Trent Dalton’s first love was the time-travelling Marty McFly

Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly belts out Johnny B. Goode at the Enchantment Under the Sea school dance.

My first love played guitar for The Pinheads and drove a ­DeLorean that travelled through time when it reached 88 miles per hour. My first love was brave and brash and brilliant.

He clung to moving cars on his skateboard. He stood up to butt-headed bullies named Biff. He went to Hill Valley High and he was in love with a girl named Jennifer Parker and best friends with a fast-talking scientist named Doc. I still remember the very moment I knew I had fallen head over heels and arse over T-shirt for Martin Seamus McFly.

It was the summer of 1986 and I was raking up the fallen mango tree leaves in the backyard of my grandparents’ house in seaside Sandgate, Brisbane. Those mango leaves had been baked and browned by the Queensland sun and had the consistency of Thins potato crisps. I’d scoop the leaves up in my fingers and they’d crumble in my palms before they made it to Grandad’s old bin.

Then, as always, I was distracted by my reliable friend the septic tank. Just a rectan-gular block of old concrete with a circular copper manhole cover in its centre. The block was about as long and wide as the kitchen table where Nan was often found in her wheelchair eating ginger-nut biscuits upstairs. This particular suburban septic tank had proven to be a useful and adaptable structure for me and my three older brothers. It could act as a precarious elevated rope bridge stretching over a river of famished crocodiles, upon which two stout-hearted knights might engage in trial-by-combat.

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It was a breeze up there on that solid block to imagine you were holding Excalibur, pulled triumphantly from stone, when you were really holding a PVC pipe cutting pulled from Grandad’s tool shed.

I could practise my ankle-level slips catches by bouncing a tennis ball against the side of the septic tank block. Four upturned buckets for seats and a frisbee for a steering wheel and that septic tank turned into a Sherman tank, carving through some hellish bomb-cratered European battlefield.

Trent Dalton.

On that day I was raking up those mango leaves, I saw the septic tank as a stage for Marty McFly to sing Johnny B. Goode at the Enchantment Under the Sea school dance that was taking place only in my mind. The septic tank became a high school hall stage.

The wooden garden rake under my arm became a cherry-red Gibson guitar. And I became Marty McFly, goose-stepping and knee-swivelling like some seasoned singer of 1950s rock’n roll number ones, dancing across that glorious concrete container housing my family’s number twos. “Go, go,” I roared.

“Go, Johnny, go, go, go.”

Then, miraculously, the septic tank turned into a time machine. My own decade-hopping DeLor-ean. And this, of course, was the thing I loved most about Marty McFly. His ability to escape; to change the course of history; to right a few family wrongs.

Dude was a time traveller. Slam the gas in the driver’s seat of the septic tank, get that sucker up to 88 miles per hour and off I went to anywhen I wanted. Not anywhere, of course, anywhen. I knew the laws of time travel. I caught every piece of scattershot exposition that spilt from Doc Brown’s lips. I knew I couldn’t transport myself to Ancient Egypt. I knew I couldn’t zap myself to the Battle of Waterloo or The Gunfight at the OK Corral. Place didn’t change when Marty’s DeLorean did its thing, only time.

So I travelled back to seaside Sandgate, Brisbane, in the time of the dinosaurs. I saw a Tyrannosaurus rex barrelling across the low-tide mud flats of Moreton Bay. I slipped through time to 1942, around the time my granddad, Vic, returned to Sandgate after giving his blood and one of his legs to the Western Desert Campaign of World War II. I shot through a blue wormhole and was spat out in the mid-1970s in Sandgate when Mum and Dad were beautiful and young, before their sweet-scented love story turned septic. I could drive to the future. Sandgate, Brisbane, 3022, to see great towers lining the beachfront along Flinders Parade. Kids floating above Moreton Bay on hover-tech hula-hoops, eating battered flathead and chips and sipping on cans of Pasito because of course Pasito will outlast eternity. Or maybe I could just stay put in 1986 and drive the DeLorean up Deagon St and into Brighton and I could drive up North Rd and find the house of Alison Hipwood – my own personal primary school Jennifer Parker, my second first love – and maybe Alison could step outside to check out my ride and maybe she could be so impressed with my time-travelling wheels that she’d plant a kiss on my lips just as the chorus to The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and The News echoed across the northern suburbs of Brisbane.

And as I write this I want to stay in that place. I want to stay back there on that septic tank in 1986 – back in time – and I want to run upstairs and dunk a ginger-nut into milk beside Nan and I want to tell her she’s a wonder and a marvel and a princess who never once complained about the life she lived with polio.

I want to run into the living room and tap on Grandad’s wooden leg and ask him what sacrifice really means, and what it feels like to take a bullet from Jerry. I never asked him these questions because I was always too busy watching Marty McFly singing Johnny B. Goode on the telly while Grandad read his paper and his Bible in silence in the living room. Damn, I wanna stay. But, of course, time waits and bends for none, especially children of the ’80s.

So it’s time to come back now. Back to school runs and rising electricity bills and war in Ukraine and hackers of health funds. Back to good and bad times and times we’ll never get again. Back to every beautiful thing that’s waiting for us ’round the bend. Back to December 2022. Back to the future.

Trent Dalton’s latest book is Love Stories (HarperCollins)