hexed

 

the ocean is green, like glass, like eyes. i would like to wrap it around myself like a cloak, tying it up firmly under my ice cap, wrapping it lightly around my southern hemisphere, feeling it swirl silkenly around my lithosphere, resting coolly on my tectonic plates and giving off its cool, atmospheric lustre like the shine on angels’ skin, or skinks’ skins. skinks are beautiful. their scales are like water.

i sit on the rocks and acquaint myself with the chunky world of rats. there are such good, dark places down there for rats. felicia would be in danger there though, although all the caves look beautiful. the rocks are made of sandstone, all colours from white to black, taking in greys, browns and red browns, yellows, creams and oranges, with textures like bush biscuit, turkish halva and gingerbread. the crevices among them, where the rats live, are black with floors of pure white sand. perfect.

i swim alone these days, avoiding crowds. if there are porpoises out there, there won’t be sharks. if there are no porpoises, i’d better keep an eye out.

i roll a tight, neat cigarette these days. the cells of my body rejoice in it.

on the first day of my last year of high school, lily wallace confronts me in the corridor outside the latin classroom, waiting to go in. ‘you don’t do latin!’ she is one of the other eight matriculation latin students. now that latin is no longer a compulsory matriculation subject, classes have dwindled.

‘i got special permission,’ i explain, and tell her about the clash with my mother and the correspondence lessons that resulted.

she laughed. ‘you must be keen.’ like most students, she has a secret anxiety about latin.

her boy has been told to sit and stay, but he lifts up a golden paw and laughs a silent, placating laugh, his wide blue eyes beginning to lose hope. they are beautiful, his eyes, but his eyebrows are too low, too short, too pale, too dense, too shapeless, and his skin looks too fragile, like the skin of an eyeball, so that you recoil from touching it.

he congratulates me on a poetry prize i've recently won. 'very nice poem,' he adds. 

‘oh, you read it did you?’ i ask him with a quick nervous smile that his neurotic magic twists into a sneer which he exaggerates into a snarl, stretching my eye teeth into fangs and equipping my hands with claws, because all women are bitches to scared boys in thrall and the power in any power struggle goes to the most terrified contender. partly to reassure lily that he was not flirting with this girl. just congratulating a poet.

‘yes, i always read poetry. i like poetry,’ he says. there's an edgy vibe happening between us as he looks at me, until lily intervenes and stares deeply into his eyes, standing between us, almost in our way. i am aware of the deeps of her eyes while she does it, though i see them only obliquely with the edge of my gaze, which is levelled attentively at her boy. lily pours a liquid ray into his eyes that fills him and makes him radiate a silvery light, like the aura of an ancient irish god.

‘what do you know about poetry?’ she asks him fondly with a maternal crooked smile, straightening his tie for him, though it had been neat enough. 

it was part of the bond-forming, you can see that from here can’t you? the two lovers of the tarot. it’s all involuntary. they are together now but will they always be? she calls another girl into their space. now normally it would be the most likely rival from among liliy's girlfriends, but they’re all smart, empowered girls and won’t be in it. ivy is inept, a spinsterly bluestocking gone wrong, a poet and philosopher, but she knows nothing about pair-bonding and she has no defence. 

timidly, not sure whether or not this one is still valid - and anyway, is it appropriate here? - the boy gives a gesturally stage-whispered assurance to his lover that he will not be attracted to this rival, defeats the strange girl if he can in a power struggle of his own making, disables her self-possession, kicks out her soul and installs someone hypothetical he really hates instead, in order plainly to display to his mistress that he and her would-be 'rival' hate each other. ivy stutters a bit as she asks the question, 'who's your favourite poet?' and wishes she were somewhere else.

 ‘c. j. dennis. he’s my favourite poet,’ replies the boy.

‘oh, come on now!’ ivy laughs. look, you can actually see her trying to escape there. she pulls away with quick shudder, but the boy has control. he wants it hate. ivy stammers ‘you're joking, aren't you? you don't call him a poet?’, and her face is a cruel mask, her mouth twisted into a tight little sneer.

he has great power, this boy, and it is harnessed to his fear, and it is his intention to bring ivy down. a bitch she is hexed and a bitch she is forced to be. the bitch muscles out the last of her, sprangles my settings and configurations and infuses my manner with a false self-confidence, which manifests as an arrogant swagger. ivy channelling bitch.

not the first time ivy has felt controlled by others. 

he comes up close to lily and me and draws lily in too so that our shoulders are quite close, forming an equilateral triangle, representing perhaps an eternal triangle. he has a geography lesson in the next room, but our teachers have not yet arrived, so he isn't lined up at his own door. he looks me straight in the eye, a humorous sparkle in his own. lily chuckles comfortably.

‘he is australia’s best poet.’

‘his poems are only comic doggerel. pop poems. light entertainment only. it’s like calling nino culotto a great novelist.’

‘he is! he’s one of the best!’

we all laugh, all three, one wild, hysterical yelping laugh. it is his laugh and he has all three of us laughing it.

a lowbrow, this boy. a turtle’s egg. lily jerked him back onto his haunches and told him to sit, but she said in his defence, ‘that’s just intellectual snobbery.’ 

‘no,’ whisper-screamed ivy, becoming fanatic. ‘there is a real difference between good, profound literature and light entertainment. it’s not a matter of snobbery.’ but, yes he's got her there.

‘i bet you’ve never even read any c. j. dennis,’ snarled lily’s boy, wagging his tail furiously and laughing silently, his blue lagoons of eyes sparkling with mirth while his soul commences to twist slowly and his muscles begin to bulge in the first easy ripple of his warp spasm. lily’s soul gripped his soul by its collar. the collar was real, silver and decorated with limpid jewels the size of pigeons’ eggs. his body coughed wheezily in protest.

i had and i proved it. i quoted a few slabs from the songs of a sentimental bloke - i even waxed loud and swaggering for a minute or two: ‘i’m crook. me name is mud. i’ve done me dash. me flamin’ spirit’s got the flamin’ ‘ump. i’m longing to let loose with something rash…’ and i was, so i did. ‘er name’s doreen. well, spare me bloomin’ days, yer coulda knocked me down wiv arf a brick…’, '"wot's in a name?" she says, and then she sighs, an' clasps her little hands and rolls 'er eyes...'

demeaning as i felt it to be to have it, ivy paraded a surprisingly impressive knowledge of poetry i hadn’t even thought of since i was nine. 

by the time i’d finished, his battle rage had inflated to distort, not his soul, nor his ethereal body, nor his appendix, bladder or spleen, but a silkily shining hot air balloon which had for its skin the cloak of ocean-shimmer my soul had been wearing for the past week or so, and which lily had stolen from me a minute or two before with a contemptuous twitch of two fingers and draped casually over his arm as a trophy, forfeit because of my cruelty to her boy, thus demonstrating to him that her resources of power and authority are at his disposal (conditions apply). inflating and inflating, it had billowed upwards behind him, threatening to lift him off his feet, until it split with a little gasp of surprise under the mounting pressure and deflated itself with the shiny white sigh of a wave across a sandy beach.

i retrieved it, and put it on again, and they didn't dispute that i'd won it back. lily laughed delightedly. ‘what about you?’ she asked. ‘which poets do you like?’ 

            ‘dylan thomas… sitwell… pound…’

‘not one australian?’ that’s unpatriotic.’

‘it’s realistic. as a nation we’re a laughing stock. we have no poets. we will have no poets until we have found our feet. but we’re too busy denying that there’s anything so embarrassing as a ground to put them on.’

lily burst out laughing.

‘you’ll have to explain what you mean by that,’ chuckled her boy, panting softly as he constructed the forms and focused the powers of a very large, very venomous serpent behind his laughter-crinkled eyes. its tongue flickered, tasting my sweat. its head filled his mouth and he could feel the heavy weight of it depressing his tongue. his jaws, like those of the serpent, were open in an easy, good-natured grin. 

as in a mirror, the same broad snake-head and glittering eyes slid onto my tongue and its tongue flickered between my lips. ‘"who hath ears to hear let him hear!"’ i laughed, at which lily hugged herself and wheezed with glee. at the sound of the bible the serpent vanished, obedient to the mythos that sustained its existence. ‘observe thy feet, m’boy. canst see them?’

‘yes,’ he said, hastily erecting with a tight smile a random assortment of defences against me and pushing his reasonably well-regulated belligerence against this superior bitch with the rippling current of the power of the sparkle of his eyes in an effort to appease or repel her, to acquit himself anyway in the eyes of his lover. being so occupied, he scarcely dared to look away, even for the split second it took to locate his feet, but he had to in the end. lily made him. ‘they’re down there?’

‘wrong,’ said lily, gleefully. ‘those are your shoes. your feet are inside your socks which are inside them.'

'you see, you did need help to find them.’ ivy sighed tragi-comically. ‘if only i could do the same for australia. metaphorically speaking, i mean. we’d understand, then. we wouldn’t have this crazed idea that we can raise our parochial little rhymesters like judith wright and kenneth slessor onto the top shelf with pound and shelley and expect the rest of the world to agree. now that i’ve found your feet for you would you like me to find the ground for you to put them on?’

‘no,’ said the boy. and ivy just couldn’t believe it when he actually said, ‘it’s that hard, black stuff under my shoes.’

‘you bloody idiot – that’s the asphalt!’ she took a handful of his hair the colour of glittering gold, and fascinating herself by kissing his lips, which he pouted up prettily for her. ‘the ground’s underneath it.’

starved, smothered, throttled under the tar, its seeds dormant, its biota on hold. but here and there were small eruptions where tufts of grass grew through, and places where small cracks were forming over something uncompromising under the ground. the care-taker would get on to them no doubt...

because there’s a millennia-long tradition of classical, sacred, dogmatic, folk and popular poetry that's been flourishing like a rich garden in this land, and now it's been cut back hard and there's not much of that's still in flourishing growth. some has died forever, while some still shows signs of fitful regrowth, and a good deal of it is still protected by a cherished few, waiting like a willing rootstock for the engrafted ars poetica of the invaders.

within it are all the clues to configure to, to get our poetry up. it has to drink through those roots from the dreamtime springs, take on board the game-changing wisdom of the rainbow serpent, wed the stony storied egg of uluru to the red red rock of ayre, take up the chant from the aborigine poets of the dreamtime as they take up ours, and harmonise our poetic voices with theirs. 

back in the sixties, nobody, except for a very few academics, was even aware of it. the only aborigine poets we'd ever heard of were writing metrical rhyming poetry or vers libre, raw beginners in the english traditions, just learning to use the rhymes and rhythms of the popular english poets -.and showing talent, using them well.

but the bell has gone and now there were teachers coming, and one of them was burnsy, our latin teacher, and so the girls keeping nit at the corner came skittering up to the door in a tizz and we all went in, except lily’s boy, who sauntered off to geog.

these were slow, hot glassy classroom days with the teachers’ voices almost indistinguishable from the buzzing of flies, followed by the oppression of home, the stuffy bedroom, the thuddy volume of the black and white tv, the bad-tempered family, and not much time for the beach. outside of school, this newfound after-school solitude while i derived a newly-permitted pleasure from studying latin was slowly bringing about a shift of emphasis in my being. ivy was becoming a secondary persona. she was only wanted as a kind of lady-like stuffed shirt to be polite and not too talkative on social occasions, and to pour tea on sundays when the ladies came in the afternoon like some vague race-memory of a parlourmaid; or as an awkward, gawky, semi-comic character to play canasta with when no ladies come.

as a persona zeke on the other hand was developing, becoming a viable option, and i was selecting it whenever i could. at school, zeke was seldom approached. zeke was a loner. zeke wrote the poems and the protest songs, sang the old ballads, folksong and blues, learnt the latin, gave out the philosophy, had the iq that stuck out like a sore thumb but was to make no difference at all to ivy, just as if she’d never had one. zeke was the beatnik. zeke was the gypsy, clairvoyant, telepath, prophet and magical musician. zeke was the earth-witch, in thrall to the faerie. 

it was zeke whom they persecuted, hunted and tortured and bought and sold as a slave, in fantasy not far removed from some not so remote all too real reality somewhere on the planet - south america, africa, the philipines, closer to home, right beneath our noses - haunting the edges of the intuition of us all. more and more of my body’s time was spent in fantasy. into the classroom the thugs would burst, a select few of us would be seized, chained and shackled, teachers questioned, other kids questioned and the secret files being kept on many of them examined. 

and somewhere in the world, that was happening. and we who are born in every new generation to turn back the tides of destruction unleashed by our forebears, are homing in on it, determined that all human beings must be born free and equal, and stay that way all through our lives long, all equally subject to the same merciful, I compassionate laws, all equally entitled to all essential social services and to vote and participate in government.  

into the woods to the safety of her hermitage fled zeke, to the books, the books that must be studied, interpreted, the strange ancient tongues that had to be cracked like codes and read for the first time in millennia. into my cavern in the nick of time tumbled davy, at last! davy! with provisions: food and drink, and medication and bandages to heal my wounds, tend my fever, bring me back to life from the extremest brink of death. my body’s personality began more and more to be zeke, and ivy was little more than a mask – and a mask that could be made to channel just about anything by anyone who knew how. 

oh freedom, sang pete seeger. o-oh freedom, sang joan baez. o-oh freedom, over me, sang zeke. 

loki, oscar, and the ghosts, souls and angels came and went, some hostile, others not, and i scarcely noticed that they were becoming distant, that a mist of distance was coming down between them and me. through study and reading i was forming a new way of bonding with the earthly world, with the faces and hands of people inhabiting their material bodies, now or in the past, and with the outer skins of their souls, which we call personalities.

only occasionally did the sounds and shadows of the gods penetrate this new, near-normal consciousness. more engaging to me then were the literary realities in the novels i was reading: dostoevsky, thomas hardy, and jane austin. sometimes zeke forgot to be a character and ivy read so deeply i could rap on the doors of the houses in the fictional fields and villages as i read and see the startles faces of the women who came to open them. shifty, mutable images they were; only loki, oscar and occasionally the women who bind up the wounds were more or less constant, although even they stood farther off now, appearing like ghosts instead of just walking in and sitting down with a thud.

lily and her boy and a few spectators took to baiting this zeke/ivy bitch on a fairly regular basis for a while, and i even seemed to wear lily’s collar as the weeks went by, though not so splendid a one as her boy had on. ivy/bitch found the boy insipid and said so once to lily, who was a proud, brave girl with a sound intellect. ‘he is not worthy of you,’ ivy said, in his hearing, by way of banter.

now here, said oscar, was lily’s fib. lily played it cool, but she was really bewildered by the delight she took in the boy, and for the sake of seeming rational about it she handed the bewildered air to ivy, which was annoying to zeke, who was after all ivy’s own self, by acquiescing. it was her intention, lily declared aloud, in front of him, while she held him by his tie which belonged to the uniform of another high school, to marry him. but she was, she allowed, high brow, and he was, well, middle brow. her parents were professionals, university graduates. he wanted to work in the bank. she was a deep-thinking methodist, and he was vaguely an anglican, at least for the purpose of religious instruction every thursday afternoon, though really, his mind was not on it.

‘take care, lily,’ warned ivy mock-seriously, mystified to find herself channelling some ancestral gypsy lily found more interesting than zeke. ‘it’s ignoble lust that bonds this boy to you. he has no sense of the worth of your mind.’ 

lily adored it, and the boy laughed out loud and began to act up to it, prancing and strutting like a little page all dressed up plush in his scarlet satin for lugnasadh, not disputing the superiority of his master. which she was. his master, that is – although of course his social and intellectual superior as well. 

but ivy was genuinely repelled. she could not believe in the sincerity of a mentality that could contemplate with complacency a life that incorporated forty hours a week of addressing itself to numbers that represented money. ivy had always regarded the bank as a kind of workhouse in which, for the want of all hope or any opportunity at all, a certain type of scrupulously honest people were miserably and tragically trapped for the whole of their working life.  

zeke wrote lily a poem which showed her how her whole life with her boy was mapped out for her, from the launching of their marriage on the treacherously calm-looking sea of domesticity until its shipwreck on the rocks of despair where upon her lust-pummelled thighs the bald, pot-bellied, petulant pet-boy bank-clerk sat whining about his ulcer and sucking his thumb. she seemed frightened by it, by me. but it was all down there in the stillness of the curtains of ancient history, which was lily’s own history of purdah.

‘lily,’ i persisted, sucked into the vortex of this spirit i’m channelling now, and a counter eddy of her soul’s devising, dervish-dancing to these syncopated tunes. ‘so to degrade yourself in this unsuitable match is unthinkable.’ this was her gift to me, this character, these lines, this satirical smile. ‘you can’t seriously be thinking of marrying him?’

she gave a frightened yap of laughter. these were her fantasies. yet she was feeding me the lines and i could not resist her. i obeyed her as her boy did, like a mesmerised dog. ‘you have a beautiful soul,' i told her. this boy has… none, apparently. it’d be like being married to a cow.’

they both laughed, and i did too; cracked right up, we did, all three. but his soul was speaking softly to me, right into my face. ‘you can get away with this, you bitch. you know i can’t defend myself, but…’

was it some kind of trap? well of course it was. he was looking very fierce and ivy had gone too far. it was the climax. he had aimed and fired. ivy had pulled the trigger of his rage on herself, hadn’t she? – everyone saw that!

but ivy could no longer see. lily had stopped feeding me lines, and had dumped me at some distance from my own speech generators. i didn’t know how to recover my own will, how to get back to myself. he said it so simply and he said no more. i glanced at him, in pain – was this a spear through my liver, a jerid? – and i made brief eye-contact with an aethereal jesus, with weeping wounds in his hands and bare feet and nothing on but a grubby linen loin cloth, above which was a jagged appendix scar and i recoiled without even understanding why.

i made a blind grab for my soul, put up a cry for loki, and oscar was there. he nodded, and made some tense, terse speech to the jesus in a language i didn’t understand, to which the jesus replied with a penetrating glance at me and a kind of laugh, which i had to edit before i let register, it sounded so nasty.

when oscar moved off i had the impression that he was leaving me, going right out of my life, and i panicked. i watched him out of sight, peering after him into the empty air. when i looked around for loki i found nothing but barriers to my vision surrounding me close around as if my head were in a box.

it was lily’s boy’s soul through lily’s boy’s body’s eyes that drew me back to my centre again, so that i could stop laughing and speak, and he observed my confusion with a kind of gratitude that was really my own.

‘it’s not quite as bad as that,’ said lily, ‘and anyway, what’s wrong with money?’

the words came fast and glib on an inspiration that mercifully was still flowing, not the less fluent for the sudden racking pain that gripped my right side, where the jerid had snapped two ribs going through. attack of indigestion. ‘it’s not that it’s money, it’s that it’s arithmetic. doing compound interest sums all day.’

‘oh, you silly idiot! they’ve got adding machines. and computers’ll be doing it all soon.’

‘and what will bank clerks be doing? pushing buttons?’ 

 ‘finance and banking are very complicated subjects. it’s only boring if you’ve got no imagination!’  she took hold of my upper arm and shook it.

the boy looked serious and mature for a few moments, and put his hands in his pockets as if they had money in them. ‘anyway, i might be a surveyor,’ he said.

‘ah, now that might be a better job for a literary man!’ i laughed, and then realised that the quip had come from the ghost at my right shoulder whom i was now able to begin to see, a young-faced, dark-haired angel, not taller than me, in dark clothing, with grey-white wings more like a goose’s than a swan’s. these churchy/biblical kinds of mythic beings are strange gods to ivy's atheistic soul and she fled from them, down to a cellar where no light came but a dim scintillation of dust swirling or swimming in a ventilator high up.

her body went sullen and silent and stayed that way, bearing the wrangles of school sullenly, hearing the commands, not knowing why she complied...

what cellar, where? it is grey as a mouse, safe and warm; nothing has disturbed its soft warm mouse’s fur coat of dust for half a century. it is dry and healthy, entered by no light more cruel than the shine of outside’s day on the shady side of the house filtered through the barely translucent inch-thick dimpled panes of the tiny window near the ceiling. not one of libby ackham’s house’s. where then?

it is very calm and quiet, no sound louder than a breath, even the few cars passing on some distant bitumen road sound no louder than heavy sighs. i am curled like a pill bug, like an armadillo, like a snail in its shell, hard and dried. i am not bought and sold here, not branded. the ghosts i whisper with all died long ago. they care no more for me than the skeletonised leaves in the dust on the cellar floor do, which is no more than i care for the leaves.

it is a grey blue wind today; sobbing in it and long, sorrowful sighs – a man has died, but he won’t be one of us.

there’s a heavy weight along the length of the northern road – there will be traffic on it soon – a holiday? – or why will there be traffic?

there, thoughts are like cobwebs, still most of the time, ephemeral, not sequential, old structures falling away, new ones much like the old replacing them.

they observe that i’m not dead, that my body’s still alive, but it doesn’t worry them. they let me stay there. they have no power, not even any desire to question me, or banish me, and soon my thoughts are whispering with theirs, undistinguished from theirs.

because zeke is banned. banished.

ivy is thus enfeebled. zeke is shuffled about like an awkward parcel by ivy’s new helper ghost, a compassionate, healing soul, who will help to correct her, so that she can conform. already ivy is mild, melting and moderate. this renders the rehabilitation process possible. yes, sadly, she has had to be drugged. astral helpers are administering astral drugs. ivy cannot configure to her own soul now, can't be zeke. they have banned zeke. they are fittng her out with a better soul, a soul that wants to be good, and kind and humble.

so when my mother announces that dannion’s mother has asked her if i could go with dannion to their family’s shack four hundred miles down the coast, during the may holidays, ivy simply waits quietly to find out whether she’s to go or not. dannion has her mother’s consent to spend a week there with her older sister provided she can find a responsible friend of her own age to go with her. i’m to be that responsible friend. to forestall my refusal, dannion has persuaded her mother to issue the invitation. dannion’s mother is there across the room from me when my mother makes the announcement, while i stand in the doorway. dannion is not there. my jaws are locked together. my mother has control of my face. she has ruched it up into a shy grin copied from a fading memory she has of my father’s mother, whom she met only once a few months before she died, before she even knew she was going to marry my father.

it throws a strain on my genetics, and makes something semitic or romany i inherited from her father blaze suddenly dangerously through my oddly blue eyes, as if to bring down fire upon some altar or strike some malefic torturer stone dead in an instant. just a fleeting glimmer, really. 

 ‘would you like to go?’ asks dannion’s mother.

dannion’s sister pat is twenty two. her lover owns three motels in two towns close together down the coast. we stay, not in the family shack as dannion’s mother believes, but in one of her lover’s motel rooms. dannion’s mother knows nothing about the lover. we two are sworn to secrecy.

dannion and i have a room almost to ourselves, except in the mornings when pat cooks us a breakfast of rabbit and mushrooms donated by her lover, then dismisses us and does yoga. she is as beautiful as dannion is ugly, full of laughter and wisdom, and yes, love too, because she is in love, or perhaps just because she is happy.

she plays cat stevens' morning has broken while she does her yoga, and we are dismissed until lunchtime when she serves us fish, crab, crayfish, mussels – all gifts from her lover, with vegetables stir-fried in an electric frying pan. then she vanishes and we’re left to help ourselves to salads and cheeses, cold rabbit and bread for tea. we spend the days walking, as if enid blyton herself had written it. 

it is a savage piece of coastline. it’s a sea that eats people. it baits them with fish, drawing them down to the rocks that gnash like huge teeth among the spume and spray that explodes like blood from split veins and jets hard up against the shuddering breasts of the cliffs almost to the top where dannion and i stand in the suck and blow of its breath, feeling it like big, sobbing punches in our faces and seeing it buffetting each other’s hair.

‘they used to fish for whales here,’ says dannion. so it’s whale blow, whale anger, that sobs and shudders, and the wallowing horror, the great, bulking misery, the wailing suck and long-running ebb of churning sand out to sea is the dying of whales and ghosts of murdered whales and the trail of lost blood, the horror and rage of whale, of ocean still gnawing at this old agony again and again as if at a nagging sore. 

at low tide we find caves neatly cut into the cliffs, square-mouthed, straight-walled, flat-roofed, where boats were once sheltered. the fishing boats on the bay have no sense of being picturesque – i don’t find them picturesque. the tinned fish factory with its tinny little history all done up in a tin for sale to the tourists is made of tin – or that’s what we used to call galvanised iron anyway. it’s as satisfactory an eyeful as any tin shed. i’m pleased enough with it. why should dannion imagine i would disdain it? we walk round it. i enjoy it casually but thoroughly, like a dog.

dannion, leaning out of her body, keeps holding up little pieces of ethereal fish, pieces of crab, or strips of dark meat, and dangling them in front of my mouth. she has noticed with annoyance that my mouth doesn’t water over crab. i enjoy it in some way she doesn’t understand, not subscribing to any cliché and it has made her curious. ‘cummom,’ she says, wiggling it like bait on a line. then she magically takes me over, opens my mouth by triggering the mechanism of my jaw by an act of her own will, against mine, drops the morsel into my mouth and activates my swallowing. this manifests as a nervous tic, a tendency to gulp.

but she’s still vexed that i’m not salivating for it. ‘why?’ she whinges. ‘why don’t you like it? it’s nice.’ and i have an insight that i really didn’t want that it’s she who doesn’t like it, that sea food aggravates her eczema which is the same eczema as her dogs have, and the smell of rabbit makes her want to vomit because not so far back in their recent ancestry her dogs have been conditioned against rabbit, and she sleeps with her dogs and their souls share everything they’ve got.

‘dogs dream their diseases right back into your past, as far back as you can go,’ her soul told mine, 'and right back into the landscape's many pasts, and right back into the pasts of the timelines of human perception.' but without words. then she added, choosing words with care despairing of perfection at first, ‘they’re wallaby-wove. there’s not enough dog soul in the land to support the dog dreaming here and since the indigenous woodlands were cleared for wheat and the rabbit plagues and so on, there’s all this unused wallaby soul. so the dogs are always channelling wallaby souls. they think they’re just getting into your pouch and dreaming there. but it’s all dreamtime there and so they’re into all your pasts and futures and off in other realities, out in the stars . . . that’s why you get their mange ten years before you get them.’ 

i try to tell her about how much her soul and her real self really hate seafood, but she would kill me rather than be told anything, anything at all about that. seafood was daddy. can't hate daddy... 

at the first hint of danger, and she’s been very watchful for it, she has gagged my soul, its mouth so shut tight, and she’s filled that mouth, which she knew to be a cave of raving poetry and magnificent martyrdom, which she fears even more than the revelations of her own soul, she has filled it with sand and rubble. but it was her own poetry she feared. not mine, hers. her own. because that was very, very, deeply, seriously dangerous, or so she’d liked to boast all those centuries ago, when they were burning not just books, but the authors of books, and in some places, anyone who could read.

she gives the next little morsel a shake, to make it dance enticingly, shedding its spicy aroma under my nose.

‘dannion,’ i think at her suddenly, suddenly angry, finding anger that’s been lost to me for years, ‘if you do that to me once more i will attack you.’

she slides a sidelong glance at me, sees the gleam of my scales, the glint of my short little fangs, the glistening swell of my taut venom glands, the hot little beads of menace my eyes are, the death adder i am, and for the first time since we met that shine of mocking superiority fades from her eyes and she backs... off... slowly...

...slowly she turns herself into a sticky iced party cake with white icing stained by the red glace cherry on top and the strip of green angelica beside it, and she had a white voile frock on that stands out so frilly, it’s a sticky patty pan frock with white icing stained red and green in the grooves and a big aqua nylon sash tied in a bow at the back and she’s saying nice, mmm, it’s nice, i’m nice, and looking up at the hoodlum angel who has given me this spurt of anger to enable me to defend myself so fiercely, whimpering scaredly, in a paroxysm of guilt, ‘nice, i’m nice, why don’t you like me.’

i nevertheless don’t trust him.

dannion’s body shows ivy the foundation of an old church, still visible among a few pine trees in a meadow of statice and scabiosa, with the cemetery behind it. the graves are still tended a little, weeded at least with weed-killer, and their tombstones righted, their statues and vases, even the broken ones, in their right places, their borders and chains all in place.

dannion finds babies’ graves and the graves of very young children, a whole family full of still-births, and goes, ‘isn’t it sad!’ in her best sunday frock attitude with a bunch of wildflowers in her hand, radiating niceness to appease the angel. there’s a young married couple in their twenties. here’s an old, old couple in their nineties, married for seventy six years. 

it’s a cliché of an old graveyard. dannion is in the process of taking on all the mainstream clichés – readers digest, the sound of music, peanuts, religion, the lot. she seems to believe that everybody else is too. i don’t understand why that should worry me so much, should hurt almost, like a grinding ache in my chest, but then i shift into the mode where i see and there i catch her at it: she’s worried. she’s engraving with gravestone makers’ tools the clichés i should have engraved on my being, they should be my genes, these oh-how-sads, these doesn’t-it-make-you-feel-as-if-life-is-all-futile-after-alls that all nice people have as ready responses to graveyards, she is carving them on my chest. she had turned me into a marble slab.

the angel it is who has drawn my attention to it, and hers, and he makes her stop. but she doesn’t understand. she fears the fear will kill her. she only wants me to be nice. the angel calms her with a subtle shift of radiance. he is an established third member of the group now. he regulates the conversation. dannion becomes less combative.

‘dad wants me to do economics,’ she says, ‘but i’d rather do science. dad says there’s more money in economics, and more jobs.’

it shocked me at that age when people, even dannion, talked of selling their futures to the highest bidder. dannion is no economist. she’s probably a good scientist, a chemist, perhaps, and she’d derive enormous satisfaction from it, real pleasure on a daily basis. she’d get none at all from economics, or almost none. ‘so what will you do?’

‘economics.’

i don’t say anything to that, just roll a cigarette and breathe the sea air. the place is rural. a few scattered houses up here, a real street down by the beach with a hotel and a few shops and some houses either side. we go and look at the family shack, which is isolated in a small rabbity home paddock among scrubland further up the hill, almost a mile from the shore. it is a warren itself, an old farmhouse of a deserted farm, with saltbush up to the door.

it is full of ghosts, but my ghost that would see and think with them is in that cellar somewhere, way back in the past, located at last in moonara under the house we lived in there, so i can’t feel much at all. as i swing round a doorpost bilocating, with a jolt i almost slam into that cellar and unsettle it, so that the ghosts are set softly in motion and my own is released from the grip of such a long time hearing only ghost whispers and the shadow noises of a world beyond my vision. as it flows into me, a great burst of bright energy suddenly illuminates us/me making our reunited form briefly clearly solidly flesh and blood visible had anyone but other ghosts been there to look. i know they would have been watching us, pleased to have an event to peruse, holding their long, slow breaths, and passing their long, slow, wisps of thought back and forth to one another.

but not yet visible to dannion, who was way up ahead and not looking at me anyway.

‘what about you?’ dannion asks me.

‘latin and greek.’

she cocks her head, looks up from under her high, bulging forehead at me for a long time, and decides not to laugh. ‘no money in that,’ she ends up saying.

‘no.’

‘unless you teach.’

‘i’ll never teach.’

my mother said once, when i was six years old and to be like other little girls i had said i would like to be a nurse when i grew up, ‘over my dead body.’ and she’d said it again when ivy was fourteen, and laughing had said half-seriously that if all else failed, as a last resort she could probably teach: ‘over my dead body, my dear.’

i had replied as adolescent girls do, raising and lowering my eyebrows several times and assuming a foreign accent which was meant to be sinister, ‘zat can be arranged…’ but i knew that this mother was, is, laying down a law, with a power beyond a mere mother’s power, that filled ivy with fear, and was destined to drive zeke long after her death.

and what made ivy wild and want to wail it away was that in this instance the maternal authority was irrelevant. ivy would never want to be a teacher. she could think of nothing worse. it would be like standing naked-ribbed, a slaked, white skeleton, hanging by a wire through the hairy knot at the top of its skull and all the malicious little humans, half grown and not yet made merciful making it mad for the pleasure of it, as they had done to miss merfat who was only eighteen and had been given 2f, which was a class of twenty five lanky larrikins and sixteen slack sluts who chewed gum and swore, and mrs hallard, who was just married and pregnant at the time.

‘well what then? you can’t do latin and greek for a living.’

‘i might write dictionaries.’

she shook her head. ‘you’ll have to marry someone rich.’

‘i’ll never marry.’

‘they all say that.’

‘i’ve never met anyone else who says that. i don’t believe you have, or not many, anyway. nobody seems to believe in not marrying as an option, any more than you do.’

‘you’re a very strange girl.’

i detest the way she pronounces that, as if a normal girl were something pink with icing on, one half of a wedding cake pair. i harden my aura as a shield against her. girl like a she-wolf, i suggest to her. or like i am when you’re not enfeebling me. feeeemaling me. feeeemale, a feeeemale, a feeeeeeeeeble-male, feeble-maling me pink and white with sugar on top. quite cross, i get, or anyway, the ghost who has possession of me, filling the vacancy my own spirit soul, which fled when the angels took over, has left, gets. enfeebled but not succumbing.

but dannion’s face is relaxed now, the angel appeased. she has lost that grin, that huge display of big, wide-spaced teeth, and the dandruff. her eyes, though still too liquid, like mercury rolling in a porcelain dish are their irises in some lights but green and black with gold flecks like a frog’s back in some others), now look demurely, soberly out from between their freckled under and upper rims with their red-gold lashes like dogs’ hair, which are no longer spangled with eczema. her skin has a pleasant, slightly downy softness now. the freckles have tamed down and are fading under a slight suntan that has become habitual. her mia farrow crop has taken the madness out of her fiery, wiry terrier hair, the sun-bleached coir that once waved wildly round her jutting forehead is gone and the richer reds underneath show now, those big loose curls are gone, and now there’re only neat, firm, crisp waves, becoming lustrous for the first time in her life.

she no longer knuckles her astral fists into your eyes or pokes at your mouth and nostrils with wet, nailless, gnawed fingers. she keeps her hands folded in her lap. her legs are still shapeless, but suntanned now at least, and not so oedemic, under a sober sundress that displays a back and shoulders tanned almost to bronze, almost camouflaging those big, orange freckles that she’d made such misery of. ‘i expect someone will marry me,’ she says, without pathos, having forgotten, or stopped believing in, her prophecy.

i catch suddenly a strange light in her eye, which was briefly transformed as she turns her gaze up over the roof to the high. cloudless sky, but short-focussed as if he, he who would marry her, stood close before her and was tall, and as it contracted for that moment, it was actually beautiful that light in her eye, of a colour not at all that poisonous green she always turned on me. which made ivy’s soul suddenly know that the repulsiveness that she always saw there was deliberately there, dannion intended it, to repel her. a warning: ‘don’t like me.’ and of course – we didn’t like each other after all these years, though . . . well, yes of course, we also did.

we’re silent together for a while, looking at the big-grained, grey, weather-scoured timbers of the shack, listening to the sweet, tingling, singing symphony of the wind in the spear grass eternally climbing the hill like the belly of some great millennia-long sea cow hauling out onto some ancient slab of rock.

and also she was rummaging in my mind’s cupboards there where she’d caught me hiding my poetry, which i no longer write, my oil paintings which were too frighteningly real, with such speaking mouths, with such seeing eyes, such startled lips and such a tendency to age, that they made me stop, and my novel about the horse. i’m digging it all under, looking for shoes.

but when i’m alone, adult, free, autonomous, my feet won’t be shod. i’ll be barefoot, me and my barefoot boy, like the blackfellas . . .

and for clothes. but i will no longer wear the clothes my mother has bought me, or the clothes she sews. i am clothed enough anyway at least for this almost ended, winding down now, year, in my cheap jeans and long jumper, and my protest-black duffle coat with the ban the bomb rune on the sleeve, and my chisel-toed boots that smell richly of a thousand miles of walking with a guitar on my back and poems, which i already no longer write, in my pocket.

because they trap people, they catch you by the soul, those paintings. so some unidentifiable astral soul person or other, backed up by the establishment, said. they are very, very wicked. you must never, never, never paint another one. or else, only of yourself. then you’ll see how spiritually harmful it is because of the harm it’ll do to you. and then she ran her mind-controlling curses in and like very smart venom it went in for the kill.

perhaps, suggested my mother it is because my grandfather was a jew. jews are not permitted graven images (does it specify god in the commandments). but do jews paint pictures? are there any jewish artists? are there? ivy didn’t know. didn’t know who to ask.

dannion is running an eye over the magical state of my relics. my duffle coat hangs loosely from my very wicked painting of my mother which is my shoulders and my spine, and the long bones of my limbs are now those long columns of my poems, and their imagery standing forth from them has become my muscles and sinews and veins in another dimension almost visibly close to this one – and you could get superstitious about it, if you really felt the need – and there’s a whole box full of scraps of writing and bits of novel and a play, suspended in a limpid silence as vital seeds of dreams, threads for the weaving of the infinitely multi-dimensional fabric of yet another array of realities, and my mother, who is for a little while, dannion, and dannion too, they know that i really have not got the least idea of what i will do, and anyway, not the least hint of an option to do anything at all of my own choice, if i’m not an artist or a poet, or both.

perhaps the angel knows, but he is not now distinguishable from the rest of the blue air above us.

there is nothing at all for ivy to do, not art, not poetry, not languages ancient or modern, not science. no profession, no job, no marriage. ivy will go mad. that she knows.

that light, sober and controlled, in dannion’s eyes, when i make brief eye-contact with her again, is pity, or a kind of love. mostly it is the lingering love she has found awakening in her for this man she will marry. somehow she has assured herself that he really is not a boy like the boys of 4a, but a quiet man, with gentle manners, and not like a pop star going ‘love, love me do’ with a warm, sucking up mollusc of a heart like a snail to slurp up the lettuce leaves of her lips and tongue, (for she has put invisible there, and her ghost is never home for long for fear of having to pash on with some boy she scarcely knows ever again, though why she should fear it so much is hard to say.)

strange power that has, love. even though such a small ray of it was meant directly for me, meant for me it was, and directly. i could have taken it from no one but dannion. with it her soul gave mine a kiss like those they used to give in ancient times, a formal display of affection, a brief flattening of each other’s lips that offered and demanded terms of equality. even so i had no face, because it interfered with her fantasy of me, and even though i am a girl, neuter, ⅞i had no mouth for several days afterwards. just invisible…

the afternoon is bright and heady, the light spinning out like a million birds above us. the air is damn near solid with a constant interplay of bird song, insect song, the music of the ocean waves and the breezes through the trees, with the soft swathe of the noise of a car or truck passing on the distant highway threaded through intermittently like the long, slow curve of porpoise paths threading the ruffled sea. dannion wants us to assume the characters of boy scouts, lusty lads who would walk pluckily in wild places in khaki shorts, with knapsacks on, singing ‘there were rats, rats, big as bloomin’ cats in the store…’ to speed us on our way. but it’s too wild a landscape for that, even though the breeze is light and soft, so zeke is spared it.

the mallees lightly finger the air over us, and there’s no doubt that they view us, like whales do. they read our skeletons and they finger the maps of our minds with their sensitive leaves and they do not distinguish them from our sacred dreaming places - not these here, choked with rubble and centuries of coughed up alluvium with gold nuggets big as fists in the song of your guts, on this planet, and not those on the seven other planets in this universe that also have mallee-reading-two-girl-group dreaming asteroid-ploughed into their surfaces as vulcanised landscapes with life forms, and not those amazingly gentle transcendental ones in the timeless, placeless, scaleless but intricately detailed and scrupulously particular dreaming places in the transcendental sky, whose campfires are real stars, and whose eyes see all the seven planets of earth at a glance and know all their details, and yet love them, as gently as a girl loves a drowsy cat.

they take in the patterns of our thoughts and of the chemistry of our guts and send them off like gossip, scattering them as parrots flung like handfuls of dust from sorceresses’ hands, shrieking their weird interpretations of them to the clouds and the invisible women that sing them their shapes, to fall as rain on the little lizard tracks that smell so bitter sweet and sweaty under our chisel-toes.

it is uncool, would say the kingly oscar, to whom i have become a loyal page, to effuse, but i would rather be a cold corpse and buried in the clay, and all my poor, hiding ghosts that are me retrieved to my soul’s corporeal centre and gone, whisk, like a weed with all its fine fat feeding roots snapped like nerves, pulled from the soil and left to wither in the hot sun on a rusty wheelbarrow than, than go tramping about with dannion in khaki shorts down to our eczematous knee-backs singing boy scout songs in order not to feel the trees taking such sentient, such oddly detailed cognisance of us, and all the galahs shrieking about it to the wind.

and up here on the rise, in the tussocky grasses and the stiff, clawy bushes before the scrub starts that’s still practically untouched after untold millions of years of evolution all the ghosts but a few are black, all but a few of the babies from the graveyard, black women, black men, young, old, mothers with babies on their hips, maybe smoking a pipe or a cigarette, because they can snatch them from us, the ghosts of our cigarettes and our tobacco pouches, and they can strike the ghosts of our matches into flame to light them, and they smoke them, and the ghost of their smoke goes up to the ghosts of our clouds, girls with awkward kangaroo gestures, elegant boys with a tooth gone, mothers with kids on hips, old women in command of children, strong men, wizards, witches, old men, some of them actually ancient, smoking and drinking, hunting and living, and carrying on their lives as if nothing had happened…

just this shift to another stretch of reality much like the one they left, and these moments, these small places, these states of being where they can see through into ours, and steal the ghost souls clean out of our kid’s play lunches, the whisky from our drunkards and the clothes off our clothes lines, which is why they fade so fast in these remote rural backwaters.

 suddenly dannion steps out of the scrub and stops at the edge of the cliff where she makes a show of stretching, twisting her body around to look out across the sea like the illustration of a schoolgirl adventure story, and by the time she has finished this stiff, entrancing dance, gesturing and prattling about birds, she has discarded her knapsack and her phantom shorts and her soul has become a kangaroo, grey-brown with dark points, and i am one too. we both gaze out over the land and sea for a long time silently, before we slowly move into the shade and lower ourselves down onto the sand, stretching out languidly on our sides, twitching our feet for tails, propped up on one elbow, exchanging vague words now and then, at peace, gazing out to sea.

and so we passed the time, and we hardly ever saw each other again much after that.

in the school biology lab i am manoeuvred by circumstance into a corner as part of a three person biol prac group, hemmed in by two other three person prac groups, my back to the bench, and zelda vane who is also assigned to this corner with barely enough elbow room for one as she complains, is frisking me, rumpling my long, greyish flannel nightie (which i suddenly inexplicably have on), and she’s just short of indecent about it, and making me laugh, beacuse she really is rather funny. she’s a rabbity girl, or young lady, or little woman, a couple of years older than us all, because she’s been working in a bank for two years which she found so bleak she came back to school in order to matriculate.  ‘you’re what they tell me is a tough nut, and can’t be cracked,' (here she let out a spluttery laugh, as if that had meant something else exquisitely funny and probably smutty to her) 'but you’re scarcely sixteen and i’m nearly nineteen, and wicked with it. beware, chicken, i have been wearing mascara now for more than a year. i hex you!’ 

‘i’m really only an oddity. bit of a long-standing  joke.  they’re only scared of me if i move.’

they have never heard me joking before. no one else had ever asked me to. they crane their necks to see us but zelda claps them away like chooks. ‘do you think lazenger would notice if we two out of seven wagged history today?’ she asks me in a whisper, tar-babying up to me like a fascinated brer rabbit.

‘he wouldn’t notice if all seventeen of us did.’

we went to the tooby, which was what they had nicknamed flat 2b, at 7 rush street, down by the beach, which was jack’s place. it was a small flat. jack was a surfer. he’d surfed all over the world, more than once in africa, which was where the marijuana came from. subliminally, the tooby expanded easily into a large, dimly lit roundhouse filled with languid people, mostly africans, and a few whites other than ourselves, the shadowy atmosphere merging us all into a soft, fluent (hey, are we affluent or effluent? no shit, i’m just fluent, ha, ha, ha.) continuum. but there was no furniture. you lounged on the floor among big floppy cushions, you listened to acid rock, you passed joint after rich, pungent joint with the smell and by-taste of kitten piss, and a chattery, almost frantic intensity, hispanic, urgent and fearful. ‘love! si?’ it went with its small, white, staccato teeth, ‘love!’ with tears like ice, ‘love. love’s what it’s gotta be, ya gotta do, ‘s gotta be love,’ and zelda goes, ‘dooby, dooby tooby tooby too!’

‘help! i’m a rock! help! i’m a rock!’ goes the music. jack is twenty five. he wants to become a marine biologist. he’s not very handsome. he has a head like a rock. the sisters of mercy they are not departed and gone*… sing the real haight ashbury hippies from california so tenderly and feelingly that you could put it in a vase and keep it . . .

we can go anywhere in zelda’s car. she’s got these friends, hey, she talks as if i should know them, judy, denise, julie, they’re from our school, and guess what, they’re all camp. ivy isn’t sure what that word means. we go and see them. they’re all in some student house on the esplanade where artists and marxists and radicals live and they’re all wagging it too.

so we all go back to school together after lunch, high as clouds and giggling, with african ghosts looking out through our eyes, and denise says to me, ‘hey, wanna screw?’ and when i laugh, pretending to know what ‘screw’ means, not wanting to look like a prude, she whisks a little silvery screw out of her pocket, flashes it like a piece of an aborigine sorcerer’s mabon looking intently at me through aborigine sorcerer’s eyes and then slips it back into her pocket.

the others, including zelda, are all doubled up laughing, expending the energetic flash of it, and we’re halfway across the girls’ yard, and the end of lunchtime siren’s gone, and suddenly i’m my soul, sliding down into a swoon, into a gravelly tar pit, a slough of porridgey mud. but before i go under i’ve had time to glimpse their vanishing faces and see their dismay, and that they’d help me if they could. then i go under. my body goes lightly, light-headedly into class.

i’m on the bank of the mire on clay like grey plasticine with sparse spiky sedges pricking through and reeds here and there. they are sluicing buckets of cold water over me. loki is there, and behind him, fast approaching, is thor, with one or two others whose names i don’t know. three aborigine men, neither old nor young, in white pipeclay and feathers are sitting cross-legged close by.

‘it’s just a matter of keeping her out of the hands of the establishment,’ said loki, tiny and tidy beside big, hairy thor. his finely tailored suit of silver grey is superb, the cloth smooth and silky. his shirt has a fine grey stripe through it too, and his tie has a tasteful thread of dark separating the grey and silver stripes. even his shoes are spotless.

thor and the other norsemen are wearing animal skins fashioned into garments which are bound round their bodies with leather thongs. their tools and weapons are tucked into their belts or tied on to it with sinews. they are neolithic. their hair is long, thick and tangled and some of it is plaited into frizzy little plaits tied up with coloured threads and bone beads. they have headbands of leather and sinew.

the two britons reviving me, though neatly dressed in brushed, velvety seude fastened with carved bone toggles passed through tidy leather frogging and beads, are splattered with mud. only loki is spotless. he seems to be enjoying this distinction.

thor is huge. he is like a mountain bending over me and the size difference is increasing. his hand, taking hold of my wrist engulfs most of my arm, as when a shepherd captures the front legs of a lamb to draw it from the labouring ewe. i see it huge, monstrous, my little arm with its elbow bent like a pipe-cleaner between his fingers as thick as the smooth boughs of kurrajong trees. gently he slides his fingers under my back digging them into the marshy ground under me, to lift me up as a child lifts a frog with a layer of spongy peat to cushion me and protect me from the dry friction of his skin. carefully he shifts me into the palm of his hand. i am not quite half the width of his palm.

loki laughs and calls me a coward to shrink from the presence of the gods like that, but thor gazes gently, respectfully askance at my fragile diminutive. the lines of his palm are rivers and roads as i keep shrinking. his whole face is kindly, deeply concerned. he is the whole sky. but there’s the sun in it, and in it also is loki’s almost metallic laughter: he is laughing pitilessly! i hear thor rebuke him, saying, ‘she is a–fray-éd,’ his eyes tunnelling out after my frayed out bits, my stoned schoolgirl, my outlaw poet, my ghost in the cellar, my bird souls, my insect souls, my wolf, my horse, my eagle, and the shadow wraith in the fear haunted cavern that is also my cunt, and beyond where i can’t see.

i faint there on his hand that has become, smoothly gliding through the shifts of human logic in the motifs of his myth, a meadow, hearing him say, like the sigh of the wind over the meadow, here among these cold rocks, red and purple ironstone rocks, ‘i will not let them harm you.’ with such infinite love that i have never forgotten it, never ceased hearing it, have mutely deeply appreciated it as a life-saving medicine, a water of life, elixir.

i awaken from a dream then, among the flowers, staring at the sky full of seabirds which are hurrying, shrieking to the shore where the fishing boats are coming in. i can hear the shouts of the women. i catch whole words in an ancient language sixteen thousand years old, and when i stand up i am less than the height of a flower, a pink one like this daisy rising from its rosette of smart green leaves, with its only flower drooping slightly on its rough, waxy stem which i hold to steady myself while i’m standing. it is as thick as my arm, that stem. i can curl my fingers round the hairs of it.

and suddenly zelda’s camp friends who’d been meant by the lesbians 'upstairs' on the astral plane to become zeke’s friends, part of her forcible conversion, abandoned their attempt and have fled. there is that dust and smoke at their feet, glimpses of the wild west between their running legs. when i look about me for the hoodlum angel i see him distanced, his face sliced vertically through as if with razors, the planes set all at different angles, a series of strange mathematical distortions passing a-rhythmically through them making it difficult to discern that the watching intensity it still construed was even a face. over the next couple of days it hardened into a kind of scab that my halo wore a yard out from my scalp, and it no longer seemed to be sentient. when it fell completely off the angel was gone.

zelda seemed to be shocked. after all, she’s a nice girl. went to st elva’s ladies’ college before the bank. has a mother who whines about not knowing where she is, and an uncle who lends her money knowing he’ll never get it back, and a sister she cares about. these camp girls who scotch out angels and scare themselves silly trying to set slaves free without knowing from whom or to what in spite of instructions from the establishment gods upstairs and almost sometimes at the expense of their own liberty play too rough, are too fast, too rash for her. they’re radicals. but she just doesn’t realise yet how much good they’ve done, or what a tearing, revelling, raucous, celebratory transcendental trail of such good trooping fairies we’d been being. so she’s just shocked at the violence and the loss of the angel, and feels responsible. she treats me like a patient.

she takes me to her parents’ house, which is spotless and fragrant with baking and soup, and her mother in solicitous readiness in the kitchen, and there we are, two nice girls in school uniform, and her mother gives us fresh white bread spread with yellow butter and beautiful browny-black vegemite, and never has it tasted so good, so unlike shit, and so wholesome, whole slices bigger than your hand and not cut into squares or triangles. she leaves us laughing together happily about our day at school.

but i’m not all there. a spell cast by lily watson’s father,  a committed theist, who always hands this one to atheists, believing as he does that they believe that bodies have no mind beyond the pedestrian, no soul, and no spirit of their own, because e believes that although a body might emerge mechanistically from the silurian swamps they can never have an immortal soul except as created and bestowed by god, is slowly taking effect. he spells it out as a curse and it blocks most of the subtle awareness and all of the aesthetic.

it’s not not a spell, my soul tells him, and it’s not not harm, begorrah and it’s not not grievous and yes, it’s bodily! but he can’t hear souls, only heaven and the sermons of saints. and the angel who could have helped me is gone . . .

‘yeah, i love my mum, and my sister. don’t you love yours? i don’t believe you don’t. you’re just saying that. they can’t help being deadshits. we’re all deadshits too, us kids.’

though i laugh i say nothing except with a deliberate effort, stammering a lot, and then subside. zelda has to lead me around like a dog on a leash. i’m conscious only through my body’s sensoria, but i can’t read my body’s awareness, only the consciousness my brain has, registering everything, and i can’t reach the constant, slow, infinitessimal crawl of chemistry in the cells of my brain. i have no comment to make about anything, although i understand it all as well as anyone else.

zelda needs me to talk, to react, to laugh and quip – she’s an anxious, neurotic girl - and i’ve gone quiet. her soul is filled with guilt, her ego restive. biting her nails, rolling her eyes, scratching her cheeks with her long fingernails, she feeds into me the soul of her doll, doesn’t even know if it’s legal, doing dolls the way she does, just something she’s always done, spent eighteen years on it so far, keeping it the same age as herself, writing it like a book, like a character in a novel, in her mind, her fantasy, conversations in bed alone at night, instead of with a christian saint. ‘she’s nearly a real soul,’ she says, ‘but of course, she isn’t…oh, but she is! she’s my best friend in the dark of night.’

and it isn’t a bad job she’s done with it. it’s almost ready to incarnate – a spirit child. she, not it. for now, she’s soul enough to fill me, to keep the ghosts out, to get by with, and she likes and respects zelda.

zelda has beautiful eyes, deep-set, like currents in a bun. she has a good strong tilt of defiance in her chin. she gets stuck right into things, doesn’t mess around. she has masses of very curly biscuit brown hair that has to be straightened with a perm, and a pert nose to perch her glasses on, although the first thing she did when she got her first pay packet was get contact lenses.

her doll is still unformed within, like a steamed pudding taken off too soon. but on the surface, she’s beautifully detailed – no vices, only endearing peccadillos, pretty, a little wisdom, some virtues, some sadness.

between her soul and my body, her personality and my genome, structures begin spontaneously to form, and i and she are endangered, but helpless to know it or to say so.

the doll sets its red tongue against its exquisite front teeth, presses my tongue tip against the backs of my teeth, and smiles quite a lovely radiance at zelda, pleased with everything she says or does. she bubbles up a froth of laughing that crawls over my brain like fingers over the controlling keyboard, switching my neurology to conform to its patterns of patter, seeking connections, and slowly, clumsily, i begin to pick up on a phrase here, a laugh there, an attitude, a gesture, a look.

zelda is satisfied on the surface, pleased underneath it, and appalled deep within, watching for the return of my soul with an intensity and eagerness that manifest as queer little frowns, from under which i catch her peering into my eyes at odd moments. will nothing help? will no one come? almost she considers prayer, to the thing, the cool, clear sentient silence that listened to prayers in the school chapel, but not , for some reason, when she knelt - yes, actually knelt - at her bedside at home.

in the end she drives us to the tooby instead. the resinous flowers of the marijuana plant. the sea on the beach outside.

jack’s face is thor’s. thor looks out through jack’s eyes. me a doll, a doll’s soul. my memories are plastic, a wicker pram rattling over the pavement cracks, a nylon dress, glass eyes, a thick plastic head like a melon rind, the size of a paddy melon.

something must separate these two souls, he surmises. both are endangered here. ‘i will weave you a braid,’ he says, and everyone laughs, derides poor thor, the slow-witted giant who rides in a goat-cart, at the idea of his great, broad fingers at play with the fine coloured threads of a braid. but zelda’s body, aware only of the painted besser brick walls of jack’s bed-sitter, of jack and ivy, and the hippy music is saying, ‘…a kindy teacher. i think i’d be good. i love little kids that small. they’re gorgeous. they’re great.

it’s marine biology that sent jack back to school – cool thing to be, a marine biologist. the sea gods have him, no doubt! there’re some amazing things alive down there, down there in the sea. ‘what are you planning to do, ivy?’

it’s a very cunning braid that thor has made for me. he ties it around my head, where it makes a kind of bridge between me and the doll, an unliving interface to stop it from grafting itself onto my brain. two tightly woven strips separated by loops.

‘faggoting!’ cries zelda, seeing it with astral eyes, but seemingly out of the blue, making us laugh, relieving me of the need to try to answer. ‘that’s what they call it, the stuff on my shirt. faggoting, not smocking.’ she’d mentioned it earlier, and called it smocking.

‘oh yeah, i know,’ says ivy, because dolly and i both do know. she draws some loops from thor’s braid in the air. ‘looks a bit like hairpin crochet.’

then while we talk, zelda and thor lapse into danish and make some arrangements about the doll’s soul, and after that she and ivy drift apart, trusting that it’ll be all right about the doll.

dolly doesn’t seem to object to the lipstick they’ve been trying to cajole me into wearing, only to its name: pussycat pink. they give it to me for christmas, my mother and her older sister and her two daughters, my cousins. i find it in my stocking.

the norfolk island pines outside are the only things righteous.

oscar is irrelevant to dolly, but he still lounges by the dressing table, long and liquid like the notes of a clat, of a clarinet, and dolly, despite the braid, pulls me about by the nerves of my brain and makes me pout a dolly pout for the lippy to be put on. dolly’s hand applies it, with a skilful little flick, and primps it on matt and flat with a kiss.

dolly is a silent, restful, self-sufficient meditation when she’s alone, and her plastic damps out most of the vibes and radiances of most souls and ghosts. i’m nevertheless occasionally inspired to play some jazz, and i have a vague hope that that is because of oscar. i have a couple of historic lps. charlie christian, dizzy gillespie. dolly likes them, particularly, and she even smiles and there is even a plastic-scented sigh of satisfaction in it.

there are no questions in my mind, but i shrink from things.

a little rouge along the cheekbone?

to herself ivy looks like a painted skittle, but dolly doesn’t mind.  ivy’s mother has taken to calling ivy charlie. she’d become a good dress-maker, made herself some dresses and now wanted to make some for ivy. gerald’s girlfriends, always three or four at a time, fascinating women with their heads into their futures, the swish of academic black about them, their lipstick brownish, not pink, a little rouge along the cheekbone, thick sixties mascara, eyelids bruise-colour under the brown-pencil brows, offer advice.

ivy’s cousin grace is another. ‘your eye shadow should be either blue or grey, ivy, with your eyes. and you have got lovely eyes. lots of mascara.’ is she talking to me or the doll? it feels awful, like flies clustered at the eye-rim to drink the tears, like beasts at waterholes, pock-marking the edges with their hooves.

grace cups her cousin’s chin in her hand and pencils in the eyebrows with deft, sure strokes, issues a death threat when my ethereal self, zeke, whom she has wrenched out of her stupor only to infuriate her, almost shrinks away, leaving her with a plastic doll’s head in her hand, the ghost of dolly’s though rather a poor replica, now that she’d tried to see it as a shrunken head, a melon, a split plastic ball, before at last she returned to seeing the face and there it was, paper thin and her fingertips denting it. she gave it lightly to the astral plane, to rattle in the wind down some alley or be squashed under the wheels of cars.

and why should zeke object? can’t even a poet wear eyebrows?

but ivy it is who grinds her teeth every night so hard they hurt in the mornings. sometimes she gets lockjaw. zeke just doesn’t happen when the lippy goes on.

‘fear scorn,’ said grace. or was it ‘fear’s gone,’ or perhaps both?

but scáthán, fíor scáthán, fíorscáthán, (mirror, real mirror, real mirror) murmurs an ancestral memory in irish, disdaining the command, and thinking, not very logically, ‘what’s there to fear in a mirror? it’s a manageable ouija.’

then one day, as ivy and dolly communed with the sudden mirror women about ivy/dolly’s future without zeke, zelda came flying in as of old. she charms my mother, but she and my father bamboozle each other. my mother thinks zelda’s done wonders for ivy, and has missed her breezy visits. but zelda has come to undo all the good she’s done, to take dolly away.

zelda never called me zeke, but it was zeke’s room they sat in. zelda sniggered like a friendly horse at oscar and peeped about like a little bird for loki, but even the owl was just a china vase, except that it emanated a dense, close-woven interference pattern that stopped abruptly three inches from its surface and was undetectable beyond that. zelda sat straight-backed on the bed, which in zeke’s austere little hut was a wooden bench.

ivy’s brain hurt. it was a relief to have the doll ghost lifted. zelda was almost frightened again at how truly a ghost - a soul - it had become. it would look for a body now, had already been reluctant to release its increasingly electromagnetic grip on the nerve web of ivy’s brain, beginning to learn to use it, to establish self-perpetuating patterns of usage. she was sucking psycho-space, her mental environment, for a body now, and plastic would no longer do. an avid little parasite she’d be! pale-faced, she looks for her ladies’ college saint, opines that she’ll have to take full responsibility for it, and will it be her future to wear this doll-ghost until it can be born? will it be someone’s baby? Will it be her own first child. will it be an angel in heaven when it dies?

she took to ejaculating ‘o christ!’ and ‘o jesus!’ a lot, instead of ‘o shit!’, and ‘o fuck!’, still trying to believe in miraculous interventions from heaven.

wearing dolly’s pout to hold her steady while she finds connections, zelda hopes, oh she hopes i’ll forgive her. i can’t say much. it’s beyond me. why does she blame herself?

her saint is a white disc of light like a screen turned on but no image yet. utterly unhelpful.

‘put dolly up there,’ i say.

‘angela,’ she corrects me, ‘but how?’

i find the right jazz piece: charlie christian’s up on teddy’s hill, composed evidently for the purpose. the room starts jumpin’, possibilities open and shut, a stairway is tonally crafted and sustained and suddenly up bops dolly, leg over leg, stiffly, crookedly, jerkily like a risen-from-the dead, a walking-dead zombie, step by plastic step, smiling joyfully when she gets to the top, finding a toy land there where she will attain autonomy, where she will be happy. and there is peace once again. on this prized and sacred lp, the crowd at minton’s, angelic hosts stoned to the height of magical effectiveness on jazz, booze and horse, applauds like crazy.

on the way home from school one late spring day, the weather being sultry, my bathers on under my school uniform, i pass the baker’s van, the smart blue gibsell’s breads van with the big brown gelding with the wide white blaze in the shafts, a handsome horse like a hunter, and friendly. his name is george.without even dolly, my awareness is critically thin. as a teacher would say i was living in a dream. no aura to speak of, soul-gone. the sort that steps off kerbs into the paths of cars. suicidally. 

i’m a prey to irrelevant, inappropriate impulses. three years ago the baker would have given me a bun for the horse, seeing me communing with it and the horse enjoying it with its ears a-twitch and its big soft lips mumbling at my fingers, pleasure almost purring in his throat – quite famous that baker is because of his horses and his love of them, and his good-naturedness with the pubescent girls who stop to pat them, and who wait outside shops so as to be there when he comes for the sake of george, or jim or the bright chestnut mare whose name i never did know – perhaps it was bonnie - she was after my time, and for his sake too, because he was jokey and fun.

he’s shining, this man, radiant, but not with the wholesomeness of his bread which is mostly thinly sliced white, but with the love the children who love his horses extend also to him. it keeps him full of a buoyant energy that keeps him dancing, in and out of shops with his tray balanced an one hand, from breadbox to breadbox along the footpath, his fame drawing my energising love so surely, and that of the whole suburb, because of his horses. 

it dances him about, that energy, making him swirl his bun trays about over his head, held high on the flat of his palms while he skips lightly up the kerb, dances over the pavement, swivels himself round gateposts and drops the bread and buns into their boxes with a little flourish, whistling up his horse without bothering to look, so good is their rapport. it’s bit frenetic – girls who love horses are enthusiastic and horses are nervous; he manages it with difficulty sometimes.

he doesn’t remember ivy - she hasn’t stopped to pat a baker’s horse for three years or more, not since she realised that high school girls didn’t – but george did. she’s surprised to find it’s still george, looking so fine and strong and young still, his breath scented with fresh bread, because he’s just been past the primary school. we know each other on an atomic level. ‘big energy there,’ go my atoms, and his.

he sucks with a long horse-sucking pull my depleted system which moves emptily like an old paper bag in the wind and as i get near, he suddenly thinks of something else and makes my arms fly up like a paper bag suddenly rearing up out of the wind to snatch at his head and wrap itself round his eyes, and he shies.

that’s his joke. he’s been all morning thinking it up:  . . .and suddenly here’s this paper bag! he scuttles over into the traffic lane where, for a moment, he could be in danger, although fortunately there’s nothing coming.

and then there’s the baker, dancing out of a driveway, sees the horse, sees ivy, berates her with some barely decent expletives, and his over-energised ethereal body is hurled in a rush of rage straight at me, where instead of it administering a disabling thrashing and returning to him, the potential difference (pd) sucks it up firmly like a magnet to ivy’s undercharged system, its ghostless genes as hungry as any doll or statue for its soul, sticky as a tar baby with its need to engage with mind.

the scared ka sticks like a wrong jigsaw puzzle piece jammed in with a fist, but suddenly there isn’t going to be a thunderstorm this afternoon. george the horse laughs himself silly over the whole episode. the baker gets him back under control and drives on, feeling dissatisfied, but stabilised, grounded. 

ivy goes on her way feeling panicky until the baker’s soul projection, which hadn’t a developed self-awareness yet, succumbs to her genes’ enchantment convincing itself that she is the baker, and after a brief struggle, subsuming her into its error, so she’s happy to believe she’s herself again, just feeling a bit dull-witted all of a sudden. 

there wasn’t much of an intellect with it. 

in fact there was a real drop in iq - a loss of some forty points. ivy scraped through somehow, failing history, doing well only in english and latin on what she already knew up to that point, and only fair in french, of which she was suddenly afraid, the baker having done something dreadful there, in france, during the war, and been blown to smithereens for it, and biology. 

but poorly as i do, and although i don’t get a scholarship, and even though i failed history, they still let me in. i couldn't believe it. with not much better than good passes in four out of five subjects i had matriculated, and the state’s top university had had offered me a place, which of course i was to take. 

even a poet has to earn a living and poetry doesn’t pay. because you see ivy, nobody reads poetry unless they’re forced to in school. and although everybody’s sort of glad they had to, there’s really already quite enough of it and we really don’t need any more . . . (some of the establishment thugs are women.)