all shrivelled and hot, their boobs poached in their own sweat like half-cooked pork fillets? Well? Could we?

There was supposed to be a moral to her story, an answer to her question, but the heat made it hard for us to concentrate.

“What?” we asked.

Mum shook her head. “Do something outside,” she said. “Get out of the house.”

But even she knew our options were limited. We were afraid of the beach. We were terrible at swimming. Sometimes we’d have a “wet day”, where we’d spend hours with the hose on in the garden, pouring bubble bath liquid onto a plastic slide stretched out over the lawn. Inevitably though, someone would get hurt, or we’d get into a fight, and one of us would start bleeding from a cut or a missing tooth. Wet days were strictly a “sometimes” activity. Other days, we’d stand in front of the freezer until Mum told us we were wasting electricity. Most of the time though, we were just content to stay at home and whinge, which is something each of us did really, really well.

↓

Though we might have felt deathly, other things thrived in this kind of heat. Mosquitoes, for instance, drunk on sweat and blood, would bite us without fear or shame. Sleeping through summer in the room I shared with Andrew, we’d wake up with welts on our feet, palms and face; the next morning, we’d walk around like we’d been shot by rubber bullets. But what I hated the most were the cockroaches, which bred in our kitchen like a virus. I didn’t have problems with spiders or silverfish, but cockroaches grossed me out. Mice problems almost seemed cute. Friends who had snake issues struck me as exciting and adventurous. But cockroaches were the pest for people who lived in dumpsters. There was something shameful about it.

It was our kitchen’s fault. Cockroaches loved breeding in and behind the broken, derelict dishwasher, and after we’d turn off the lights, they’d hold revolting orgies underneath the warm coils of the hotplates. The oven had never been properly installed, and there were gaps between the cabinets and the walls where grease built up like a black tarry plaque. We lost cutlery and chopsticks in those gaps. For cockroaches, it was a warm, sticky, disgusting heaven.

At least twice a day, massive cockroaches would crawl out from their corner and into open, public display. There was something so outrageously shameless about how they did this that we’d bay for the cockroach’s blood straight away. Andrew was always the first to launch into action.

“Die, fucker!” he’d scream, chasing it with a shoe. The rest of us would jump onto sofas, hopping from foot to foot, pointing and shrieking as Andrew gave chase.

“Kill it! Kill it!” we yelled, watching it zigzag across the living room floor.

“Where’d it go!”

“Over there! Over there!” we said, pointing to the pile of board games under the coffee table.

“Don’t use that,” Candy screamed. “It’s my good shoe!”

“Fuck your good shoe!”

The cockroach would climb up the wall.

“Over there, over there—”

“It’s getting away!”

Andrew took aim.

“My shooeeee,” Candy moaned.

“I see it!” I said, pointing at the wall.

“Got it,” Andrew said.

Andrew pegged the shoe with startling precision. The initial impact would briefly paralyse the cockroach before Andrew came in for the kill: a brutal series of unforgiving poundings that would obliterate the thing into an unrecognisable mash of guts and legs. The rest of us became bloodthirsty and primal, like those movies where small-town pack-mobs are taken over by psychotic bloodlust. “KILL IT!” we’d scream, as Andrew kept smashing the thing into the floor. The bigger ones would explode, their insides squirting in all directions like a splattered boil, with pus and plasma that looked almost human. By the end of it, Andrew would be bent over and panting, trying to catch his breath, and all of our hearts would be racing, our blood boiling in the tropical heat.

↓

Every year, Dad called pest control to nuke the shit out of the cockroaches. Every time he called them, we all hoped that would be the end of the ordeal. Somehow though, the cockroaches always survived. After a pest control bomb failed to get rid of them for the third time, we reconciled ourselves to the idea of living in a roach-infested hellhole for the rest of our lives. What else could we do? So in the summer evenings, when the heat would wake me up like I was being smothered, I’d get out of bed to go to the toilet. On my way to the bathroom, I’d casually smash cockroaches along the way with plastic slippers, before wiping up their remains with toilet paper and flushing them down the toilet. We all did our bit. Afterwards, as I made my way to the kitchen to get a glass of water, I’d listen to the murmurs of my parents arguing in their bedroom, behind closed doors.

As my eyes adjusted to the kitchen’s darkness, I could see the walls were moving. Of course, it wasn’t the wall, but the clusters of cockroaches that moved across the kitchen. It was like a curtain from a nightmare. When I took a step back, I nearly stepped on one before it crept off into the shadows in the direction of my room. Washing my tumbler, I wondered what the point of washing anything was, since it’d all be covered in cockroach germs by the next morning. No wonder my parents aren’t happy, I thought. Whose parents could be happy in this sort of house? I figured if the pest control man wasn’t going to do his job properly, I’d have to take matters into my own hands.

I’d read in the Australian Women’s Weekly about a surefire remedy to trap cockroaches. You got an empty ice-cream container, soaked stale bread with fat, sugar and alcohol, and greased the rim with oil. At night, you put it in the corner of your kitchen, and all the cockroaches climbed in, driven crazy by the combination of sweetened liquor and grease. They’d try to get out, but the greased container would keep them inside. The morning after I made the trap, my siblings and I dressed in our school uniforms before approaching it slowly. The first thing we noticed was a scratching noise from inside. Together, we peered into the container.

“Wow,” one of us said. “That is disgusting.”

Inside was a stack of cockroaches almost ten centimetres deep, all crawling on top of one another and trying to get out. The cockroaches at the base were either dead or drunk, and the living ones were stepping on the bloated corpses of their comrades.

Without saying a word, I carefully balanced the ice-cream container in my hands, while someone else opened the sliding door that led to the yard. In one swift movement, I threw the container up into the air. It landed upside down on the ground. No one said a thing, but we all knew what to do. As the cockroaches scuttled away—big and small, fast and slow—into the corners of the garden, we screamed and started smashing them into the dirt with our school shoes, hollering like we were possessed and in the middle of a massacre. These things had ruined our home, they’d taken over our house, and now they were getting what was coming all along. Finally, finally, finally, we had all of the motherfuckers cornered, something to destroy, something we could control. All of us continued to stomp and scream, while Mum watched on, bleary eyed from another evening without sleep.

↓

One of the first things my mother did after she’d separated from my father was to buy herself a new oven and dishwasher. The new oven fit next to the cabinets properly without any gaps, and her new stove top rested magically flat on the bench: no electric coils, just a beautifully polished black stone that lit red when in use. After the spaces between the bench and the dishwasher were sealed, the cockroaches disappeared almost overnight, taking their babies with them. With my father gone, the cockroaches evicted and new household appliances doing her work, it was like my mother had a new lease on life. When I went to wash my glasses and mugs, she’d holler from the other room. “Don’t worry! I have a dishwasher now! You can use as many glasses as you like!” Then she’d laugh like someone deranged, as though she could barely believe her luck.

By that stage, I’d moved out of home and was living in an old Queenslander, a house that faced south, retained heat in summer and in the winter let the freezing air in. In the damp, stormy summers, mushrooms would grow out of the shower fittings, and although none of my housemates or I ever let animals indoors, fleas would make their way into the house. During the summer, when the heat became excruciating, I’d lie in bed all evening with bowls of ice, moaning and nude. The place was paradise for vermin and pestilence. Still, I had a system for each species. The mosquitoes would be smoked out. The spiders would be let out gently. The fleas would be fumigated. And the cockroaches would be crushed without mercy, no hesitation at all, sometimes with my bare hands, because sometimes the occasion just called for extreme measures.