enchanting

enchanting.

ice weed. thick green starfish on the pad of moss against the grey, ochre-lichened wall, and douggie trelorne said any cow would eat that, scoop it up like a steam shovel, go squelch, crunch, slurp with the cold juices sluicing out through the splitting membranes and the bursting ice blisters and jetting hard against the roof of his mouth if he were the cow, and running down the sides of my chin, green and trickly all over my big, purple twisting tongue if i were the cow, and he looked at me, eight year old ivy, with benevolent, brown cow eyes, did douggie trelorne; but it was only his soul.

the flesh and blood of douggie trelorne was nearly a man, but his brother adrian was in my class and looked like him, only smaller. both were thickset and pinkish with fairy faces with deep folds in the flesh of their foreheads, curving downwards from where their feelers would be to between their long, slanting eyes. their little piggsie snouts were moist and pink, and their rosy little mouths all puckered up for kisses. in his flesh and blood douggie trelorne only once spoke to my mother over our grey cement wall while i was there, and he said nothing to me.

gerald knew him pretty well at high school. adrian could do the barn dance, and the military two-step and the military three with the grown-ups, steering big, middle-aged women round the floor like a man. but then, a lot of them could, the kids in that town. it was a real rural backwater, it was, that town, alienated and adrift.

ice weed. jady-aqua, like a lakeland coloured pencil colour, and as big as your face, with little chunks of clear, pure ice, like tears on neptune-aqua cheeks, blisters of clear fluid under waxy membranes. what a find! what a treasure! 

and i can spend whole hours under the pepper trees without anyone calling me home. i’m trusted. 

there is a pepper tree in our yard, but it doesn’t reach the ground. the ones outside along the side wall are like willow trees, with their dark ferny fronds cascading like a fountain all the way to the ground. their fallen berries make a pale, pinky-grey pebbly river of the footpath. there is no one ever uses it but us. i look out through a curtain of beads the colour of ... oh, colours you don’t find in any pencil box, not even in the subtle dreams of lakeland, not in the voluptuous blood-colours of staedtler, not in derwent’s matter-of-fact colours, not even in the zany humility of the double-ended norris. nor was it ever in any paint box. only plastic is ever as perfectly pink and translucent as the beads of a pepper tree. they mingle in her tresses like the threaded beads in the head-dress on the ghost of the shaman who stands beside it sometimes, nearly naked, like a film in the air, red-skinned, but green, the tree’s own deep and subtle shade-green luminosity, illuminating him from within just as it illuminates the tree. he has a broad stripe the colour of vegemite over his nose and cheeks. he is the curved pink film of the bead itself, curved on the air like an accidental shine, like a tiny pink, broken eggshell on my fingertip.

the peppercorns, though, when the pink shell is broken, are sticky and unpleasant. they make me feel cross, just to smell their fruity, sticky old sauce-sticking-in-the-bottle-neck smell come streaking through the pure, clean, white sheen of the odour of the leaves, which made you have visions, or elusive glimpses, and caught up your heart in its clear, cool hands, and caught up your eyeballs as if they were two little hearts, and held them like a naturalist, as if they, hearts and eyeballs, and little dormant wombs, were frogs between their respectful, scientific hands, and they made me a bit wild with remembering something so heart-touching, so eye-holding, so womb- and foetus-cherishing, that lived more deep than heartwood under the high, soul-thrilling art of its fawn and silver slivered and scruffily scrolled bark.

i could have lived there under those trees, in those green, ferny palaces among those hallowing branches in those perfectly swept rooms within those swaying walls, with their pink-beaded curtains between me and the world, or upon the soft, deep, soothing, black and russet carpet of the leaf litter further in.

            in the sandpit raelene vennan showed off in front of the big kids and incidentally me. flaxen-haired and pretty as a doll she won me completely with her contortionist act, knotting both ankles behind her neck and nobody cared about seeing her nice clean pants.

i loved her. i wanted to be her friend. everyone wanted to put an arm round her shoulders for winning me into their group. everyday at recess time i went to the sandpit to see her, wanted the others to tell her to do it, wanted to see her circus trick, good as a circus, she was. feted her, they did. we did.

and i loved the way they talked, these girls. they said 'christ!' and 'jesus!', and sometimes 'jesus christ!'

now i forget what happened next. beth macinerny came snarling around, elaine valera looked on grimly, there was a showdown, and it was beth and elaine who walked away triumphantly with their arms round my waist, sneering back over their shoulders at the jibes from the vennan and her clique while i looked, wistfully at first, over mine. but hatred they spat, vennan and gwenny green and joylene poldark, at me, as if it had been my idea to leave them.

but the powers that be are snobs. beth and elaine were a far better class of child. and well, yes, they were intelligent. 

there were matinees on saturdays. i wore instead of the shiny black court shoes my mother had forbidden me, though all the other girls had them, sensible bone shoes with straps over the insteps, and a stiff petticoat under robia voile or pale pastel blue bubble nylon. i had to beseech my mother for that stiff petticoat. was she seriously worried about my moral character? would it really make me vain and silly? but she had yielded and on my birthday, there it was. it was so stiff it could stand up by itself, a big fluted cone made of starched lace, more than fit for the matinee. it made the skirt of my dress stand out all around me like a fairy's. there's no gravity where fairies dance. the shoes didn't go of course. they usually had brown scuff-marks on them before we even got in the car. 

that was something of a gala day. you saw the kids out of school with their hair oiled down or tied up with ribbons and their best clothes on. nearly the whole school. beth macinerny and me in the dark, giggling at tigers, at highland strongmen, at tom and jerry cartoons. robert and gavin wallace in the very front row, making their backs bigger than the whole screen, the backs of their two fair heads blocking everybody’s view, riding high, grinning like delinquent dogs, yelling out 'go rinny, go-o-o!' when the big dog ran, and whistling when the female lead almost revealed her forbidden charms provocatively from under a froth of bath bubbles. gerald at the back with the high school boys, and the high school girls, some of them smooching. 

that was in the institute, near the centre of the town. our house was a mile away, a long, mile of gently meandering bitumen road away, a slow, dangerous walk when the maggies were swooping, through wild, neglected, snake-infested pastures fringed with native scrub out into the bush. everywhere you went there were rabbits. they aren’t brown, they are beautiful. they are grey and perfumed - but no, not grey; fawn, black, light grey, dark grey, white and cream are all in there together. they smell of hay and dry grass and rabbit fur. their eyes are very aware. they are warm and secretive within their fur, warm bodies, hidden bones, secret awarenesses: they do not trust you.

and big lizards that rear up and hiss, their mouths wide open, their big blue tongues flaring out at you, backing away, hissing. it’s a terrible place for snakes.

meanwhile, however, lacking social skills and bewildered and observing that my new companions are definitely not among the fae, i've resorted to being jokey for beth macinerny who has thrown over elaine valera for me, and for the world in general i have become like a toy clown with a funny face you can turn inside out. for the matinee it is turned out, white and ribboned, and for school, white and tartaned, and still turned out, and for meals, white and tidy, out, and for all other times it is turned in, and no one can see it, because i am alone. 

alone. all alone. to be alone, to be autonomous, to be where it is all the still, cool, pure and cherishing colours of alone: crystal colours of fear and sorrow sweet as rain on the zincy surface of the new galvanised iron fence back where we used to live. alone and listening, for there are whispers ivy doesn't yet quite hear...

and all this is the result of too many thrashings, and too often for minor misdemeanours. i haven’t mentioned them yet because i first became aware that it is shocking about then, though it was considered normal in those days, and i want to protect my mother. it wasn’t her fault; she'd been brought up to believe herself grateful for the severity of the thrashings that made her what she was, and what she was was far. too. cruel. 

and when she was too busy, or was thrashing gerald or robert and thought i needed one too she would call dad and he'd come running like a whistled up dog and administer it with just as much gusto. they never spanked our bums. we nearly didn't have bums. they basted our sides, thrashed us from ankle to shoulder, and sometimes there was a hard, stinging slap on the face. wherefore gerald’s eyes are subtly crazed with fear, a paralysed, frozen shriek of heaven’s own blue above his freckled cheeks deep-dimpled between the stretch of his froggy grin. robert’s brown eyes flash a dangerous radiance now and then, or else are hard and determined. ivy is remote.

so i played outside. outside is where i was from silvery dawn to till tawny dusk, only staying in on schooldays, and only going in for meals on weekends. i do well in the historically interesting school, dip-pen and blotter, not many mistakes in arithmetic, and none at all ever in spelling and dictation. inclined to dream, says my report card, says my teacher. my father is my teacher and  robert’s teacher too. it’s a two-teacher school. my father takes the bigger kids and my mother takes the littlies.

outside ivy is alone. surrounded by fairies. witches watch her. you do. wildcats, too. they manage her fantasies which are deep and vivid. the faces come and go. the voices ebb and flow. the pixies. the fairies. the gnomes. and then it comes to her, to ivy, to me, in her, in my, reverie, distant and thin at first, but by degrees more and more insistent, keening, keening. 

standing one day on a rocking rock i see, or all but see, a child of another world, or of another dimension of this one, myself, me, a child, somewhere my own child-self, myself or someone i have made or been in ancient times, or in other times, crying there, crying out for me, and yet it is a place.

it is the river, the river...

and so i pack my ten shillings, my pyjamas and my kangaroo-skin koala in my doll’s pram with jennifer but not stephanie, and some apples and oranges and dried fruit for the journey, and in a wet, green mist before day i make a dark line of tracks through the dew-drenched soursobs all the way to north yelandta, which is a place of such a fierce blue-tongue you wonder how the boyers could live there with their fifteen children, all half-mad as they are, because i never stopped to think of the copperhead cruelty, the uncompromising venom of the town itself.

i’m going back now to wypeiri, the place we’ve just left, the town i was born in, to the river, to the crying lagoon, which is really a billabong fringed with coolibahs, to the calling place of the terrapins, whose magic arises strenuously from muscular strivings between tough, contentious plates. oh how could any biome make such a wide-awake, baying hound of a reptile, how could such purposeful water be so bent and plaited into such agonistics and sewn between plates as cool and as delicately holding as pepper tree hands in her yabby-edged lagoon? we used to go fishing there, all of us, gerald with his rod, and my father with his bigger one, and robert and i with our lines of thick string wound onto pieces of wood and my mother with a dip-bucket, between the lagoon and the river, the wildest place on earth, and even robert caught one once: a callop.

you go up through batesfield and then up to the top of the gulf, down along the ten inch rainfall line with the bluebush on your left and the saltbush on your right, and you'd make it at last on your last suck of your last orange to connect with the river at stonewater, and food is plentiful thereafter, with fish, fruit and yabbies for the taking, then you just follow the river upstream to wypeiri and you'd go out a bit towards mavis and there you made a secret camp on the banks of that grey mud-lady’s billabong, deep in the lignum within the cathedral carcase of a fallen down tree-god and there you lay down, feeling the wooden spear hard and loveless through the centre of your topshell and through the soft bleeding of your inner self, and through the centre of your undershell, your uselessly strenuous legs shredding the crying water, your flesh drawing, from the thinking, unfeeling spear, lovelessness, love’s death, the death of love and, crying, the last flagon of cheap, stinking plonk drained, the last beer bottle broken in the fear and frustration of the dying of love.

that's where you are headed, but you haven't gone more than half a mile, you are still ankle deep in soursobs, not even very far past the reservoir, when gerald calls out to you. you stop and glance around quickly as if a friend had called out to you in the playground on your way to the monkey bars; and when he said, ‘come on. you have to come home,’ you turned around without a fuss as if he’d been some kid in the playground who'd said, ‘the monkey bars are wet, let’s go and play marbles instead.’ because in that town of miners’ grandchildren girls played marbles too, and boys danced just as much as girls and were proud of how well they danced.

the grade fours, twelve of us, are in the first block; my desk is near the fire – i can hardly believe myself so privileged. beth macinerny, and elaine valera who comes from venezuela, are top, about equal, but i’m way better than both. dill kitto sits in front of me, phil the dill. he has a face like a ferret and poor coordination. his writing looks like cuneiform, very hard to read. he still has to print everything and he’s in grade four. they don’t let him do cursive, and he’s not allowed to use a pen and ink. he dribbles a bit, but he sucks it up schlook straight away with a manly toss of the head, though he’s smaller, this wiry little black-haired, finely-freckled, black-eyed, white-skinned, rabbit-trap-headed tough, than most girls his age. i’m as tough, if not tougher, but i’m also the tallest girl in grade four, inches taller than dill kitto.

when i stretch out my legs my feet are under his chair. suddenly a mean little nut of an iron-hard ache forms in my foot. dill kitto’s steel-capped, home-cobbled, leather toe of manhood is pressing down hard on the instep of my brown leather lace-up. pressing down hard! he is trying to hurt me? or trying my strength? testing my endurance? 

well then, i endure. i am strong. i am georgina kirrin, i am the son of davy crocket, i am tarzan’s boy. i am wild. i am strong. i am brave. i do not move. i do not flinch. i go on forming neat words with my pen. dill kitto goes on battling with his pencil, twisting his tongue almost around it, and rocking a little, giving himself a little push from the point of his boot toe now and then, sending showers of hot sparks through the pain in my foot. the pain is hot. yet pain it is not. it is a warm, hard knot of red-black noise. it has been there forever. it is a stone. that is what a stone feels like inside, a dark, red, stone with a hot, iron centre, molten, like the centre of the earth. do your worst, dill kitto! ivy endures.

his toe pins my foot like a vice, digs in, so strong for such a skinny little leg, and so hard his little muscles are – he shows them to robert one day, down in the old chookhouse where we are mining for copper, while i am there, rolling up the short sleeves of his t-shirt. ‘i’m small but i’m wiry,’ he said. ‘i’m like my father. i’ve got a dog’s face. he’s half mexican. that’s why they call him dog-face. dog-face kitto, they call him.’ 

so do mexicans have dog’s faces, then? the ones in  robert’s roy rogers annual didn’t. i didn’t know any others. but anyway, he wasn’t mexican at all. my mother said he was a hundred percent cornish, that one. but how would she know? wouldn't he know his own father? dog-face. he said it with a little flourish, ended with almost a grunt of satisfaction, and for a while, there he is painted for a moment in profile on the air, a bas relief on a sloping sandstone wall in a sandy desert which is suddenly egyptian, not mexican, because he has many souls, all noble and pious, his linen white and airy, its pleats regular and sharp. he conducts himself with stately pride, because he pleases the gods.

but then suddenly abashed he retrieves his friendly ferretiness, and his humble rabbit-trap face, and is a nice boy again. he has a very strict father who insists on good manners. he usually came third until i came.

suddenly he lifts his toe and releases my foot. i’m surprised - i could easily have stood it longer. when the bell goes i do not limp. i walk as firmly on the sore foot as on the other. outside he challenges me formally to a game of marbles. he has put aside the girl i am, the dress, the hair, and - what else is there when you’re eight years old? - and is addressing the boy i am starting to become.

the game takes place after school when no one is there to watch. the afternoon is shading into evening early, because rain is coming and the clouds are big and luminous, beginning to flush in the lowering light. the air is purple. i am bathed in purple: my aura, the way i feel, light, soft, pure purple, with the grain of a cloud or a smooth, porous purple pebble. you find them at the beach, not far away.

we pug up, call the terms, play hard and sullen and silent and fair. we play for keeps, and no swaps. we play for the marbles we play with. blood-trackers, honey-and-creams, a chipped green cat's eye, my two water-joeys. he plays lying flat on his belly, scuttling like a crustacean on all fours from one place to the next, controlling his tongue with jerks of his head, which he somehow makes look tough. when i’ve won his six best marbles, strangely satisfied, he quits. 

he's laughing a bit when he shakes my hand and smiles right into my face with full sincerity. then he takes his schoolbag on his back and goes for his bike. he's got a long ride home. i see him ride away. i have no words. i have marbles, aggles, dags, allies, such good ones. they are a treasure of great value in my hand. i feel as if some great contract has been finalised. i am well set up for... something...

i don’t understand, but the boy-girl i am becoming, whom i am required to become, required by the powers that be to become, who has won high praise for marble-playing prowess from some egyptian god-headed, celto-mexican hierophant does. i/he pours scorn then on all-girl, and bless/es all-boy. what ‘boy’ actually is is a rich, wild thing, strong, brave and virtuous. i know no boy worthy of boyhood. girls are weak.

i ask for my long hair to be cut off. farewell to the dark-chocolate-coloured plaits of suzanne granger, which i’ve been wearing for nearly two years. i am georgina kirrin. i ask for shorts. my mother says no. i throw a tantrum. i get a thrashing. i hate her. still she says no. it is tearing me apart the pain of not having shorts.

and then, and no, it's not my fault, my mother has pneumonia, and she’s a long time getting well. while she is in hospital my father takes her place at the table and supervises chores, baths, homework and bedtime, and i play alone. i am a boy. farewell in the flowery fields to all you fairies, gnomes and pixies! farewell to you picture book ghosts and diaphanous ladies, shepherdesses, queens and athenian princesses, and maidens to whose hand birds come flying, in lands of flowery meadows and magical castles in daydreams. farewell my silly clown face. i am a boy. my face is brown. brown is good. pale is weak. i am a boy. i am a boy.

i am the son of hiawatha. i string my peach stick bow with parcel string. i fire straight and true the red and gold curved and crenulated arrows of the norfolk island pines, my honed, hidden critique, honest and true to the heart of every lie in every soul in my whole wide world - including of course, myself, because did i mention it? ivy is a terrible liar. yet her straight praise and eke censure fly swift and sincere to the heart of every word and deed, or yours, of theirs, of mine. and yes, with all the sincerity and severity of her nearly nine years. 

because humans are universes, each one of us is a new version of the whole universe, and in all universes there is the memory of war. there is war. 

and in the war fields within, and in war cemetries where human grubs pupate so briefly as corpses and burst forth so gloriously as angels, where grubby little impressions are shot through with critique and spill forth shining, in those war fields, are the seeds of peace, waiting for rain. and the weapons are falling to the ground like dead leaves. 

and it’s not entirely my fault, ghosts, that that zealous truth-fervour subsided rather rapidly and rarely disturbed my all-absorbing fantasies. it's at least partly yours. there was not a nuance of support for the concept in all my literature, art and culture, not from you, nor from the ghosts of that time. war and peace are both equally far away. 

i am a wild boy, wary, wily and wise. i carry a knife to skin rabbits. i live off the land. i know all the plants by name, where eggs have been laid in the summer grasses, how to trap birds under a box propped up with a stick tied to a string, which grubs you can eat, how to tell mushrooms from toadstools. and i have no home. barefoot i am, and alone, a lone wolf, a cat that walks by herself, and i sleep under the stars curled up like a cat on a panther skin.

beth macinerny skips backwards over the ashphalt in front of me, clapping her hands and nodding. her eyes are two hazel nuts. her smooth hazelnut hair curves prettily inwards to the edges of her mouth. her steady, intelligent, hazel eyes reach into my meanings; she laps them up like a pangolin laps up ants while they are still just behind my eyes, before they become words wrought in the great, bucking machinery of throat, palette and tongue and the whinging bellows of my lungs. now and then she spins on her toes, whirls around once, winding up the taut, firm thread she is spinning from the fleece of my mind onto the bobbing bobbin of herself. ‘i’m distaff!’ she observes from a height within herself. i catch a glimpse of a row of lean, slinking pards, flashes of vert and argent. then she stops, and is the other sort of distaff again, and she picks at a clinging cobweb on the elbow of her sleeve and says indignantly, rolling it into a ball with her fingers, ‘what’s dis stuff?’ and although we've both been completely unconscious of the soul exchange, we both laugh.

we are both bright. we tell each other all sorts of things, just starting to try to be wise, overstraining it a bit sometimes, but always making good enough sense. so we’re pleased enough with each other.

‘the warmest part of the world is within feathers and within fur,’ i observe, from my soul to hers, along the murmur of our material bodies’ conversation. ‘feather-warmed blood flows most softly and is most cruel – or least – because it doesn’t feel what it kills. fur feels, and is appalled. but kill it must, plant and beast, or it and all its parasites, hyenas, vultures, baboons, beetles and the things that catch beetles, must starve. fur kills compassionately, or else hysterically, in sympathetic anxiety with its victim, its blood leaping like leopards, like gazelles, its heart crying to the gods of the highest for mercy.’ but it's wordless, so we're not constrained to vocabulary. together we feel that for a while. 

‘there’s still copper down there,’ says beth macinerny. ‘that’s why all the cousin jacks are still here. they feel it under their beds, under their feet, under the tyres of their cars when they drive. it seeks, them, it calls them, it holds them by a magical enchantment, like flowers suck bees, like cakes call flies. but the mines are closed, because there’s too much water down there. it costs more than the copper’s worth to pump it out. all they can do is just stumble about up top like flies on a cake protector. jean pollard's soul can see through the ground – they all can, but jean told me about it – all the cracks and seams and veins and lodes, stones and buried boulders in landscapes as clear as our own up on top, only with great heavy boulders hanging in the air, because our sand is their air, and tree roots hanging down in wide, round webs like big lacy turnips. there’s more copper down there than ever they’ve taken out. it is a wife weeping, and her man’s gone a-fishing like mr poldark, or a-crabbing, like all the kittos and trevelyans, or keeping chickens in long, warm sheds like bratty trelorne’s father. bratty trelorne is in grade four. elaine valera has become her friend since beth threw her over for me.

‘i love bratty trelorne,’ i tell beth. ‘her nose is like a glazed bread stick. her eyes are like two black pebbles lying in puddles of mud. her cheeks are moulded flat and wedge-shaped between the ancestral hands of despair. her mouth is ap-peal-ing - a twisted orange peel. she is water, she is cold, hard, mean water, cursed and sincerely repentant for not doing anything, just for drinking up little children’s souls and for coming up mine shafts to get them, and she is the yearning, crumbling lodes, and the soft, swollen timbers collapsing black and slimy on their abject surrendering knees, the miles-wide bedrock clutched in the furless, featherless, claw of the selfish water, and she hasn’t done nuffink wrong.

around whirled beth. ‘look at me! turn around,’ clap, clap, ‘now i’m a squirrel. turn around,’ clap, clap, ‘now i’m a cat . . .’ and there was her soul, all but visible, truly shape-shifting within her body’s electro-magnetic field.

‘do a horse! do a horse!’ i say, laughing, full of admiration, but she is afraid.

‘no. not a horse. i’m a cow.’ 

now we're right under a currajong tree, which is easy to climb and we find our favourite pozzies, and hugging a branch i say to her, ‘what would you do if i were a koala? a real koala, right here, now? a real one?’

beth macinerny looks at the sky laughing. then she says, without a trace of the laugh left, shaking a long serpent neck with a fringe of fine spines along its body and strange, disturbing, underwater patterns under its scales, spraying a shower of rainbowed droplets of sea water all about, ‘i would cut off your mouth.’

which shocked me, and i thought the tree shuddered somewhere deep within. i thought the serpent thing was made entirely of secret, venomous spite, and wanted to kill me.

yet beth is a clever, clean child with two pet angora rabbits named snowy and fluffy. beth is a good girl who gets good reports and always comes second or third. before i came she always came first or second. so if beth isn’t best, better watch out. beth is a sea serpent. where? beth is a beached, venomous sea serpent a hundred, no, fifty, no, twenty, no, twelve, no, six, no, three feet long, and as thick as your arm, no, your wrist, thumb, little finger. 

the writhings of her body puddle out a little pond in the silvered, tawny sand, just deep enough to trap her there with the last of the waning water, the sun rising, the day promising to be hot. no, the serpent is playing in the cosmic flux. it’s beth who hates me, who jumps out of the tree and runs away. but the serpent dies.

the returning tide will lift one dried and properly kippered sea-serpent corpse, four, no, two, no, one and a quarter inches long out of its dried up puddle on the beach and float it out to sea. a fish will eat it, all but the fin with its poisonous spines; it will spit that out. the fin will decay. it will rot away to nothing and the poison will dissipate and that will be the end of beth macinerny. no, it won’t. yes, it will. it won’t. it will. it won’t.

skip, clap-clap, whirl, and she’s away over the skimps to the roundabout, and gone.

it will. 

but it won’t. it will only be the end of the sea serpent.

meg godden, same age as me and in the same grade, is very sickly and ugly and smels evil, so no one likes her. she’s like a little knot of clayey straw, a voodoo doll made of mud and straw and animal fat. she has come out of the earth to thread a thousand souls through a wedding ring, like a shetland shawl, or through a curtain ring, like a possum skin, souls who are cockle-shells, ocean waves, crowns of glory, the ripply patterns on the brindled beach; and she has knotted herself into this tight little poppet, this voodoo doll of a genetic inheritance with its squeezed-out, pinched-in, sliced-with-a-thumbnail face and hair of dead grass rubbed with fat and twisted up into greasy plaits, and praying hands fitted together like two little mussel shells to gather them all up, her kin the lapsed souls, and thread them through, to save them.

evil? indeed she has a sharp, forbidden odour, strong enough to be called a flavour, and her pants, i know, because i have seen them when she spins over the bar on the jungle jim, are flannelette, grey and grubby and creased up bulky like a wet nappy, stained with shit and the dirt she’s been sitting in. they don’t wash, the goddens.

but they call her little brother flying ginger, he runs so fast, and ann, her sister, has nice, brown eyes and a soft way of moving, and her brother is at high school, and he’s okay, gerald said, so she’s the worst of them, and the one nobody likes.

when she comes up under my arm like a little mouse creeping into my pantry to nibble my cheese, to simper her wedding veil sighs into my ear like a species of venom, to lap up whatever of love i let fall in blue beams of kindness from my ever-loving oh so remote eyes, like a mouse at the treacle, she puts on a grandma face of flesh, as nice as can be, but it’s borrowed, stained and soiled and un-innocent, a third-hand face designed anyway for a poor woman, old, thin, dirty, and vile. her lips are like the thin, frilled edges of a frantic, gobbling little vulva, but sometimes the fairies see a large swelling bee’s proboscis slide suddenly out from it, and she makes enormous flowers with her hands, little green calyx baskets holding sweet, polleny petals all scrolled up and standing like banknotes in a loose rubber band, to suck their nectar.

i can’t always escape from her. beth and elaine valera are friends again and don’t want me now. bratty trelorne doesn’t like me much. raelene vennan and her circle are invisble to me now. if i can make it to the fence and through into the head-high and even higher mallows and the boxthorns beyond, i’m free till the bell goes. but if meg sees me i’m caught. i can’t escape. i can’t be cruel. my voice becomes a small mouse in the cellar of my pelvis and it climbs with difficulty to my doormat tongue and only says the polite things that meg wants to hear, and she gives a little lash of spite, now and then, to make the pony trot.

she opens a bex powder and licks it rather fiercely off the paper, shooting a savage glance at something or someone in her field of etheric vision where ivy's can't penetrate. she is beoming addicted to those powders. always has one for recess to float her above it all. briefly as she licks her eyes look red-rimmed, as if from crying. it's all right though. she won't live long. 

she tells me about her pop, whom i’ve seen at the dance – pop has gone his eye: it is small, pink and mauve and curdled and looks just like an oyster, though the other one is all right, from diphtheria when he was a boy; about her dad who deserted them, fled in shame, enraged and impotent, whacking her mother over the head with a beer bottle – more than once – to get away, and about the tollets who came to stay and were filthy and  left all the work to soft-moving, brown-eyed mum, and about marrick's cove, where they used to live.

she shows me what she treasures most in the world: a little lead rabbit an inch high sitting up on its haunches that her pop had given her. i am at once enchanted with it, charmed, transfixed. ‘give it to me. it’s magic. i should have it.’ 

‘it wants you,’ she sighs, and gives it to me. it’s stronger than her by a long way. she gives it with love, along with the gift of guilt for taking a poor child’s only treasure, but then she simpers, whimpers, mews at me more, keeping her distance but sucking with her horrid, moist, frilly, little lips as if at my flat, white, disdainful cheek, till out of an insanity of politeness i smile kindly and not entirely insincerely  at something she says and let slide a carefully measured ray of my sky-blue irish love-light into her future, to cast a spell on her, to make it nice for her, one day, in the softly-having-died after-life future. 

the little lead rabbit moves warm as a silent ruby into the darkness of my blood-flow, and within a year i have forgotten it, lost it, or it has vanished. 

meanwhile there has been a parliament about meg godden. decisions have been made. the collective soul of the grade sixes and sevens has seen our duty for us and enjoined us all to do it. one morning before school we all take our rulers out of our cases and satchels and we form a ring around meg godden. and robert is in it, and gavin wallace and dill kitto and adrian trelorne and kay box and carol poldark – all these kids, big and little. and i am in it, and beth macinerny and elaine valera. and ann godden, meg’s sister, she’s in it too. but none of us was bodily at any parliament - only our souls. it was a parliament of souls, held while we all slept and no one remembered the dream. yet here we were and others too, fifteen or sixteen of us, nearly the whole upper school, and meg godden dances and skips in the midst of us all while one at a time or by twos and threes we all run in at her, bent low, eager, intent, and we smack her orangey-purple cold-mottled legs with our rulers. now what commands us all, all commandeers us, i want to know. because we were responding, all of us, to some post-hypnotic suggestions, weren’t we? that’s all i can say in ivy’s defence.

meg is too shocked, to overwhelmed to cry. she can’t believe it’s happening. she tries to fend off what she can with her nearly nailless fingers (she has bitten them down to the bleeding quick) and they are smacked too. she screws up her mouth like the tightly twisted top of a paper bag, and like us dealing them, she is eager, absorbed, attentive, she is hard at work, strenuously warding off the blows. she gives a distracted little bleat now and again, but her heart isn’t in it. we spank her and spank her and spank her. then we put our rulers away and disperse to swings and monkey bars and all over red rover until the bell goes.

no one says a word about it to anyone, except maybe one of the grade six boys made some remark, or grunted anyway, with satisfaction as we were dispersing. we just put it away with our rulers and never referred to it after just as we never had before.

but meg improves. she holds herself erect with defiant pride, even looks down her nose a little, like the english girls in school girl annuals my mother had generously lent to the sadly understocked school library from her own girlhood, which she’s fond of reading. she no longer captures ivy in the schoolyard, and so she is free, i am free again.

the marshmallows are up over my head, and they call for me, the marshmallow plants, they fetch me with their magic. i’m their big mammal, to go crawling among them. i am drenched to my aorta and to the deepest coils of my intestine with the green, regal sap of the marshmallows. there i make my home, rolling out flat, tiny rooms with narrow corridors connecting them. green ceilings in the corridors, pure new blue ones in the rooms. here i hide, hissing like an earth dragon round my hoard of fool’s gold and green and blue stones collected from around the mines, fantasising gloriously, until the bell rings.

but there’s been another parliament and this time i'm the victim. at recess time brian wallace from grade five waylays me, like one of his father’s dogs, and he heads me up away from the marshmallow paddock and along the three-wire fence behind the arbour day athol trees, with a snappy little taunt and a little bit of threat, all the way up to the swings at the top of the asphalt.

there is a blue-tongue lizard on the skimps there at the edge of the asphalt, a big one, making much of its great tongue, hissing furiously, and a ring of boys stands around it but no one is game to reach out and seize it by its long, glassy tail. if it bites you you get a running sore. after a while that disappears, but it returns every seven years, doubling in size each time. no medicine can heal you.

            brian pollard toes it with a scornful boot. ‘don’t hurt it,’ i say. but for a moment it seems they've finished with me.

beth macinerny and elaine valera are on the swings. elaine is the fastest girl runner in the under nines. i am the second. her big sister sonia is the fastest in the under elevens. beth calls out to me – perhaps she wants to make friends again – ‘you do a horse!’  i joke, ‘neigheigheighay!’ and they laugh. they would almost let me on the swings with them, all three of us, friends.

i’d like to be a horse. i feel horse power surging in me. it arches my muscular, golden neck; it shifts me uneasily on my broad, woody hooves; it flares my wide, equine nostrils. i look darkly from the sides of my head. i toss up my head and i snort.

‘war drummer!’ shouts gavin wallace. ‘spitfire!’ yells adrian trelorne. i turn. i wheel about, my tail slashing the air, i strike out with my dangerous hooves across the yard. i fly; i float above the ground.

behind me the big boys gambol. they run and shout, calling out to me: ‘spitfire! sea biscuit! war drummer! go!’

my great heart leaps with fire, with a rage of love. my hooves strike the ground. i wheel about, i rear up, i strike out with my deadly hooves. i neigh a long, loud whinny of happiness. never have i been so loved, so admired. even robert is laughing at me, having no choice, since all his friends are.

so loved. so admired. but the best of it was being held in the warm wild heart of the horse. being a horse//.

...till the bell rang.

in the green, blue-ceilinged marshmallow room i turn my head, feeling his dark, solemn gaze on the peach-skin bloom of my jaw-line. my magical blue eyes rest on the pattern of trampled stems under the fingers of my hand. i wear a ring, browny-pink with a cow’s head on it, her little horns turning inwards towards each other, snapped from the top of the little plastic spoon out of a sherbet paper. i keep remembering that she is a she.

he murmurs in his deep american voice, ‘baby, i will always love you.’ i don’t need to look into the beautiful, deep, timbery dark brown of his eyes, that liquid glimmer behind the ragged fringe of his shiny, blue-black hair, to know that it is true.

his feet are bare, like mine. prickles, broken glass, sharp stones and thorns – we scoff at such things, he and i. we wear fringed pants and jerkins made from the skins of animals that we have caught and dressed ourselves. we shoot our arrows infallibly right between their eyes so that they die instantly and feel no pain. we peel their skins off like socks off feet and we stitch them together with sinew and gut. we cook their bare bodies in the coals and eat them. sometimes we talk to each other in signs. hand signs

he is only a soul boy, and he comes and goes. i know him from other worlds, and from other times. he is a kind of prince.

never have i seen such cats as the wild ones of moonara. they have their kittens under the boxthorn bushes where nothing but a cat can go. boxthorn soul is half-cat, anyway, an elegant lady in golden green with a face you can’t see because it is white and turned a little away always, no matter how long you spend with her, and she’s cool like a chill breeze, or a ghost, and she slides a sharp ray into you like a thorn of vision, seeing only colours of you, for she uses a reflection of you to form her face and thorns have put out her eyes long ago, so that now she can almost see again, but not quite. she loves me because i love her berries and use them for dolls’ tomatoes. her cats are all white and tabby or tabby or white and black. no ginger that i ever saw. they are glimpsed fleeing, a bare blur, a soft, silent flow of near invisible, round the corner and away.

at night their singing is uplifting. it makes of your heart a helium balloon, only the helium is desire, a soft and sacred religious desire, a sweet, climbing, aerial desire for the hem of the gods’ garments, the scent of their spiritual breath.

on my way barefoot and silent up the hill, through the spirit-haunted scrub, not far from the top where the pines are and the toadstools big as saucers in winter and spring, i am arrested. paralysed, i stand shocked like an electrified scrap of paper on a rubbed comb, face to face with a wide-eyed, awestruck tom. crouching, he is not ten feet from me. there flows between his glaring eyes and my shocked ones a current of green, liquid cat’s-eye power against the current of my see-all human power. we stare at each other a long time, until replete.

cat’s eyes. like dill kitto’s marbles.

i haven’t mentioned our cats, that were there almost from the start. we hadn’t been in that schoolhouse long before the resident cat turned up. small, slender and white with tabby patches, nervous and passionate, she attached herself inexplicably to gerald, who was indifferent to her, except that her adoration flattered and fascinated him. she killed pigeons and rabbits as big as herself, almost, and yard-long pinky-brown snakes with a bright band across the back of their head which the locals called copperheads.

my kitten from her first litter was pudden, a big kitten that grew very quickly into a huge, white, black-spotted son of a wild cat, almost twice his little mother’s size before he was half grown, heavy, powerful, a voluptuous double armful, fed on cream from the top of the milk, because none of us liked cream. 

a lackadaisical hunter, pudden was a good old cat. he followed me sometimes a mile or more into the scrub, crying only when he reached the outermost limits of his territory and trembling if i carried him beyond. he had his secret sleeping places, his cardboard boxes, the clothes-basket, his nests under the front hedge, and he ignored me while i pulled his whiskers and tickled his paws with grass-stalks, pretending to be asleep. i carried him around in the schoolyard at recess and lunch times and before school. he lay like a huge, heavy kitten in my arms or leaned up against my shoulder and purred into my ear. his was an avuncular character, and i loved him. 

and it was therapeutic for ivy to have a cat. cats inspire creativity.

and i should say a word here about ivy’s literary career. she’d written her first poem when she was five. she wrote it out on a piece of lined paper and drew a picture under it of a brown hen and twelve yellow chickens in straw. she made the ground red and green and yellow and brown, which worked surprisingly well. red and green make brown.

the poem went:

            ‘cheep! cheep! cheep! who can that be?                       

oh, little chickens i can see!

            running to the mother hen,

            in the cosy chicken pen.’

 

you will observe that it worked. i mean it scanned, it rhymed . . .

ivy was bemused by it, as a hen might be by the sudden, unannounced, unplanned production of her first egg, and fascinated by the process of production. the spirit of poetry had seized her and incubated the poem in her, so that each line was ready when the preceding one was down. it was a bit like seeing into the future.

her second one was not until she was seven. it was a classroom exercise and wasn’t such a success.

                        ‘a nice little girl was walking along,

                        singing a rollicking, frolicking song,

                        when all of a sudden she chanced to spy

                        a big kangaroo come frolicking by.’

it scored derision: can kangaroos really be said to frolic? two ‘frolickings’ in the same stanza and anyway the ‘rollicking, frolicking’ had been plagiarised from some book or other which anybody could guess, so ivy was ashamed of it.

more than a year passed before her next attempt, and that she set to music – a slightly unsatisfactory little tune she’d made up by humming.

            ‘there we stood wai-i-ting,

            i-in a house,

            nothing was moo-oo-ving

            not even a mouse..’.

not so much plagiarism as the legitimate use of a literary cliché.

 

‘where’d you learn that?’ gerald asked me after the fourth verse or so. it was about two nervous families with suitcases packed to travel. they were menaced somehow by an evil ghost prince, but saved by the quick thinking of the youngest child, a small girl with magic powers.

‘i made it up,’ i said.

‘liar!’ he said. ‘you got it from the kids at school.’

‘no i didn’t.’

‘you did. from beth macinerny. you are a liar.’  robert couldn’t let pass a chance to jeer at me.

‘i am not.’

‘you are.’

but my mother said that i should be flattered that the song was such a good one that they couldn’t believe i’d made it up myself. 

ivy completed her first lined exercise book of short stories while convalescing from her tonsillectomy when she was still seven: bobby and ron go for a hike, the toyland train, the fairy ball, the good little pixies, mickey the kitten, and the boy who ran away. she commenced her first novel when she was eight: kitty and the count, a romance for adults.

i read my mother and father chapter one. they laughed and ivy was embarrassed. her mother objected to a minor character, the village schoolteacher, an unpleasant man who hated children and was only in it for the money. teachers get peanuts, she said. you’d have to like children to be able to bear it. i’d never thought in terms of teachers liking children before.

and these books were illustrated with pictures carefully drawn with lead pencils and carefully coloured in with coloured pencils. these absorbed me completely, filling my time with pure pleasure while the great white and black big fat cat purred on my bed. 

and then one morning late in the second year of our time there i wake up deformed, broken apart and my parts displaced. it is a broken morning: the sky is on crooked, there are fault-lines through the light between the sky and the ground, with big blocks of the light displaced. trees broken, somewhere in their beings.

it was a serene, ice-clear morning, with the still air just broken through like ice and then frozen back together again, broken, like the broken and mended head of a hard plastic doll, the big sugar gum across the road cracked through in its tall, still soul, not even quivering from the jar. the pepper trees and the scrub had crept away, gathering their souls up under their branches and into their heartwood where, in the acacias, real blood flows. the boxthorns are statues of sobs breaking in a tight, aching throat, statues of the breaking.

my grandmother has died and my mother has packed a bag and is going to catch the train – two trains in a row – to mt parker, which is where my old grandmother, dead as a dusty old cushion, now is.

why, if she’s dead? why bother to go?

but the day is broken, strangely, and i am rolling, stuck in a broken summersault on my bed, my neck bent, my arms angled oddly against my twisted body, my long legs climbing up the unmade bed, trying to get the pieces right, and make them not be broken, giggling a little to myself and singing school songs. sing song kitty can’t you kimey-o!

‘ivy! be quiet! your grandmother has died! she was my mother! have some respect!’

her mother! my mother’s mother! i’m flabberghasted! can’t grasp it.

i try putting them together, this short, square-faced, square-bodied, squat, bony old lady with her hair yellower, her face younger, with my mother much fore-shortened darting her imperious school-teacher eyes about, looking out of a child’s version of her own face, her hair in the sleek pageboy which she’d told me about which had a perfect ring of blue-black shine like a silver halo about it, in a kitchen above a lolly shop with a chinese family in the greengrocer’s next door, which included a dear, dear old chinaman whom she loved like her own grandpa and a gracious old chinawoman who had given her that woven bamboo work-basket that everybody comments upon; and now her mother, my grandmother, who seems stuffed with wool, or that stuff out of old armchairs, all stitched up tight in felty grey, who visited us twice when i was little and whom we visited once at mt parker, in a dark little wooden house full of doorways to the past with ghosts coming and going cheerfully, sure of hospitality here among the souvenirs of a long life of a woman who had been born in london and had visited scotland and could make the heathery moor visible just beyond the horizon just by looking, and who had gone to live at mt parker of all places and at her age, and was dead now so my mother was going to her funeral.

so i had to be quiet and bear the brokenness while all the sweet, dew-sharp excitement of an early breakfast, the last minute packing, and the phone-calls back and forth was a forbidden flavour to be quenched with respect. respect must make solemn the awesome sense of distance, of a place two long train rides away, a day and a night away through the scrub, over the hills, between the salt lakes and the river, through the vast miles and flying miles and empty, airy miles of mallee and spinifex, sheep and wheat. my imagination was a shattered mirror and all the fragments askew. the empty, flying miles were a broken window with its bits put back together again all wrong.

 robert and gerald went over the road as usual to the post office and lolly shop to wait for it to open to get our mail. when they came back they told me brutally, with brutal compassion, that the big, white, black-spotted tomcat lying cold on the frosty road with glazed eyes like plastic and a mouth lined with black blood and the blowies already at his mouth and nose and ears and eyes was my pudden.

then i understood. then through all its cracks that morning gave way and spilt its whole skyful into my day, and the next day, and the day after that, and all the days after. pain that would not fade. loss that yawned in me as sobs, and as sobs again and more sobs. love too wild to contain. grief too penetratingly deep to soothe. and besides, they were all too angry with me to even try to soothe me, for singing and giggling when it’s my grandmother who’s dead and being nearly hysterical for a week over a half-grown cat!

and i kid you not, reader, she didn’t get over it for months.

it is strange to be invited to beth macinerny’s now that we’re no longer really friends. perhaps it was to please her mother. they are all a bit distant and suspicious. i play hopscotch with beth and her little sister ann. they show me their angora rabbits, snowy and fluffy, and lady, their big scotch collie. lady makes us all be soft and friendly. she is the colour of butterscotch and has a scabby nose from sunburn. they put butter on it to help it.

they have an acre of almond trees. their house is an old miners’ cottage. you can touch the kitchen ceiling it's so low. mrs macinerny’s cheeks are round and red like apples. 

once beth showed me a red apple streaked with gold and a little patch of greeny-white on one side. it shone like duco. high gloss enamel. you could see reflections in it. ‘my mother polishes our apples every morning on her stockings,’ she said. she bent her leg and mimed the polishing of the apple against the nylon of the thigh.

mrs macinerny’s cheeks are of thin pink skin, watery and transparent, laced with little red veins, and there are two hard, lumpy phantom apples inside them. her hair is an exasperated shade of foxy orange, like a doormat, but with the soft, fluffy texture of teased-out string, soft and fragile. spiritually (she is religious) she is a deep prayer of violated pathos.

mr macinerny is a tall, lofty, teeteringly high, wuthering height of a man, with a broad, concave body, long, thin limbs and knotty hands, who overlooks everything like an amused saint or giraffe. his hair is the fleece of a cloud, his eyes sky blue. he is nearly invisible. the aerial breezes blow right through his scarecrow body.

his heart and lungs have escaped from the bony clutch of his rib cage, flown the coop. his guts are a highway over undulating fawny-yellow barley fields, over blue hills in the shimmering distance, and away out of sight.

i’m invited there to please my mother. there’s a hard, unbreakable glass pain (pane) between them and me, the pain of my bereavement, and beth is a death adder hurling herself like a spear and clattering harmlessly against the glass. ‘are you going to kill that too?’ she asks, sarcastically, but i have no mouth and can’t answer her. anyway, we both know she isn’t really offended about the sea serpent, just afraid, and wanting me to keep my distance. we play marbles. her brother comes to watch, hands in pockets. he has his father ghosting him, and a hopeless shuffle that is all his own. he is one year younger than beth – the middle child. i am silent, watchful, defensive, hostile, till he’s gone, but all the while he’s the silent, watchful, defensive, hostile one , and what i was getting was a sort of empathy, from rapping with that beautiful collie dog and holding beth's little sister's favourite fluffy bunny.  

although once he offered gerald five bob for his bike.

there’s a mile of statice and chamomile, wattles and sheoaks and a small pine forest and, at each end, a straggle of miners’ cottages between her place and mine. among the pines there are those toadstools. i fill my school satchel with them and over the ensuing weeks and months for the rest of the year i visit it secretly, fearfully, every now and then.

they have rotted and become flesh, a felty shadow substance that rises up shaped like a soul to meet me. they have become a wesen. their stink is a whole forest of vertical shadows and warm, fecund wood, and crumbly yellow rocks being mauled and sucked to death in the knuckly clutches of the roots of deeply chuckling trees.

very very poisonous no doubt but i can’t throw them away. it. they have become an it. i love it. it has a soft, velvety feel under a cool, tender skin, and a warm, dark golden, mouldering inner heart of beauty deeper than blood or breath or the darkness under the ground. whenever i open my satchel to take a book out or put one in, up it rises and it puts its arms around my neck and it lays its warm soft papery face against my cheek, with a deep, long sigh of hope and longing and faith and love. no one ever finds out. 

ivy's father didn’t even detect the smell of their spores in her exercise books, because it feared him and hid from him, cringing itself up into the smell of grey classroom dust (classrooms had bare unpolished floorboards in those days) so that he wouldn’t find it.

for my tenth birthday i am given an exquisite marquisite watch and a golden ring with an emerald in it. the golden ring is to replace the cow. my cow. my magic cow. 

i’d have protested, but i had no mouth, and anyway, my soul is shredded in the ripping off of the wrapping by these greedy child’s gleefully grasping hands that my mother has given me, and i’m only this thin, feeble wraith on the lino, dumb and uncomprehending, and there’s only my mother’s ghost there, the child she was, getting the present! 'vicarious' was not yet in my vocabulary. 

and by trickery they steal my cow ring, which is my strength, and they bend the two blunt arms of the golden one round my finger to fit and they have stolen my cow. ‘darling, you are too old for that nonsense now. you are ten.’  it is dark grey like grey melange under the gold.

then one day it snaps with being bent on and off each bath time and i have no ring. i sadly regret the loss of that cow.

the watch is like an adult’s watch – real marquisite. i wear it on a dry, chalky adult wrist; i touch its winder with thick, yellow, copper-stick fingers; i consult it over the mounded upholstery of my bosom, squashing my double-chins against my chest bone, dislodging drifts of powder from my finely furred skin as i do so. it’s a lady’s watch. for a lady.

and i am not a lady, and never will be. i am a boy. or if not a boy, as good as a boy. or better than a boy. i am not a silly shiela.

but i have no mouth. i do not smile. i do not want this watch though its diamonds make me giggle, make me show a grinful of sparkling silver-diamond teeth, only they’re not diamonds, they’re only marquisite. it's as if i got nothing for my birthday, only they took away my cow. 

next time i run away i go out towards macinerny’s but i turn north at the pines. this takes me to where i’ve never been before. i leave no tracks in the dry summer grasses. i go on a saturday morning after breakfast when i won’t be looked for until dinnertime. i only take my pocket knife to live off the land, me and my soul-friend – not the dark amorous one, the other one, the fair-haired one in deerskins with a thin plait of leather for a circlet round his tangled hair, and a cool, fey eye, that can show you clear over the horizon all the way to scotland and beyond.

but i emerge from thick scrub unexpectedly onto a powdery pink road edged with miners' cottages louring silently at me like old men smoking pipes, the white wreaths going up from the chimneys lazily, and maybe ill-humouredly. and there are boys coming up from the far end of the road, one running, laughing, the others shouting to him, calling his name, and running after him heckling, like a football team. ‘gavin! hey, gavin! come on, ya mug! gis it here, ya bloody bugger! give us it!’ 

gavin wallace sees me and is inspired. ‘hey, ivy! come and see what i’ve got here! look!’ thumping and lurching, red-faced and sweating, panting hard, he pushes out his meaty hand to me, its fingers clawed up thick and hard, and within it was a baby bird trying hard to construe it as a nest. it is yellow with no feathers, only purple zigzags across its wings to show where they’ll be . . . ‘put it back . . .’  and a big, plasticky beak. his hand encircles it gently, warmly, consenting to be its nest. it begs, its grief sliding away in a futile flood, like a tear from an old man’s eye . . . put it back! . . . or like the wrapper off a gem-crusted gift watch, because its self-deceit doesn’t deceive itself, and yet it asks us for food and stretches its beak out wide in expectation.

‘put it back with its mother,’ i plead.

‘aah,’ he mocks, ‘the poor little thing.’ he turns and runs the other way and the others back off and spin round after him, and i instinctively veer off homewards, looking for someone to plead with, and catch myself up short, and begin to try to scold, hopelessly, because i am crushed with despair and can only try to pretend. to be a lady, all fat and grown up, to make them stop. but then a great cry goes up and owen wallace, gavin’s little brother who is in my class at school comes running up to me with both hands held out in front of him, his fingers closed down over their palms. he shows me them one at a time. in one hand he has the baby bird’s head, warm and dead. in the other is its cold, bloated body. the other boys, four of them, stand back and laugh. ‘girls are weak,’ says owen wallace.

then he runs up a lane and out of sight and the smaller boys follow him. gavin and terry askin put their hands into their pockets and walk off together, no longer interested, in the direction they came from.

then i catch sight of lynette pollard, who is still in my mother’s class at school, only in grade three, standing by her garden gate staring at me. she is small for her age and thin. she has on a washed out cardigan of bleached green, hand-knitted, pilled, with yellow crochet on the bands. she suddenly vanishes, like a fairy, into the shadow of the veranda, leaving me standing there at the edge of the scrub, my baby bird beak closed tight, never to beg again, and the damp ghost of a floral hanky balled up soft and germy in my hand.