captivated

here’s the schoolyard. you can feel the asphalt under your feet now, and smell the crushed gumnuts, you can feel them roll about under your foot, so be careful you don’t slide about and lose your balance, you might fall over. you can see them all now, all the children, playing under the sugar gums, running about and walking in groups on the asphalt. you can hear their laughter and their shouts and calls. you can see ivy in a little grey school tunic with a green twinset. there’s no reason why she can’t have purple. you’ll notice that one or two other kids are wearing purple. ivy’s wearing bottle green, the same green that they use for high school blazers.

sometimes girls go round in chains, holding hands. they have older sisters who have taught them how. they catch you and surround you and join up around you, a chain of girls holding hands. ‘who’s your boyfriend,’ they ask, and you have to tell them or they won’t let you go.

they walk around chanting, ‘who’s your boyfriend, who’s your boyfriend, who’s your boyfriend?’ smooth and flowing with a surge in it, like waves flowing on a beach. and you are a rock and the wave flows round you in a ring. then the girls all crowd in on you like gulls and you breathe their toffee and cordial breaths while you giggle, and then you whisper it.

then they all fly outwards away from you, and they squeal and scream like cockatoos just finished with the almond tree. you can feel their beaks catch up thin strands of your hair, ping, ping, ping it comes out, with the wings beating their stiff whitey-yellow feathers in your face, such a willy-willy they make of it.

and they’re full like cockatoos of your sweetheart’s name and off they go after more: ‘who’s your boyfriend, who’s your boyfriend, who’s your boyfriend,’ a long chain of girls laughing, like a daisy chain of marshmallow leaves, or of real daisies, black and yellow like tigers with a purple smell that scrapes like a brick and sounds like a howl across the yard to catch someone else.

i don’t much like boys. robert has conditioned me firmly. ever since i can remember he has made faces at me: he pokes his tongue out at me and waggles it, pushing up his nose and pulling down the rims of his eyes and swivelling his eyeballs inward till the irises nearly disappear. that is very intense and interesting, and you nearly fall right into his face, falling right through the red, swallowing hole behind his face like a ghost, without there being any teeth or skin or bones in the way. but then his face goes back to normal and the redness fades and the eyes keep staring with a steely threat like a splinter of grey slanting down into you and it’s meant to hurt.

it does.

and he comes up to me and says, ‘go away,’ and says ‘be quiet,’ if i speak. and if john murray is there, or donald lacey, it is worse. they both go ‘bubba, bubba,’ if i cry. sometimes he pinches me. it’s funny how blunt, round fingers make a sharp pain between them. it makes a shape as sharp as a thorn.

if i’m playing he jumps in it and goes ‘yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!’ he gives me chinese burns. he hits me. if i tell on him he hides behind things and his faces are everywhere, all over the house, in the bushes, in the dirty marks on the wall, just in front of my face and around my head. he has a big, soft, round, brown tongue; he rubs boogeyman hands all over me, his tongue goes in and out right in front of my eyes. he puts his germs on my mouth with his ugly tongue.

they are big, germs, like the jelly bean creatures you find on the beach. they are invisible and they wobble through the air and when they land on you they crawl all over you. they wriggle into your ears. they go into your eyes, right through like ghosts, and they get right up your nose and when you open your mouth they go in. they’ve been squirming at your lips there like blind maggots with their heads just wedged in, and you can’t catch them and pull them off like caterpillars off a leaf gently so as not to stretch their tummy muscles which would hurt like a chinese burn or squeeze them so they bleed inside, because they are made of invisible and your fingers just go straight through them.

but they want to know who’s my boyfriend.

once i would have said gilberto puccinato. he was small and neat. he wore small, shiny black shoes. he wore dark blue and sometimes pure purple shorts, like the night sky around the yellow moon in my fairy book, with stars like spattered milk and the blue going from clear dark blue through purple to black with a delicious thrill through it, like a jewel.

his hair was black and his eyes were brown, but like beer bottle, not bum. his skin was brown, too, like a dry leaf. his hair was so black it shone blue. he got ten out of ten for writing and once he came top. once he sat up so straight and still that we all had to turn round in our desks and look at him. ‘look at gilberto! his back is nice and straight. he isn’t wriggling about. that’s how i want you all to be.’ he is shiny like a sparrow’s eye and beautiful.

but he’s gone now and i don’t know where. there isn’t anyone to equal him in the whole school.

so i just say ian lacey because he’s a nice, quiet boy with hair like wood-grain, light and dark like golden syrup and treacle, and he smells of brilliantine. then they squeal and go away. but it’s half-hearted, incomplete, doesn’t quite connect like it does with the other girls. somehow it doesn’t just come off with ivy.

there’s the school room where they killed my maths. i could do twelve times anything before most kids had mastered their four times tables. i could do them skipping, or playing the doh re mi’s so well on my toy piano that my mother was embarrassed between pride and shame at being proud. that was too great an advantage and a drag was put on me, and my maths killed to keep me down, i was too forward. they killed it one day which i spent in the sick room, too sick to do anything but moan, a queer noise i learned to make to express pain, although not a muscle or a nerve of me hurt at all. but i consented to moan when the thought occurred that i should, and lying on my side pretending to be in pain i spent the morning when they killed my maths in the sick room at school.

well it was the domestic arts room, really. there’re lots of puns there: the mr garts room, the mystic arts room. i liked the latter when i finally grasped it, years later. but back then, i believed in mr garts. but whoever would he be? once a man in a thin dark suit was there with a black morocco leather bound ledger. perhaps it was he? everyone was pleased to see him there. but he was not there when they killed my mathematics. and no one ever told me why, except that i had more than the others and should be ashamed of being unwilling to be so cut down to size.

i’m going home after school under the kurrajongs and when i get to our driveway i go in. but ann millar and kay stevens are there by the gate with their big brown school cases. i’ve only got a small grey and tan and navy one that my ruler only just fits in diagonally. they come up behind me and kay says, ‘that’s not your house.’

‘yes it is. we’ve just moved in.’

‘no, you haven’t. it’s not your house.’

‘our car’s in the shed. i’ll show you.’

‘liar! it isn’t your car.’

you should never call anyone a liar. you should just say ‘fibber’. you could say ‘that is a lie’ or ‘you are lying’, or ‘that is a fib’ or ‘you are fibbing’ or ‘you are telling fibs’, but not ‘you are a liar’. that is according to ivy's mother. 

on the seesaw behind the grade six classroom if you if you sat in front of the handles four or six each side you could slip down the plank and catch a pinch of the inside of your upper thigh in the handle as you leaned on it. it was a big high yellow juddering pain that hit you in the stomach like a strong wind full of little stones and sand and it made you go f-f-f-ffffibbb-b-b-b-buh backwards down your throat.

‘that’s nana wakeland’s house.’ ann miller has blond curly hair. she is very pretty, like a girl on a birthday card. she never has to wear a grey tunic. hardly anybody else does.

‘well, here’re my mother and father. ask them.’

they were just coming through the school gates not far behind us, with mrs granger who was one of the other teachers. the school was only at the end of the street about four houses away. kay and ann looked back and saw them and then said ‘liar! liar!’ and ran away across the road. they went a couple of houses on and then stopped to play, swinging their big cases around like the skipping rope in fairies and witches.

i look back at them as i follow my parents through the front gate and i see with great satisfaction that they do see me going in and shutting the gate behind me so they won't call ma a liar anymore. my mother calls me and i run to her, swinging my little case, and we go down the drive, around the back and into the kitchen, and ivy gets sent to her room to play while her parents have a cup of tea and talk about the news. nana wakeland’s ghost is here, inside this house behind the net curtains in the dining room where there are dead blowies on the window sill. she has nice, soft, white hair and hardly any face. she is very quiet and good, and just listens.

i sometimes play with my plasticine, making a fairy with long, thin, pink arms and legs, and hair made out of the thinnest possible yellow snakes, and i press tiny blue eyes and red lips onto her face. then i give her a purple dress and blue wings. they should be silver or clear, but they don’t make silver or clear plasticine. i stand her on her feet but her legs buckle up under her so she lies down while i make her a chair out of cardboard.

when i see my scissors i think of jennifer austin at school using her scissors with her wet hanky pressed into her hand, and even knitting like that. i pull my hanky out of my sleeve and try. i open it out and pretend to blow my nose in it, and then i screw it up under my two last fingers and pick up the scissors.

‘it’s good to do that,’ says jennifer austin. you can see her there through the wall, even through nana wakeland, whose soul fills the whole wall like a fine veil, and there are peach trees behind her, because she lives out on a fruit block near larco. ‘it’s like a grown woman. you can do everything with just the other fingers.’

i cut out the chair and fold its legs under and its back up and sit the fairy on it. but she is too heavy, a soft, heavy lump of plasticine, and she flattens the chair, bending its legs beneath her.

i pick out her blue eyes with my fingernail. i lightly rub off her lips with a fingertip and roll it into a tiny pellet. i peel off her long, yellow hair, her green skirt, and her beautiful, silver wings that are only blue really, and roll them into smooth, round, yellow and blue and green balls. i fold her long, barefoot legs up onto her belly, i push her head down onto her neck, i wrap her arms, long, thin and elbowless, around her solid, unbreathing lump of a body. i roll her smooth between my hands, pushing the wrinkles and cracks out until she is a smooth pink ball like a lolly.

jennifer austin is pink like a lolly - but i have dropped the hanky because you can’t do plasticine with it, not and roll it up into smooth round balls without any wrinkles or cracks. i roll up the blue with the blue and the red with the red and the green and the pink and the yellow all into their own big balls.

nana wakeland behind the curtain gives me a cool, clean ray of approval, like the cold when you open the fridge. i try to do one too. it isn’t like light, it isn’t like water, it isn’t like air, but it flows out of you quietly, cool and clear and nearly sweet like when you lick the tank.

but jennifer austin is damp and soft and pink. she has a sick, mad, pink sponge-cake hand and i don’t like her.

when she is gone i get out my chess set and play with the pieces. my favourite pawn:  blackish brown, but with the golden syrup colour of the wood showing through; the beautiful queens; the knights that are really horses - two golden white ones and two businessy blackish-brown ones. one of their heads comes off and there is a little peg on its stump so you can put it back on.

but i stretch out my hand for the elegant golden king and it isn’t my hand. it is a grown-up hand, soft and moist and pink, like a sponge cake and there is a soft, moist hanky pressed into the heel of it with its last two fingers, while the other two fingers and the thumb are stretched forth like the claw of some gryphon or dragon or lizard to grasp the king. it is only a phantom, a horrible phantom, but i can’t just rub it away.

i know how all the pieces move, but this set is very old and two white and one black are missing, so it’s got three big pawns from another set. i just play that the bishop is sick and the queen goes to visit him in hospital. the knights are galloping across the linoleum plains and sometimes they stop and fight.

i’m next to the dining room window now because my grandmother is here and she isn’t well so she’s been given my bedroom. they’ve partitioned off part of the dining room with my wardrobe for my bedroom. my bed is right up close to nana wakeland’s window, the one she haunts.

sometimes when i stand up i start to swoon. sometimes it feels as if my head is full of salt and there’s water running down hard from the top of my head deep into the ground. it’s very intense. there is a vortex of water rushing, like when you pull the chain to flush the toilet. and there is a hole in the air, which is black and red, and something goes thwoom thwoom thwoom thwoom, loud and angry and black in my ears. i like the salt and the water rushing, but the black and red is teasing somehow and i do not like the thwoom thwoom thwoom.

there are people in the lounge. they are staying next door with mrs sowell. i don’t know why they are in our lounge. the ways of parents are inscrutable. the woman is also a ghost but she’s still got a white, thin body of bones and flesh. she carries a baby in a white parcel and she’s halfway out of her body, waving backwards and forwards like a feather with a ghost baby parcel in the crook of her arm.

the man is a brown and black stick with a very pink face. he makes a body shape around a twirl of reflective darkness. it is a hard stick of blackish brown like twisted toffee, like knitting needle.

they are all very awkward there in the lounge. i am out in the drive where there is fawn ground, pinkish light brown sand – my mother said that was fawn – with quartz and oolites in it. the quartz is like mutton fat, smooth-cornered pebbles the size of a knucklebone. it’s good for sheep where there is quartz.

out in the drive, when i hold a piece of quartz, smooth-cornered and yellowish and threaded with sheep veins thin and red, i feel sheep all around me, and i see bluebush and red dirt for miles, and sheep making bluebush noises, ba-a-a-a ba-a-a-a-a ba-a-a-a, the colours and shapes of bluebush, which is all bobbly and a bit like cauliflower. ba-a-a-a ba-a-a-a-a ba-a-a-a we all go, putting it all into the bluebush. it is bluebush essence we sheep are baaing into the bluebushes. white sulphur-crested cockatoos are stamping their big blue feet on the fence posts. bluebushes are just like sheep.

see, i am putting it into your hand, a piece of sheep quartz to take with you. if it hasn’t manifested yet, one of your invisible bodies will have got it and it will manifest, sooner or later, in this life or the next – may it do all good and only good and no harm at all.

the people are now out on the veranda. mrs sowell is there too. they are laughing, sadly, weakly, stupidly together and it is all feeble and broken and sad. i put my head against the galvanised iron fence between our place and sowell’s to feel the cold zinciness of it behind my tongue, and i hold onto the jarrah rail it is nailed to and i can see them stepping off the veranda still talking, by gee, they say, and oh well, yes, you never know, hee hee hee.

and they wave a little baby bye-bye to me and i come up the driveway at them small and big and lumbering from side to side with my head over there and my hands in the air and then they are suddenly gone. my mother catches me and says ‘what’s wrong?’ and i have a sudden insight and i tell her i feel ill. not sick – that’s when you vomit. ill, like milky white water fizzing and the bubbles rising through it, and tin, tinn, tinily sensitive through my body like star beams through the night. tinn, that’s irish, from another life our family of lives in a parallel universe. i can’t see into it, but sometimes words get through.

i say i feel ill a lot, experimentally, but this time i say it still tentatively but with insight, and she falls for it, she takes me up on it, and it’s all wrapped up in a box. i am put to bed with pneumonia again for the second year running. the first time was in grade one.

everyone is at school. i am on my back in bed with a hot water bottle, and i’m warm as a treacle crumpet. i have to drink lemonade and take pink tablets that taste like lollies. they don’t really taste like lollies; they taste like chalk, like chalk and milk of magnesia with a weak streak of strawberry.

the wall beside me is plaster. i can see through it, a little way in. it's like seeing through cellophane when you fold it once, twice, and then again and can still just see through. air can get in between the white grains of plaster. that is what going through the wall would be like. there are little spaces between the grains, and you are like air, you are made of invisible, and you seep through the plaster like ink through blotter and come out on the other side.

i look behind the curtain for nana wakeland, but she isn’t there. she is: her voice is cold and little like a sigh. i can’t see her but i can see between the curtain and the wall a wan, chalky land of blue distances and yellow horizontal hazes, dry, wispy, yellow grass on long dunes, an evanescent grey-white wasteland for ghosts to go about in, a lovely place with a smear of smoky water beyond the dunes with a haze of reeds along its edge, and a soft, far away sky behind it. sometimes there’d be a white haiku moon in the sky among thin clouds.

my grandmother is in her big, high bed in my room. she has breakfast on a tray. later on she’ll get out of bed and go about the house gently but firmly, doing tidy things. she has been to scotland and sent me a ten shilling note for my birthday by airmail, in a grey brown paper envelope.

her footsteps on the floor. ‘oh dear,’ squeaks the cupboard door in a high desperation of sadness, which is nana wakeland’s voice, still held softly in the hinges. ‘tsk, tsk’ go the electric switches. ‘ha! ha ha! chuckle chuckle. hee hee hee . . . ‘ goes the cup and saucer and spoon. she brings her cup of tea in to my bedside.

she sings:  there’s a lit-tle brown thrush sitting up in a tree

                  he is sing-ing to you, he is sing-ing to me,

                  and what does he say, little girl, little boy?

                 ‘all the world’s running o-ver with joy!’

she talks about scotland, about scottie dogs and scotch pipers in their tartan kilts, and about scottish people who go hoot mon! and say wee and it isn’t that sore place between your legs.

she said there was heather there, and double-decker buses, and beautiful lakes they called loccchhhhs. and she gazed away through a different wall (although it was the same one), and i could see the blue and yellow horizons of the distance-misted lands fading far away into the distance, way up jessop street, out past stanford’s block and beyond the spinifex and red sand and carpet snakes and bluebush and the sheep which were like grey bluebushes moving among the still blue ones with lumps of mutton fat quartz with thin, red veins through them tumbling about under their feet. that was where scotland was, way out past nana wakeland’s ghost lands and over the sea.

          

             ‘don’t you see? don’t you hear?

             hush, listen, my dear,

             don’t you see? don’t you hear?

             all the world’s running over with joy!’

she was white-haired and square-jawed, with disturbing dark blue eyes sometimes lost like fishes in their own moistness among the creases around their wide, strong sockets, and sometimes darting bolts of dark blue energy that tasted like night-time out in the dew, cold and exciting, and full of pricking stars.

but you had to keep still and quiet or how could it feed you, how would you ever learn to draw starlight into your centre and to drink the silences of space and to breathe the colour dark blue right into your body like frosty air if you would fidget and fuss. she said it fidjit, with the jit like hit, but more stabbing.

            don’t you see? (sea? that’s the ocean!)  don’t you hear? (here? that’s where we are!)

            hush, listen, my dear! (i curl my hand into a question mark behind my ear.)

            don’t you see? (yes – even invisible.) don’t you hear? (the flowers talking? oh, do they really, grandma?)

            all the world’s running over with joy!

but she hadn’t said anything about flowers talking . . .  it was only the plastic nattering of christine the doll.

once i put christine into my bed because she was cold. that was before i got stephanie. she was cold, cold right through, right into the hollows of her limbs and the metal of her hinges, and the air trapped dark and still inside her like a breath held in horror was cold as a stone with a dry, still, soundless cold that chilled me. she was no warmer when i got in with her in my warm check pyjamas after my bath. it was awful. i held her against my own body’s warmth but she only chilled my chest. my mother took her out of my bed when she came in to say goodnight and she put her into her pram. you can’t warm plastic with blankets. it will not take up your body heat. it only sends a chilling, deathly coldness into you, and it could kill you. it is contagious, that kind of cold.

 she wasn’t called christine at that time. she was called raelene.

her pram was my fourth birthday present. we still lived in the trust homes then. i had a broken collarbone there. robert broke it. he chased me and pushed me over. i fell onto a broom handle and it snapped my collarbone nearly in two, like a green stick. my mother cut through the shoulder of my singlet, and she set my arm in a sling.

my mother was a tall, dark woman full of shadows, and full of dark red and green, the colours jewels are. but she was hard too, sharp-edged and steely, like jewels are, with dangerous flashes in her. and i had a dream.

every now and then there’d be barbecues at the wine distillery and we’d go. there’d be games for the children with prizes of bangles and water pistols and for grown ups too, with bottles of wine or brandy for prizes, and chops and sausages and photographs would be taken. watch the birdie – say cheese.

in my dream there was a dance in the big tin shed there with its concrete floor, and the people were singing and dancing, swaying in the smoke and shadows and light. sozzled, they all were, and i was too, just from breathing the sozzled air.

'no dear, you can’t have one,

you can’t have one,

we’ve just begun,

no dear you can’t have one,’ 

they sang, and the singing was like singing under water, and they were all swaying like weeds under the waves, the water groggy with silt and salt and people groping their way through the weeds like fish, their mouths opening and shutting, their fins wide and webbed like drunken hands.     

‘no dear, you can’t have two . . . ‘

i had had one of mrs philps’s golden labrador princess’s pedigree puppies tucked into my sling on the real day, but in my dream it was a baby – not a doll, but a real baby wrapped in a grubby white nappy parcel with a crocheted bonnet on its head that felt like the claw of some great predator, but i/it did not cry, it/i was resigned.

then i dropped it. i’d gone reeling into a corner, a big, ugly corner where a shadow man was taking out his big, limp dick to piss in the shadows there, and i reached the cold dewy wall and was a feverish woman, fearful of the earth-waves sucking at the concrete floor, and then i was myself again with the baby in my sling and i dropped it, accidentally, like a grubby old loaf of bread on the concrete floor, and it fell on its head which fractured in long, criss-cross claws all over its head like an egg with little bleeding veins under the shell. i was distraught, of course. i didn’t want anyone to see what i had done, but i wanted somebody to come and undo it somehow.

i don’t like babies. they are too pink and moist and fat. i am thin, and my cheeks are flat, and they are white, not pink, and i always keep my mouth and fingers dry. babies dribble. they suck their fingers till they glisten with dribble and then try to put them in your mouth. they are germy and weeweey and they stink. and i still have jennifer austin’s damp hanky in the corner of my hand, and sometimes it fills my hand, a wet, germy bundle. jennifer austin is like a big baby. i hate her phantom hanky. it has pink flowers on it.

it is springtime, and the air is heady and musty with pollen. my head feels full of cloud and so airy i can almost fly. the air is full of fairies flying. the breeze comes merrily, playfully in at the window, blowing the curtains in and out over my bed like the skirts of children skipping, all in accord with my story books’ spells. dr foster comes every day (no, not the one who went to gloucester) and one day he gives me an injection.

then my seventh birthday was here at last and i’m allowed to get out of bed for a little while. i’ve been sitting up a little higher every day, feeling the slow, grave slide of the world away from me, feeling myself wheeling head over heels in the air, but yet not moving, propped up on pillows held by my mother’s hand, getting ready for my party.

there are twelve girls from my class invited. six and seven year olds in grade three. i don’t know them very well, because i’ve missed so much school, except suzanne granger. her mother is the grade three teacher. mine teaches grade four. 

suzanne is beautiful. she has a soft, affectionate face like a kitten’s and beautiful soft paws. her eyes are brown like chocolate, and they hold a still, quiet flame of love. her voice is soft and mewing like sweet milk, like soft kitten fur. she has all the other girls in her class as her friends except the peevish ones and me. she is beautiful. her laughing is like chocolate and her aura is aromatic like chocolate. she has two long, chocolate brown plaits and wears a chocolate brown knife-pleated skirt and a dark blue twinset, of that jewelly depth of dark blue that carries a warm, pale fire in its heart. you find gold within that shade of blue, deep within.

i only talk to her after school when there is a staff meeting or a mothers’ club, when nearly all the others have gone home, except the ones whose mothers are at the meeting. sometimes a few teachers stand around talking after school under the sugar gums, and suzanne talks to me. the rest of the time there are too many other girls around her, girls i only know the names of and where they sit and who their best friend is and have only been to the birthday parties of; girls i don’t know, and i can’t get to her.

it is remarkable how ivy hasn’t got any friends.

the reason i can’t have any friends is because of the fairies. they turn my ceiling into a sky at night, full of stars and the big, ghostly moon, and they carry me off to meadows full of scented flowers, making me as small as a mouse but not shaped like one so that i can see into the throats of the tiniest flowers that people don’t know about, that nature made just for fairies. flowers of the grasses, clovers, knotgrass and plants so little that they haven’t got names. that’s better than having friends. i can play with the fairies.

suzanne’s present is a brownie saucer that you hang on the wall. there are two brownies on it leaning on brown-capped toadstools. their mouths are slightly open, and their mild, questioning eyes peer into my room. all the colours fade into mist at the edges; the brown fades into the soft, touchable, parchment of mushroom skin, and the red of their cheeks is a faint flush in the fawn-beige of their faces. the greens, the blues and the yellows around them fade into the mist that then fades into the china. it gleams softly. it’s as if the colours have been breathed onto it by a fairy or a wizard.

they’d put the wardrobe in gerald’s room. he was away at boarding school. the party all sat around the dining room table and they brought me the cake to cut it. i had to blow out the candles with the hair-drier on cold so as not to breathe pneumonia germs on the cake. that was my father’s idea. We all thought it a marvellous joke.

then, with a golden sun pouring warmth out of a new-blue sky, surrounded by shining trees and warm, crimson, galvanised iron sheds, i sat outside, and even stood for a while by the hollyhock while suzanne’s soul talked with mine.

‘that hollyhock is making metal: a pale foil of cobalt-mauve.’ she says. and she even says aloud the word 'mauve', and touches it.

‘it hears me communing with my paddock the frog which is under this piece of sleeper beside it, and it loves me, really, like a witch, coyly and slyly.’ i tell her.

suzanne lifts the piece of sleeper. it is heavily decayed, ribbed like corduroy. it makes us both very serious, that old bit of jarrah. it is intent. underneath it there’s the lacework of hollyhock roots in the dark compost, like a doyley, and the frog-shaped hollow where a frog has nestled all winter long, but the frog is gone.

            suzanne lives out on a block surrounded by hard-working orange trees thousands deep. her father goes everywhere, even comes to the school, on a big, dusty tractor. he wears a navy singlet and little black shorts even in winter. they are covered in tractor dust. in summer he goes without the singlet. he has a big, round, brown belly, sparsely covered with long black hairs. he is indian brown, round, bald and royal. his face is round and bristly and wreathed in smiling creases like a london bun, and his name is raoul.

my father is always clean and neat in a quiet grey suit. when he wears his knee-length pressed khaki shorts with their belts and tinny buckles on, his little white knees are like knuckles, and his thin, blue-white legs have big pale orange freckles on them, and a haze of golden down like a leprechaun and he doesn’t want anybody to see. it is awful when he wears shorts. he teaches grade seven.

so i am seven now, and everything will be different. i will read thick books with no pictures, at least not inside, just pages and pages of print. i will knit and sew and embroider. i will be serious and not giggle or squeal. i will not cry when i fall over. i will be good, and not thrashed.

then came a storm. they were late home because there was a sports day in bilmara. i could not hear my grandmother as she went creaking about the house, the wind was so loud. from the sky down to the ground it was all fox-red dust. the wind was being the ghosts in the sandstone. they banged against the walls. its mouth roared about the house and it got worse and worse as the day wore on, and then at four o’clock, bang! crash! smash! shatter! down fell the brownie saucer from its tack in the wall and broke.

then the storm abated.

and i was soon well again.

the black, shiny asphalt chunky with gravel and with sticky patches of chewy in it and slivers of silver is now just a tough grey reptile skin and i no longer squat down to examine it. now i know that all the wogs and wiggly things under the bark of the sugar gums have names: white-ants, cockroaches and earwigs. i no longer knit at recess time and dinnertime because i am ashamed of my big needles. the others all have thin ones. i only swing lazily on the swings, like the big girls, or sit under a tree, no longer playing intently.

ivy jennings and i have the same first name. she is nice and sometimes speaks to me. she blows in my face. she whispers in my ear. she and her friends let me play oranges and lemons with them and it's here comes a chopper to chop off your head and they catch me between their linked hands and i'm decapitated. 

and then we play statues and ivy is so good at that - she's positively catatonic - that they all take their cardiagans off and tie them on to ivy. was the game now scarecrows? what was the game? think, ivy, keep your mind on things.

but i couldn’t concentrate – my mind kept running back along the cracks in the asphalt, getting splayed out into stars on the spiky, electric smell of gumnuts, and going spinning upwards in to the sky, up to the clouds where the fairies are. 

only zita meyer and diane schumann will listen to me. suzanne granger doesn’t like fairies, so she doesn’t listen to me. she says they are spiteful and snitchy, and so they are, but ivy doesn’t know that yet – she’s only ever met them being sweet and kindly, and very, very pretty.

they are up above the clouds, i tell them, and only i can see them, only i can go there. they are very thin, like me, and they have sloping eyes and tiny perfect teeth. they have insect feelers on their heads and wide mosquito wings. they come to earth at night sliding down moonbeams, and their babies are born in the early dawn, out of the opening buds of daffodils and hollyhocks and peach blossoms. i am their friend. they make me small and give me wings so i can fly in the trees among the blossoms on moonlit nights.

and everything i tell about them is true.

these two girls catch me as i go into the schoolyard in the mornings, and crowd up to me at recess, and they seek me out in the lunch shed and sit listening intently as i talk. they’re avid for it, a-thirst, and they check every detail against some secret record of their own, and are excited when we concur. ‘they’re that big, and they wear dresses so fine, and they dance . . .’

but one day their two souls suddenly stare with hostility out through their bodies’ eyes and make them stand up against me, with their hands behind their backs, swaying a little like two lolly-eyed birds on a branch and they say, ‘pastor said that that talk is wicked. there aren’t any fairies. there is nothing invisible at all.’

and they pecked out my fairy eyes with their long, sharp stork beaks and then they let me go and bleed my head in the arms of a kind old sugar gum, who soothed me with a flow of soft arundta.

i’d have no friends after that but maureen shrub sits next to me in the arbour. she does all the talking, because she’s older and bigger and acts grown-up. she gives me dried peaches straight off the racks and sulphury apricots – a whole bagful. dried peaches are like ears, with all the right whorls and curves and scrollings over of the edges, and soft, slightly fuzzy lobes. i say so, but it seems to make her cross, so i don’t talk much. her father has a block. but i don’t understand why she’s talking to me. at eight years she’s already a gossip, but i don’t know all the people she names. she isn’t in my grade, she’s older.

one year ends and another begins, and still i find her beside me every recess time and dinner time. i don’t know what she wants with me, but there she is, a big brawny girl with grown up arms all neatly folded, neat brown hair and a flowery dress on - she holds me with a barky claw of sticks and i can’t escape. 

she shows me her picture hanky. she has a big, pale face like a moon caught in her twenty twiggy hands and held on for a mask. sometimes while she’s talking about something someone has done or said she goes tsk tsk tsk and looks cross. i don’t understand why she is so grown up. she’s only nine and a half and in grade five. i’m just eight, in grade four, and i still cry sometimes and still lose my temper and stamp. i still play with toys.

at last she leaves me alone with a big brown paper bag full of dried peaches. and the year ends and i'm in grade four. 

it's my mother’s classroom. one of the front desks is turned side-on. it is the worst boy’s desk. it properly belongs to alan carpenter because he is a young hooligan and doesn’t wash and and is lazy and rude, but she makes me sit there. it won’t be for long, she says, we’re moving to another town at easter. 

it doesn’t mean what it usually does. it's just a spare desk. it still has on it that spell she cast on it for the naughty boys, but i’m not going with it. i’m refusing to be deeply ashamed. i’m refusing to accept the subliminal conditioning, and refusing to have installed the behaviour-linked torments they used to condition recalcitrant youngsters with in those days. but it’s a constant fight and i’m glad when the time comes to leave, though i’ll miss the river.

and it isn’t long – only till easter. we release mortimer, our pet terrapin into the river and on the last day my mother stays home to pack and so we have a strange teacher. 

she says, ‘take out your rulers,’ and ivy has no ruler. she says, ‘take out your readers,’ and ivy has no reader. she gets cross, but when ivy tells her everything’s packed, we’re moving away, we’re leaving after dinner, she understands who ivy is. 

she asks the class who her friends are, so that she can tell them to make a big, affectionate fuss of her on her last day. no one’s hand goes up.

ivy trembles a good deal before she says, to relieve the unbearable tension and also to rebut the thinly-veiled, hostile accusation, ‘she’s in another class.’

but that’s a lie. maureen shrub hasn’t spoken to her all year.

entrance

the new house was old and haunted and very, very ugly. but it had one saving grace: down the side was this long, narrow, shallow channel lined with bricks, bright, rich, and water-worn, and firmly embedded in moss. this was the best moss ivy had ever seen, perhaps the first – she was only five and not yet allowed to wander. it was like velvet, close-textured, flat and continuous. you could pat it like a kitten. it had a high, whining scent like water. it was better than velvet, green as grinning, sharp as six.

it could be like a lawn for fairies. their feet would press on it like fingertips but smaller. a real lawn, even a gappy couch, would always be tripping them up. it would be right up to their knees or higher and it would be sharp as knives. their legs’d be cut to billy-o. buffalo would be worse. but this moss was so soft they could even sit on it.

there were two now dancing, with long skinny legs white as a china swan, and little ivy squatting over the gutter and touching the moss with a fairy fingertip, not quite seeing them. very bright was the blue of the tartan of her skirt, and nearly scarlet her jumper, with snot on the cuffs. no shoes and socks - dirty little guttersnipe feet!

one fairy flew up into the air in an airy spiral and vanished into nothing. the other sat on a stone, frissoning her wings in the opal light, and she lifted her exquisite face and began to sing a tune. she had a voice like a mosquito.

how fine was the white sand between those bricks, and among the moss roots which had penetrated into the cracks. the taste of the moss got onto your tongue and the colours got into your lungs. you felt it going in between your ribs like the roots of the moss between the bricks. what good bricks they were. you’d almost want to suck one. you could feel the taste of them already humped up against the back of your throat.

then suddenly, “ivy!” and there was ivy’s father in a grey suit coming out of the house and catching sight of her there. hands on hips, he towered over her: “here! get up out of that drain. that’s not where to play.” 

caught! 

doing something naughty again.

ivy scrambled to her feet and wide-eyed, watched him get into the car and drive away. then she looked back at the brick channel, already distancing herself from it in dismay. he called it a ‘drain’. was it a drain?  he said it was, so it must be, but it didn’t look like a drain.
there had been a drain at the old house, the housing trust home where the family had lived before.

a drain is a deep, round, vertical terracotta pipe outside by the tap, made of something like dark toffee. It is so deep you can’t see very far down it. but it stinks. it’s full of germs and the man has to come and do it or you can put caustic soda down it. it is terribly, terribly dangerous. you must never play near a drain.

so how could this mossy line of bricks be a drain? it looked nothing like a drain.
still, you live and learn. her father had said so, so it was a drain. “drain,” ivy said to it because obviously no one ever had before, or it would have known what it was and been doing it properly, and ivy would have heard it doing it, its evil, grinning voice slurring thick, wet, air-belching syllables deep down in there somewhere, among the grey and the cool and the metallic sheen of its stenches all choked up with hair, mop string and slime.

that’s what these bricks were, with their soft, hard corners and their fascinating moss, not something beautiful and soft, not a place for fairies. it was up to ivy then to give it its long, strangling, gurgle, echoing sinisterly, its guttishness and its germy, filthy stench which she bestowed unstintingly now that she knew it was a drain.

and she never played there again, even when it rained and it was full of shining, silver water like a river with peach blossom petals floating along on it from the tree next door, each one in its own little dint, like a fingertip.

hello. i’m ivy, that little girl down there in that gutter, all grown up now, and writing. you are my readers – it is you who i’m talking to. welcome to my life. 

all books are time machines. it’s time we stopped denying that. furthermore, all narratives are shamanisms, flights of fancy are shamanic journeys, and we are often enough transported by particularly well-written passages into magical worlds of the imagination in which we experience what we cannot experience any other way. okay, it is read-only, and you can’t bring anything back from the places you visit, or not yet, anyway, though it shall be so, the way our literature and our shamanisms are evolving. i am letting you into my childhood, and we are going back down into the past. look kindly on ivy. she is a thin, frail child with no friends, and could be blown away easily like a wisp of fluff if you scoff.  

      

i hadn’t wanted to move out of the trust home. it was a nice house on little stilts. it had thin, asbestos walls coloured light pink and yellow though the boys’ sleepout was blue and green. the sleepout had grey, marbled glass louvres. i used to like the taste of louvres. my room had scrim curtains with an acrid smell and a big window through which you could see the front garden. there were roses in a bed with a border of white rocks, and shrubs all around - a diosma and a geraldton wax, and a lawn sprinkled with jacaranda flowers from the tree next door. buffalo round the front, couch round the back just getting started.

and by the back step there was this drain… there was nothing else in the whole back yard but the shed down the back, the rainwater tank, and the tap with the drain - no bricks, no moss, just this toffee coloured pipe thing that you may not play near. it was nicer round the front anyway, heady with the scent of roses. if you put the long blue flower-bells of jacaranda over your fingertips it made you a witch. the big girls next door told me that.

i’d told my mother i didn’t want to move to the new house. it was down some cracked cement steps. the front was cream roughcast. it had very thick walls. its windows were black. behind them in the nasty dark a witch was doing horrible secret things. she had a smelly bottom and an ugly face like the smell of toadstools. but you couldn’t really see her. 

the front yard was dark, narrow and damp behind a thick stone wall with a cracked cement top with a fat green steel rail above it. its flower bed was full of old, wet kurrajong pods, all rotting, like ugly mouths with half their teeth fallen out, caught in the thin sticks of fast-asleep black bushes or scattered on the black leaf mold among the limp, wet, rank-smelling weeds growing sparsely around them. the only flowers were forget-me-nots spangled with rain.

       

the backyard was edged with bare groping trees and haunted little sheds of galvanised iron painted dull red that came off on your hands, like the paint on the roof. the tank was on a low stand of crumbling yellow stone. white powder flowed from its cracks like bleeding.

       

i could just get through the gap between the tank and the back of the laundry into a thin, sharp, angular place of curves and planes where you could sit down. the sand there was white powder which had fallen from the laundry wall and close to the ground there were big airy caverns into which fairies could crawl, though they might not be able to stand up once they got in. not fairies, anyway. their wings’d get in the way. elves. no, but pixies could. they’re only small.

       

inside though, only the kitchen is awful, its lino brown like dirt. my room is big and quiet, a big, airy space, eerie, cool like water, wet in my tender lungs and impassive. all the rooms are haunted. most of the ghosts are looking away or staring without seeing from behind the glass in their picture frames. my bedroom is always full of ghosts, though my mother does what she can, but what can she do? what can anyone do? it's like fighting feathers, keeping away ghosts. there don't seem to be any really nasty ones so we let them be there. 

        

so please come in. you are my ghosts.

here are my dolls all over the floor. the lino is greyish-pink like mushrooms and silver like money and a scared red and a glowering royal blue to keep everything strained up ready. wobbly lines of bright colours are crossed like scattered pipe cleaners floating past each other in a cloudy mushroom sky. i like to rest my cheek on it. it is cool and nearly smooth. there are yellow flecks on it too. it’s not flat. it’s still got bubbles in it because it is new and hasn’t settled yet. it smells big like shoe polish, so serious and strong that i’ve cried.

yellow is my eldest brother gerald’s colour. his face washer, his towel, his toothbrush: they are all yellow. gerald is a thin, pale grin in a dry, freckled face and big, white knuckle-bone hands holding wooden guns with thick rubber bands that ooh lovey could have your eye out, that shoot gumnuts like bullets. they’re going to send him away to high school in town. that’ll straighten him out.

       

i get given green, but purple’s my favourite colour. green is my mother’s. but my things aren’t purple, they’re green. that means they’re not mine, they’re my mother’s, as if i have to hold her hand. i hate it. once i got thrashed for wanting purple so much i stamped.

       

my other brother robert’s colour is red, like fire brigades and telephone booths and pigs must grunt boxes and the cold, hard, solid little rooves over the thick white posts that he said said “father pulled 5 fat tits”. but they didn't. they said “FP 5 ft'”. “FP” stands for “fire plug”. he is a vulgar boy. 

       

he is bigger than me and more than a year older. he has brown eyes and his skin is light brown, the colour of a grubby blanket, with a smell like bum. my mother says he has very fine skin that tans easily. it is soft and warm and smells like bum. it is a halo around him, a cloud of bum that clothes him, and if he touches anything, it rubs off. boys are awful. 

       

once i told on him for saying vulgar words and laughing at me when i cried. he called it ‘bolga’ like a baby who can’t say ‘v’ and came at me going “bolga, bolga, bolga” trying to make it be what i say, as if i still spoke baby-talk. “bolga, bolga, bolga” till i screamed and we both got into trouble and he hated me for that. screaming for mummy. sook!

       

i was not a vulgar girl. i had not been vulgar since i’d had my mouth washed out with soap for saying poo-poo. ‘ooh dear, such a dirty word, and it’s left your mouth all dirty with saying such a dirty word. wait now, there’s still a little bit of dirt left in there, right up the back. there, now it’s gone. now you be careful never to say a rude word again or we’ll have to wash your mouth out again. off you go now, and play nicely with your brother.” but he would never play nicely with me. boys always hate their sisters. boys are not cissies.

and he likes being called bobby. he doesn’t even mind all those bs. b is the worst letter, the worst sound. it makes your lips fat and round with a split between them like a bum and when you say it, it is like a warm, dry little fart. the big B looks like a bum sliced off to be B for bum. its awful how big and bouncy and bad and brown b is. it’s so awful that your stomach screams and you tear your hanky with your teeth.

       

it isn’t nice to have a bum or a bottom at all. i put invisible there. there is nothing there. invisible like fairies are made of. fairies are made of invisible. so are ghosts. they can go through walls. i can a bit, into the damp, gritty texture to where the hard, grey coldness shuts up tight against you and you can’t go any further.

       

but it’s playtime now, and this is my bedroom and playroom. so i’m going to play now, with my dolls. it is school time and i am marking the books. christine can’t spell. she reads haltingly, without expression. she is no good. she only gets two ticks and all the rest crosses, eight crosses and no stamp at all. she is cross and rude and needs to be thrashed, but that will be later, at home.

       

it will be rich and deep and grimly gratifying deep in my stomach: like hot mincemeat on toast with tomato sauce and the nasty bite of old grey pepper my satisfaction will be when it’s sums. christine can’t do sums at all. she will get them all wrong. no ticks, no stamp.

       

stand in the corner, christine. you are a very bad doll.

       

christine is the best at standing, though. she has a hard, nuggetty, muscly little body. if you put her arms up and hold her by the head and put her feet carefully into position on a flat piece of floor, the slightly rusty steel rods inside her pelvis will suddenly grip and she’ll stand up on her own.

       

sometimes, though, the rods don’t grip, and she pitches noisily forward, a swift swivel of the hips, her knees rigid, lands on her head and bursts into tears. she makes a deep red, twisted squeal like a cat, like the lady on the wireless being a cat, except that it has two twists, not one. it is a sound the shape of raspberry jam or ant bite. it’s supposed to sound like ‘mama’ but she can’t say the m. 

       

she walks real good, but that’s not how to say it. you should say ‘very well’. josey spence says ‘real good’. she’s in my class at school. she’s got bugs in her hair. christine says ‘real good’, too. she's no good.

       

stephanie is fat. the back of her head is flat and ugly. she can only stand up in corners or with her back against something or sometimes on a mat she might stand stiff and tense with her stomach sticking out, holding her breath till she falls over and i catch her and sit her down.

     

‘stephanie, you are too pink and moist and your hair is just like gold tinsel and it floats in the air as if it isn’t stuck properly in your head, every hair stuck right in with a good tight ping to keep it there. you are too fat.’

       

she’s like jennifer austin. jennifer austin’s hair is fine and golden like silkworm silk but shinier, like tinsel, or the long, thin spider webs you find spun across the backyard from side to side from the top of the toilet to the almond blossom tree next door, nearly invisible, bowed up high into the air by the morning’s breath, a ghostly flotilla of father christmases passing underneath, over the scotch broom at the back fence, over the quarry on the other side, over the houses and citrus and scrub, over the slums by the river and away . . .

       

jenny spence and her best friend and their sisters live in the slums. look, look, you can see it through that wall, you ghosts, you who are with me because you’re reading this book in the future and it has given you entrance. you have come in through the walls. you can see through the walls. i can a bit, sometimes, see through walls.

       

annabel austin is a real girl who was in grade one with me. she is always eating cake, golden cake with cream in the middle and sticky pink icing on top. you can see the ghost of her mother behind her, just head and arms and shoulders, pink with orange hair, big and soft and moist, holding her little girl by her plump, pink wrists and walking her like a doll.

      

annabel austin, you are too rubbery, too blubbery, too many big, pale balloons. with your wet hanky rolled up in your hand, turning the pages of your primer with your licked, grown-up finger stretched out straight, you are like a fat old lady of thirty-five. you are too chubby and rubbery to dance on your toes like a fairy. fairies don’t bounce about like you do. they fly like fairy grass, and like the father christmases in the air that you catch and whisper your wishes to and then blow away. they are not pink and gold; they are silver. you can’t see them because they are made of invisible. i can see them because i can see invisible. i can see part of the way through the wall. i can see ghosts, and your wet, soft sponge cake of a mother. i can see through clouds.

       

but ivy could not say that to annabel austin because jennifer was a real girl, so she said it instead to the big, pink, golden haired dolly called stephanie whom she resembled. stephanie didn’t cry. she only blubbered a bit and looked stupid. she got a few more ticks and a ‘for trying’. she got all her spelling right except one. she got eight out of ten for mental.

       

ivy always got ten out of ten, an ‘excellent’ stamp, a gold star, and an honour card. so did suzanne granger whose mother taught grade three, and sometimes alan foster, too. his father was the doctor who delivered us all.