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.