cursing.

sugar! the white, the precious, the expensive stuff, each speck a crystal, and diamonds are crystals, a whole bagful, ripped open like a belly, or like a doll’s cloth body, spilt shining and laughing gaily and also despairingly on the thinnest edge, teetering between gaiety and grief, all over the ramp of the pantechnicon.
oh well, can’t be helped – leave it there, dear -- no, don’t, for heaven’s sake, ivy!

but i’ve done it: licked a wet fingerful right into my mouth – no point in wasting it all. ugh! it’s awful! i’m stunned. it’s really terrible. nyah! it’s scary. there’s this hairy, horrible, airy blast of gale-force poison through it. i taste the soft, hairy splinters of the planks of the ramp mixed in with it, and they’re poisoned deep into the humble, trusting wood, the good old wood stoutly wearing its deeply penetrating preservative pesticide poison, thankful, sharing the quiet sense of those men’s victory over worm and decay, those men who have solved this ages old problem going back to noah, to lok and shan make a boat from wide range reader book four, or was it five, with grim nods of satisfaction to each other, with manly love for one another, and for noah, and for lok the cave boy.

but not for shan, the cave-girl. when she comes looking for her brother these men shuffle up the plank embarrassedly, and lok squirms with the embarrassment of having a sister at all.

‘out of the way, dear, the men are trying to get through.’ my mother is always trying to placate offended strangers.

but this poisoned sugar has just blasted me out of my body, and i’m still up there behind me somehow, several yards distant from my body. how will i find myself again if i move now? i suck myself in hard, but it doesn’t work. my subtle body is being a large, alarmed kidney, shrieking like a magpie sonically stunning a centipede, and my soul won’t, can’t get back in.

teetering like a skyscraper, at last  i draw myself in with my deepest most shuddering breath, like a christening shawl through a golden wedding ring, which i make with my rounded lips, and i wrap myself round my body’s waist like a school jumper to calm its kidneys. then i can stagger back out of the way, and robert laughs at me. i occasionally amuse him. but my mother tells me not to show off, don’t be silly; you look like an idiot standing there with your mouth open. like a kissing gourami, i concede. still it’s an advance on a dead baby bird’s beak.

now they have shut up the pantechnicon and are driving its huge weight away. the big backyard relaxes. it is mostly a dead mid-summer lawn, sagging in places where the drainage is bad. the galvanised iron fence is supported by the ubiquitous jarrah, coprosma and geraniums are sparse along the side fences. an orange tree struggles for survival down the back.  

there’s a little girl down by the back gate, leaning on the fence, looking in at our driveway, watching us. we can see her little hand affectionately stroking the gatepost, our place, us. she is about five, with soft, shining hair as blond as a palomino pony. she is as thin as a fairy. her eyes are large and beautiful, like a movie star’s, or a street urchin’s.

she’s like a waif. a little wild waif. 

when we see her she smiles and we smile and she comes in to talk to us.   her mouth is mercury mobile and red as raw meat, and she has good bones. all told she is a beautiful child, and she’s got a dear little soul, tucked inside her there, somewhere, under her pinny, which is of blue and black tartan with only thin dotted lines of scarlet and yellow, and you can count her every rib she’s so skinny.

somewhere behind it all you can see the cross old ghost of an old woman poking her along with one kind-hearted, too-much-too-harshly-rapped, knuckle-rapping knuckle, nach bhfuil go maith somehow, and as she, this old woman soul is only too willing to point out, there’s a real predicament she’s in, dark and concerning pictures and photographs in a box, a coffin in it somewhere and the smell of a stale corpse, and she’s about to go to it, keeps getting bronchitis and giving everyone a scare with her croup, but there’s a man with a sword, a man in a dark, dark suit, holding a sword – that’s no afterlife for the child, now, is it?

this child has to tell me something, and she won’t tell robert. she twists away from him like a tree tossing off the caresses of the breeze, and dances away then like the wind itself, but she levels a look of finely-honed steel-bladed menace at him across the yard and he leaves us alone.

she’s been in this yard alone, playing, while no one was living here, last week and the week before. she’s been up both sides and round the front and in the boatshed. her nanna said she could. that was whose soul was guarding her. she took me up the bow window side of the house to see the fuchsia. there was a monstera between the bay windows, and a hydrangea beyond them that miraculously unbalanced its ph into a purple-red shade that no one, absolutely no one, had ever seen on a hydrangea before, and a bed of dying soursobs on the sunny side of the path, and up this end, by the side gate that kept the last people’s dog in, there was a fuchsia.

its white petals were made to look pink by the reflections of its scarlet calyxes, but they were pure, pure white. the shadows under every leaf were cool little rooms, like the hotel rooms in a great, high skyscraper. i could see tiny fairies in them, taking off their pure white skirts made of the white wafts of spun flower-breath and their tight-bodiced, bright scarlet, nipped-in-at-the-waist jackets and slipping their skinny little bodies into tiny silvery nighties spun of moonbeams to slip into those astounding little luxury hotel beds. 

her mother’s an air-hostess, says her nanna over the fence - the real one, not the ghost - in her grey dress and floral apron and overworked face that had once been beautiful like a film star, but had worked all its life as the face of an honest servant and a cleaning lady and a char. she said done instead of did, and so did rhonda, the child. and now that rhonda was starting school and nanna had time on her hands, did my mother, being a teacher, want . . .? yes, my mother did want, was even going to advertise for someone to come in for an hour or so every day to do the floors and windows and move the dust around and give the furniture a rub and a blow when it needs it.

‘look at me, i’m a fairy!’ her arms, long and thin trail a soap-bubble film cape of lace, frilled are the flounces of her floating gown, her shining negligée, rainbowed her gossamer hair in the green air under the fuchsia leaves, with a glorious white and clear scarlet lamp stand on every bedside table. she looks like a glamorous film star in a hollywood film.

and then it strikes me: she doesn’t know what fairies are! she doesn’t understand that they have wings! because ivy had only ever called the winged ones ‘fairies’, and had other names like pixies, sprites and elves for some of the other kinds.she’d never seen anything like these before.

and then for a sun-dazzled moment before a sneeze ivy it is who stands suddenly in a patch of shade that is the shadow under the fuschia’s calyx, although it is only that a car has come round the street corner and reflected the glare of the sun.

coming out of that squint we are briefly back in the commonplace, and rhonda is looking a bit guilty, and clutching a handful of her pinny, as if protecting some tiny niche in that secret soul place under her piteously countable ribs, because she's delicate, her nanna says so, and looks at her with troubled eyes, worrying about her.

so we all do, and she darts her scared little glances over us all, and we all try to see what she is cradling in that one hand tucked up just under her ribs that broken light-globe, that time bomb, that hand grenade with its pin drawn, that big rubber bulb the man must squeeze while you watch the birdie, when you all say cheese, and the shutter will shudder like a bat’s wing across the shadows of the box and...

...i'm fetched back, says rhonda, back to where i came from, if i can't be that fairy – so fair my hair, so big and green my eyes, so insect-thin my little fairy body – i’ll be sent back to that wicked-evil, silk-infested saloon you see there, where now no one is sitting at the tables, and just a small pale man is mopping the spotless bar. i was there, and i died, and they are fetching me back.

‘and she’s bronichal, poor little mite. terrible she was all last winter. and the croup!’

‘i’ll be at the same school as you,’ she says. ‘i heard your mum tell my nanna.’
i draw her some pictures of fairies. they are not brides, i tell her. they are not air hostesses. they are like ballerinas, except that they have wings. 

(and after that she stopped walking gravely to the altar in an old lace table cloth on the front verandah, and she began to dance gracefully in the gauzy old nylon net curtains instead, and her health improved.)

but despite occasional frolics, ivy has grown grave. dead-pan. a face, my mother very often comments, digging me in my own just as countable ribs, like a fiddle. does she want me not to be or does she want me to stay that way? it’s hard to tell – perhaps the latter. face like a fiddle. poker face. dead-pan. expressionless, like a squaw. no, like a brave. like a boy, brave and silent and unsmiling.

all summer i swim. i wear only my bathers and i carry my towel to the beach. not my gaily-coloured plasticised fabric beach bag, or my lolly pink straw sombrero with its fluffy tassels bound with navy thread, or my terry towelling beach coat, white with red, black, green and yellow modern art on it, though i chose the fabric myself. not the plastic sandals or even the green rubber thongs. barefoot, i go, not leaping laughing from one thin bar of shadow to another to stand in on tip-toe to cool my feet before high-stepping it to the next like any other girl. i endure the heat. i welcome the grey hard sear of its bite into the tough leather of my bare soles which i place firmly on the burning bitumen and neither seek nor avoid the shadows, thin or wide.

with feet like that i’m a dark and upright tree, a righteous philosophy, a firm spear in the right hand of truth. they seesaw themselves, these feet, on kerb-edges. i have never lived in a kerbed town before, but i’m no squealing shiela afraid to cross the street. i’ve never known a street as serious as this before, as seriously hammered into the reality, like it’s built for cars to go fast on, not for kids to play on, for big dangerous cars to nose gently through looking for street numbers. down each side it has stinking, suffocating norfolk island pines, all trying to look alike, and sick with soot and air pollution, not kurrajongs with avuncular arms for kids to climb into. this is city. this is a suburb.

i swung myself out from a street sign pole, looked right and left, then gazed about as if casually, right and then left and then ran, as if i’d seen a reason to run, something to run eagerly forward to, someone on the other side of the road not quite opposite – yes! yes! my friend! my friend! (though he’s only a soul) my barefoot boy! with his sunburnt face, hair stiff with salt, teeth white as cockle shells, because he is, we two are, dwellers on the shore, we understand the creatures of the sea, we find our food casually like seagulls without any fuss at all at the tide line, crabs, mussels and sea lettuce, and we eat it raw. we swim together. dolphins come to our call and they play with us. i kill a shark, a big white pointer, no, a grey nurse, no, no, a big white pointer, carelessly, with my hand-made razor-shell knife, as casually as you’d swat a mozzie. well it was me or him. no, her. me or her. 

the beach is crowded with kids, families, sexy girls in bikinis, and handsome italians playing soccer, but me and davy walk together on the more glittering beach, the transcendental beach where all those others are only shimmering ghosts, barely visible radiances; and we are alone on this beach. he is always a little way ahead of me, looking back over his shoulder, jumping up onto a rock and then swivelling around to grin, to laugh, to call out something wonderful that flows silver and royal blue and dark chocolate brown into my glands, stimulant, lovely in the deep, ghosty passages of my skinny, sickly, to be honest, indeed wormy little body, fed as it was on white bread and jam, too many fish fingers with tins of something sort of food-like, and far too many lollies.

‘rightio!’ i shout, ‘and i’m as good as you – i’m better!’ and i leap up onto the rock that he has just vacated, eager and intent, looking through the transcendental air to find him again, and seeing also that that crowded, bucket-and-spaded, sand-castled picnic city of canvas shelters and fringed umbrellas and blaring trannies, of plastic blue, shrieking green, laughing red and clattering yellow that the summer has made of that 1960s beach has reclaimed me, collared me, dragged me back into itself, and knowing i’m visible again i feel foolish and i lose him.

i swim again among yelling children, smooching lovers, sprawling families and their dogs. he isn’t with me now, nor when i come out.

so once again i am a wolf, a lone wolf prowling on a desolate shore on the edge of a wilderness, hungry, haunted and dangerous, all the way up to the martin street ramp and back again all the way home.

‘i love animals,’ i tell libby ackham from diagonally opposite, who has just arrived from england on the boat, when her mother looks in for a cuppa with mine. 'even snakes.'

‘well now, i’m the one for loving animals!’ goes a big, fat, bad thought in my head, which i’m tricked into thinking is me, but that’s her telepathy: loud soundless thoughts her talking through my mind to me or herself or both, and it’s never much more than a comment, a one-up comment. she came from surrey, which isn’t london, but you know that anyway. 

here is a girl who has been caressed by the colours of nature since birth, the light of whose eyes is a sky woven of lark-flights, of the flashing flights of large-winged birds startled from cover, the exquisite thrill and lilt of nightingales’ singing, and whose hands are curved to the patient quiver of a wild rabbit’s back, of the back of a rabbit on a velvet hill just beyond the hedgerow a bit: you could stop still and stare at it and it wouldn’t run away, but stare back at you with one dark, practical, steadily thinking eye while it chewed its last mouthful and considered its next, and you could feel your hand stroking its back - how it would feel if you really were, if you really could, just as if you really were.

and as regards snakes, she tells me, when they were berthed at bombay coming over, while her parents went ashore but she stayed in her cabin because she didn’t feel well, a cobra had come on board and found her in her bunk and bitten her. she showed me the two fang marks a mere half inch apart on the webbing between her fore-finger and thumb, and while ivy bent over it to squint at it, fascinated, she felt her head turned as if with a crank handle, just half a turn, and she she felt libbygo in. well that's the best i can describe it. it was a weird sensation.

but with ivy's head turned like that, we ended up play-wrestling together on the floor, and lying face-up laughing, i could see round a corner of hers where, inside her mindscape, was a perfectly detailed memory of a wonderful rambling old house, two storeys and an attic, one or two dusty cellars, no damp or rot anywhere except in the outside cellar, but no carpet on any floor either, or only one or two threadbare ones from another age, dusty bare boards everywhere and a dusty, planky old staircase for tearing up and down raising dust to a hazy height of an inch and a half which took ages to settle again, where nobody lived except libby and the ghosts who were her friends. and the two are still in it together in their souls, when ivy has gone home to tea and the ackhams are all inside watching tv. 

later that night, when she gets into bed and closes her eyes to sleep, ivy's soul is walking about aimlessly like a ghost upstairs in that dusty old house, till she stops in a doorway between two big, empty rooms and after a short while, libby comes stiffly moving with a grim, hard face out of a small dressing closet with the skin of her cobra stretched between her upraised hands.

and then she danced with it, a wild, exotic, swirling dance, her thin, bony body spinning like a wooden skittle, so wooden, wooden, woden, woden, voudun, voodoo in her torn tulle tutu with two tiers of tatty taffetta and something yellow stuck on in places, a hand-knitted, tightly buttoned, pulled, pilled, orange cardigan a size or two too small and long-toed, soft, black school dancing slippers on.

her shortish hair flopped in big chunks, her breath rasped a little – she wasn’t very fit – and her eyes were fixed with a mixture of menace and anxiety on mine as she danced. of course, without me there it would have been a wild, joyous victory dance. she lowered the cobra skin to ivy's eyes and stretched it apart with her fingers in front of them, so that ivy saw the shattery, flaky fragments of her soul dimly through a compound eye of snake scales, or rather; she, we, she and ivy, wished i did.

she danced darkly like a jazz ballet dancer, like a skinny, white-faced, black-stockinged, thickly-mascara’d, long-haired beatnik, shyly though and therefore grim-faced and stiff, even a little clumsy. i loved her. we loved each other, although she was a year younger than i was and only in grade five.

the streets of this suburb are wide and grey. a broad, dark grey strip of bitumen between white gutters and kerbs and a strip of pale grey concrete slabs. there are weedy strips of pale dirt between the concrete slabs and the fences. there are always cars on the streets, parked at the kerbs, coming out of driveways, just turning the corner at a side street, or coming along two or three or four in a row like waves of the sea, their fast, gravelly noise smooth and powerful, their bright white and coloured shells glossy and clean, no mud on their mudguards or hanging like lumpy pink icicles from the bumper bars, no rattling mufflers, none of the bangs and squeaks of defunct suspension that country cars have. these are city cars, in city streets in a suburb of a city, and a city indeed, despite the roaring pull and laughing pleasure, the cajoling joshing of the caressing, sucking sea just beyond the row of shops on sea vista parade and victory road, and beyond the esplanade and the sea wall and the white beach.

it was like flesh, that strip of beach; the colour of grubby white plasticine. it was like walking on someone’s back, its muscles tensed and arched up against your steps as you trod it. and if you stared out to sea and ignored the other people, it was as if there were no city behind you at all, no growling forests full of roaring, metallic beasts that pounce at occasional corners and kill, but only the wolves’ wilderness full of elk and boar and spotted fawns that would come to our hands and to no others - to libby’s and mine, or to davy’s and mine, or just to mine.

it was a clear-skied, cold and wind-whipped evening, and the waters of the sea sobbed and sucked at the rocks on the shore. the shimmer of the sand from glitter to glimmer in the rippling light made easy that shift of emphasis from body-mind to soul-mind, to where you could see the sea women with their torsoes, arms and heads made of water, their arms tugging at the rocks, their fingers of foam-flecked water fumbling over their grey or black or red or purple or brown or blond surfaces, seeking a hold, finding, losing their grip with a juddering scud of sore fingers on stone, on the glistening, gritty, becrystalled surfaces of their hard, unyielding lover’s backs. then they flung themselves back into the dark, turgid sea, with angry, impetuous tosses of their shining water hair, to catch the next wave which would bear them up to fling themselves again, hissing with amorous sighs that brewed themselves into shrieks of frustration and rage, onto the unyielding hardness of their rock-hard, cruel, cold lovers.

the setting sun behind the hills, blood red from north to south, was silhouetting wolves, ruffs up, noses down, skulking about among a few scrawny firs that managed somehow to survive in that desolate land of malevolent thorn bushes and stiff, unbeautiful grasses and prickly herbs filled with acrid milk or harsh, unpalatable sap.

in the denser cover, in the deepening shadows lower down, much nearer than those stalking, skulking wolves, something moved, and then again, over there, another movement, and there another, and there.

i am cut off. they have formed a chain of men the length of the bay to trap me, and they are closing in on me. i can feel their cold, stony eyes on me, their cruel hearts clenched hard like thick-wadded wallets of money under their grey business suit pockets. they move with guns loaded and levelled, and full belts of bullets around their waists. they are closing in. they are closing in. i have no hope. no! i surely have not got a chance!

and then, a shrill whistle sounds, high up in the air (because i am a skilled ventriloquist and a magician). it could only have been the cry of some strange bird, unknown to these stone-hearts who care nothing for such things. they do not look up and they do not look behind them to see that the wolves have left the hill and vanished into the now inky blackness in front of it, and are speeding silently as only wolves can, each she-wolf to her victim and each he-wolf to his. and they do not see the serpent-eyed eagle drop silently from above, plummeting at the speed of a train out of the sky to rake out the eyes of the leader and savage his face, his screams shocking the others so that they drop their guns or discharge them uselessly into the pallid night sky, leaving themselves unarmed for the finishing leap of the wolves.

a mighty stallion, dun as the dunes with a dark voluminous mane comes thundering through the foam, churning up the juddering surf and scattering the outraged sea-women with his hard and dangerous hooves. i slide like a moonbeam, or a beam from that great golden orb just now at the ocean’s rim, onto his back; he misses not a beat of his gallop. i hold out a staunch, flying arm and feel the powerful and yet gentle talons of cry, my eagle, close around my leathered wrist. scarcely have the snarls and yells of the killing and the dying faded from the quivering air before rapid the grey, the once-wounded she-wolf i rescued and nursed back to health, is running beside us, stride for stride through the surf, up onto the beach, over the dunes and away. fly, fly, o valiant fleet, over the dunes and away!

and i am fleet, the dapple-dun stallion, the foam-flecked, wine-dark-sea-coloured stallion surging over the sands like a breaking wave. i am war drummer, i am spitfire, striking up a wake of flying sand from my hooves all along the plasticine beach where, just up ahead at the thomas street ramp, barely visible in the dusk, there are people, couples fawning on each other in the sand, kids with a dog, one or two swimmers, even though it’s a cool evening in the middle of the week and the sun has gone down. 

i dive into the water for a last swim and davy’s soul is with me until it is way past time to go home.

halfway up cronan street is a leaking gas meter. i ignore it now, hurrying past it, knowing i’m late and that my mother is in the incandescently lit kitchen, angry. i can feel the cutlery drawer being slammed shut as if into my abdominal cavity, the knives and forks and spoons scudding down the plywood to strike deep with their points and prongs into the wood at the back of the drawer, or into the flesh of the front of my spine if she hadn’t more self-control. but there’s this gas.

strange stuff is gas - and something happened there a few weeks ago, just after we moved in. it was my first trip alone to the beach, my long, skinny arms and legs not yet brown, the whispers of pines, pepper trees and the bewitched boxthorns still filling the centre of my head like the pictures in a children’s book, city outside, country within, the city impressions being still new, having not yet seeped through to my core, to the vital centre of my being. and there was this house halfway down cronan street with its gas meter right against the front fence, and it leaked.

the sweet, high, zony seep of it into the street stopped me dead in my tracks. anxiety invaded me through my nostrils, through my soft palate, from my head down, and outwards to my ribs. it is this then that i have come to, i thought, the azure smell of a hole in the air that was the leaking gas meter. the grey, stuffy air, itchy with dust from the tarry norfolk island pines, and heavy and tired, tyred and exhausted from the tyre dust and exhaust fumes of cars, and the dense porous hydrocarbon haze, as firmly packed and settling around drifts of gas and pollen and odour as the soil around stones that holds them, suspended and inclined to shift, high above the bedrock.

houses. telegraph poles. wires. houses side by side, their side windows blind, their front windows none of your business. trees in square holes in the asphalt, in straight lines, regularly spaced from one crossroads to the next, and another row just like it opposite. roads heaving, roaring, full of the speaking, important baritone voices of traffic, of heavy traffic, the road dense and hard-packed under the weight of it. houses, bank upon bank, row after row: dense-packed housing, roads full of roaring traffic. hopeless gardens, brave ones, humble, benign and fearful ones, pretty ones, green ones, concrete ones with floral edges, gardens around houses like saucers under cups. people in cities don’t know anything else.

suburbs are country towns with delis at corners and then suddenly a main street with shops, a pub or two or three, a town hall and kindy, a police station, and back from them a street or two, churches, playgrounds, a park, and further out, schools, a football oval, a golf course perhaps, and agistment for horses on vacant land. the only thing was that there was no scrub, no acres of wild countryside between towns, no nature.

no nature.

there was culture instead, and the sea. you need money for culture and i didn’t have much. my pocket money was only two and six and the bus cost ninepence and anyway, i wasn’t allowed on it alone, and my mother only ever took me to shops, so we never saw any culture. there was suddenly tv of course, but ivy was strongly discouraged from watching it much. besides she prefered her own fantasies. 

and there was the sea.

and after that first long, golden summer, there was also school.

picture it: the asphalt, the oval, the administration block. i stand with my back against the wall which is made of big slabs of plasticine-white cement studded with glistening pink and purple and occasionally white gravel. sun-dazzle off asphalt in my smart new school shoes with room in the toes to grow and my new summer frock. on the astral plane i am for sale, and my intermittent fantasy flickers over this problem, alludes to dramatic details of it now and then but cannot bring it to consciousness. the window behind my head has a metal frame, silver, spangled with white grit. it smells clear and sharp with a vicious little bite at one end, like a shrimp’s nippers. it’s aluminium, but i didn’t know that then.

the plate glass windows are a dark, slow, eternal liquid, thick and expensive, with a capacity for thought. the one behind me sucks my brain a little, so i dream a glass reverie full of congealed, slowly boiled reflections. no one comes up to me, though they pass quite close: two girls, squat and secret with oily brown hair, and beautiful large, dark eyes, shapely mouths and boys’ voices, speaking a foreign language, stand near me for a while with their backs to me, smelling of fish and oil and garlic, and not far away some tall, fair girls with intelligent grey or blue eyes, thin wrists and lightly furred arms are playing a complex counting game with a tennis ball. i stand with my heels against the wall till the bell goes. it is a siren, not a bell - a loud, hooting blast that sounds like a joke to me.

olga karatkov is russian orthodox. at recess time it is her deep religious feeling that motivates her to stand at my side, shedding the fine-textured grey light of her long, lovely slavic eyes into the hypnotic trance into which i have been put by the ethereals for debriefing and rebriefing and from which i am just emerging, until i turn my eyes to her, and i hear her say, ‘are you lonely?’

no. not lonely. held in a still, dark, eternal, thick, expensive liquid reverie, deep in thought, adrift, moving in and out of fantasy, but not much aware of the ethereals, reflecting upon the foreign language speaking girls and the thin, fair-haired, laughing girls bouncing their tennis ball and clapping their hands under their lifted knees and kicking feet, and not lonely at all.

but i have been stirred from time to time by a sense that i should move, that i should be speaking to someone and not giving the impression that i am timid, that i am not a wild boy, game for anything, afraid of nothing, with suntanned shoulders and tousled hair, that i’m just a scared girl too shy to speak.

there is also the matter of that i am a country kid, and country kids are supposed to be tough, but they’re really skinny and poor and white as a lily with no suntan, and excessively laundered with peg marks in the shoulders of my jumper. anyway, that’s what the swanes and naders and hookeses and wilkes were like, or any number of other vague-eyed families of wormy kids, skinny and poor, white and soft as witchetty grubs but with blackfella gestures and fat, tea-sodden mums with goannas and snakes looking out of their eyes at you: they were the real country types. 

well, no, i’m not quite like that, i don’t say 'i seen' for 'i saw', and i have got a tan. but still, i am a country kid, and in defiance of my girlish exterior i am trying to be as good as a boy. this is a city girl talking to me, with a quiet, cultivated manner, comfortable with her femininity, and accustomed to television and catching the bus.

my face struggles with a grin, a big, shy country kid grin, and goes red, and i say, ‘yes, i’m new.’ saying it hurts my chest. olga has short, straight, shiny, light brown hair, and she is two inches taller than me, a big-boned ukrainian girl. she has a vaccination scar on her shoulder that looks like a brand. she walks like a beatnik, gliding like a ghost, her hips swaying heavily with the drag on her body of her soul hanging off her shoulders like a long, dark cloak of beaver fur all the way down to hades. she isn’t pretty, but she’s good, oh she’s good!

‘where did you come in grade five?’ asks gail furness, materialising beside olga now that the conversation has begun.

‘top,’ i say, and one or two of them bridle at that.

‘do you like horses?’

‘my name is wardrummer, and spitfire, and fleet.’

gail was a big, raw-boned chestnut. i am led off to join the herd.

in the long, low, glass-eyed buildings with tiled floors and modern desks with separate chairs of woven metal and shiny troughs with drinking fountains and boys’ and girls’ toilets and coat racks and lockers are thick-barrelled women teachers and a thin one or two, a young thin, freckly, wild boar of a man with a bright red neck and hair like red gold, as stiff as a doormat, standing straight up in full battle array all over his head, and a slimy, dumpy woman with acne and some dark and nasty secrets behind the shields of her eyes, and my father next door with the grade sevens.

i sit next to helen tsoumias, one of the squat, secret girls with beautiful eyes, whose mind thinks always in macedonian, and within my ribs where you’d look for my heart i hold the long, cold flow of the billabong, the kookaburra waters, the crow-crying drift of heavy air over the deep current of the river, and the tight hold on my wind-pipe there, no, on my aorta, no, my current, the river in me, the river of my time from start to finish, is the fist of a black man, whose ravenous hunger, whose righteous greed, is the clench of a fist, whose fist is the dry crackle, the soft, black flesh, the clutch of the life palace within, whose heart is the bristle and wait and uncompromising grasp of righteousness on truth, the grip of spinifex on the land. it’s a spirit man, a god, holding my spirit, me to his dreaming, with a life and death grip full of rage.

from when, so long ago, we were a long way out of town, waipeiri, way up above the river where the sand was swirled into drifts by the wind, duned up among the swathes of mallee, a snaky place full of parrots and galahs and the flashes of goannas, where that passionate, angry spirit clutched with a thousand spinifex fists the warm and ardent sandy flesh of that place’s pink-orange skin and groaned or roared into the taut, listening air, that this was his land. and i was just six, the day we went there to let me stand in the spinnifex fairy ring, after my dancing lesson, with my ballet slippers on, just like a real fairy, and make a wish!

helen tsoumias breathes deep – she takes it all in through her nostrils. she smells. she can’t spell. her english is poor. her sums are often wrong. shyly, humbly, she shows me with her broad, soft, nose, her sudden strange eyes, the clouding of the colour of her face from dun to grey, herself as koala. then she laughs inhibitedly so that it might have just been a cough - and is secret again, thinking only in macedonian.

‘ivy is different,’ my mother tells nanna ayers over the fence. ‘she’s never had a lot to say, but she’s got a wonderful imagination. lives in a dream world of her own. when she was only small she was always going on about the fairies. she used to see them there out in the garden. and she’d make them all these miniature gardens - exquisite, they were, with mirrors for ponds and moss pressed into the damp sand, and shells and pieces of coloured glass – for the fairies to sit in. oh she loved just anything small. when she was only tiny she used to bring me in handfuls of ants, just as i was making the beds, and hold them up at me and say, ‘look, mummy, these are my friends.’

yes, and i do remember it, those handfuls of ants under the clothesline and me in a donegal tweed skirt with hootenanny shoulder straps and snail trails of snot on my jumper cuffs. i was a grub, a witchetty, a blackfella-whitefella kid. they were middle-sized ants with big, lumpy, iridescent green heads and a sharp, delicious odour that penetrates into some taut, hidden molecule at the base of your mandibles, jabbing them mid-protein so that they snapped open into a hail-fellow-well-met all-wide visigoth grin, a daggered greeting kept in place by the chemical power of the nest-smell pheromone, the virtual password for the teeming, streaming lines and milling crowds round the swallowing and spewing forth of the neat round holes in the hard dirt. i loved them, those ants, like whole cities full of people.

‘she could pick up bees – she could put out a finger and the bee would crawl up onto it, and she was never stung. can you still do that, ivy?'

‘yes, anyone can. you just have to be patient.’ 

‘and butterflies will come and land on her hand and lick her fingers – you can see with their long tongues that they’re licking and licking her hand.’

‘i’m going to be an entomologist,’ i say awkwardly, because mrs ayres is smiling fondly at me and searching for me in the past in a place where i never was, in a tunnel-vision bonnet and a high-waisted gown of sprigged muslin, and so as not to squirm, i have to speak in self-defence.

‘well, you’ll have to study hard,’ says mrs ayres.

but it’s ants i love best, and horses.

high overhead the stallion heard the drumming of hooves on the hard, dry ground above him, and wheeling at once, the midnight black of his mane flying in the wind of his whirling, he pawed the ground with his nervous front hooves, danced full of pride and fear at the bottom of the gully and then suddenly, silhouetted against the great silver circle of the moon, there appeared prancing and snorting at the jagged edge of the cliff the looming bulk and power of the big-shouldered sorrel, baring his teeth in an ecstasy of seeking, shivers of moonlight flying over his glossy new spring coat. sighting the war dance of the great black horse below, he reared up, pounding the shaking air with his bare hooves and split the night with a challenge screamed from the heart of all-horse, ten billion years long, from the tender throat of the soft-footed little eohippus to the great tearing teeth of ferocious cosmic hell-horses not yet, nor ever to be permitted to be born. stones from his pawing hooves went skittering and clattering down the canyon, but the sounds of their landing were drowned in the answering scream of the jet-black stallion below . . .

not an accurate transcript, but you get the drift. that book went on for ten chapters and filled two exercise books. i was very proud of it, though some might consider it derivative. ivy hadn’t promoted the character quite all the way to deva as i have here - but it’s in the right spirit.

‘ivy, you are a very gifted little girl,’ said mrs nanqueen, my teacher, who was as graceful and thin as a lady in a castle, slicing out my heart with a fruit knife as if it were the bad part of her pear for it was recess time and even teachers eat. ‘you should be aware of that, because knowing it and remembering it will help you use your gifts intelligently.’ she wiped the pulp that was my heart off the edge of her knife onto a piece of old blotter she had in her hand. i never understood why she did that, but from that time on there commenced a kind of slow, years-long inner collapse and things began to go terribly wrong for ivy.

gail painted tumult, the black, at the top of the cliff where the sorrel should have been, and her brush made the black, stormy sky thunder with the fury of his challenge. it was a wonderful picture and everyone admired it; but mrs nanqueen laughed loudly and gaily at my long-necked mare with her high, skinny withers and her accurately measured fetlocks, all intricately shaded with careful crosshatching for three dimensional effect in ink and coloured pencils, ‘ha ha, what a rrrraow-und horse!’

            mrs nanqueen had mistaken gail’s painting and my drawing for an act of rivalry. but gail was herself one of the best horses in the herd, and one of the few true brumbies. all the rest were pony club fillies and over-bred arabs, quarter horses and thoroughbreds. gail's superb painting had been a celebration of my spirited prose. gail was always generous, teaching me to draw, her derision affectionate, not scornful.

so why did nanqueen curse me? why did she from about that time on blight my years with her cruel metaphors, with the slick scythe of her cruelty? no one else hated me. why should she? she could not make gail despise me, and that jealousy that was not my own, that she had given me to wear like a kind of scapular, was it a twisted blessing? or was it the helpless pneumonic pain of her own inadequacy that she hung round my neck like an albatross. was it my saintliness that made her confess it, my innocence that made her lay it on my altar, like a pair of rabbits, gutted, but still in their skins? because i was saintly, and i was innocent and i was naively wise. ten year olds very often are, at least until puberty.

school was okay because of the horses we were, but ivy was mostly alone outside of school. not having scrub and wild grassland to wander in, she found a new sort of relationship with nature in the weedy nature strips and vacant lots and the wildish bits of shrubbery that hung over the more neglected sorts of garden fences. you can compensate for the lack of quantity by engaging intently with the detail, magnifying it if necessary, so that in full view of passers by, accompanied by whatever ghosts you feel you need, you can get lost in cubic foot of a weedy pathside. 

there you find big, furtive grasshoppers, dishonest bits of living machinery who want you to think they’re grass stalks, and preying mantises who watch you fiercely while they chant their frantic spells at you, and offer a death-threat if you see them, that isn’t merely cute if you’re a small enough lizard. there you find beetles that die instantly in your hand in a sudden scuttle of legs and maxilliary palpi, and who’d eat a dead one? not this little bird. and caterpillars are very often very pretty, with bright, shiny, sometimes jewelled heads and soft velvet skin, beautifully patterned in stripes, dots and bands and sometimes festooned with bristly tufts and tendrils. fairy-winged wasps, mosquitos and all sorts of flies flash rainbows of terror when you part the grasses, and look, there are all sort sof tinier ones deeper in.

i started an insect collection. from the how, why, when and where book of insect collecting i learn how to mount dead specimens on pins with little cards under them with their particulars printed neatly in ink, and display them in old, clear plastic-topped shirt boxes lined with sheet cork in the approved fashion. i took it to school to illustrate a talk i had to give, and so i discovered that one other girl, a member of the herd, a robust dapple grey mare, was also a collector, humorously fantasising safari, dangerously hunting hemiptera and coleoptera, orthoptera and lepidoptera instead of lions, wilderbeests, gazelles and hippopotami, and carrying them home in jars. we became almost like friends, this heidrun muller and me. she was bavarian and they spoke german at home. 

on vacant land i found ant lions, we caught butterflies, she found helius beetles along a weedy galvanised iron fence, and sweeping our hand-made nets over the pale yellow standing hay of barley grass, we caught grasshoppers, too. we kept them comfortable in jars, with good food to eat and room to move around, and plenty of movement and colour surrounding them to keep them mildly amazed. neither of us could bring ourselves to kill them, they were so beautiful.

caterpillars grew and pupated and butterflies and moths emerged. spade-handed mole crickets incubated parasite eggs within their utterly soul-thrillingly beautiful carapaces and died destroyed, with the maggots bursting out, the fat, muscular larvae of glittering blue ant wasps the colour of hair shine, the blue on the black of raven’s wings, and their legs scarlet as fire. tiger moths and silver striped vine hawk moths shat vivid orange exclamation points down the scrim curtains at my window, a giant saunders case moth larva hauled its nine-inch silken stick-bedecked sack up the walls, over the furniture, across the window panes, and over the faces of ant-farms, aquaria and terraria, because we also kept small lizards, tree frogs and fish.

people’s gardens yielded caterpillars as big and green as gherkins, with great big bewildering eyespots, gum trees gave us small, tough hairy ones, with bizarre tufts and jewelled nodes with the empty skulls of all their old skins piled up on top of their current head from next biggest all the way down to the smallest, six or seven of them before they spun their cocoons. in vacant lots there were striped ones with weird, fleshy filaments, and inches long geometers that looped along the undersides of leaves, and at night our lighted window panes brought hawk moths and tiger moths and rain moths as wide as your hand. and people gave us big longicorn beetles, handsome scarabs and rhinoceros beetles, inch-long weevils, granny beetles, carob beetles and ladybirds, and handsome bugs tiny to large, both hetero- and hemi- ptera.

and also we had lizards, tiny terrapins, a huntsman spider with a wad of tiny hatched eggshells, with several hundred infant spiders twinkling like stars in her web. a tankful of fish, an axolotl.

every insect in my collection had died of natural causes.

although she cried at the accidental squashing of a caterpillar, heidi was hard, relentless and destructive. she lopped the ‘y’ off my name with the whiplash of a heavy, flaxen plait. ‘howdy, ive!’ i never quite liked her. she jeered at her little sister till she cried, she persecuted one kid in her class until she swallowed sleeping tablets and had to have her stomach pumped. but she liked me and i was happy in her company as long as the focus was on insects, swimming or horses.

as to these last, she was a superbly schooled filly, a chunky little pony club horse, black with a pure white mane and tail, four white feet up to a little way above the fetlocks, and a white blaze. she had no idea of flying in the wind, of crashing over the dunes like a wave of the sea. when you swam with libby ackham you were sea horses riding on the tide, the white surf of the breakers was your mane and tail, the pentagons of foam on the backs of the waves was the dappling on your coats; or you were mermaids, slowly somersaulting underwater, emerging at each other in the mysterious submarine lights upside down, cruising, spiralling, opening your eyes to stare up at the sun through a metre of water. 

swimming with heidrun you were in training, or racing, hard, relentless, cutting through the water like the blades of a screw, demolishing distance like so much piffle, annihilating each other with the whiplash of a toss of flying wet salty hair. but for all her training, her callisthenics and her pride, i outswam her without any training at all. i swam without any training her fifty laps of the pool, and kept pace beside her from the denning street buoy to the main street jetty, a mile of choppy seas through shark-infested waters away to the north.

i was afraid of heidrun. you always had to defeat her, because if you didn’t she took you apart and put you back together again broken. she made you be cuckoo, you’re mad and i’m not, and when she’d disabled you she fed you her disease, which was the ailing gut of the of the mad, wailing cretin full of snot and vomit that had died so long ago, her soul sister, whose wounds, though ever so slight, bled thin-legged wasps with inch-long stings, and her eyes were the milky blue nubs of emerging bones, of knuckling-in knuckles, crying, all out in the dreadful weather under black, despairing pines.

i kept a tense and solemn chess board between her and me, winning almost every time, while i tried, though without much conviction, to give her the insight that the things she craved do not depend upon the outcome of games, that this planet heals all her daughters eventually and has probably almost healed even this soul of her own little hidden sister who though it had been so very long ago, still died every winter in the snow, blind and crying.

that was her goodness, the love she had for that child and her loyalty, but she was too ready to despise, to hate and even to kill for her, to improve her comfort not knowing any more whether it did her any good or not.
and that was her witch soul too, for we were all witches. all girls are witches, all boys are wizards. the magic's all the same. it’s a matter of catching us at it, and that was a game our souls played, gleefully usually, hoping to get caught doing something magnificent, and after all good.

a lot of our magic was fetched from far afield, but the deepest witch of them all was lyyrli meyer, the mormon from finland whose grandmother was chinese. lyyrli was a widgie and she wore net stockings on weekends and shaved her legs. and she didn’t care about swearing. it didn’t matter a bit to her; listen: ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck – see?’ and she painted beautiful fairies and moons and a subtly toned green and purple piper – very contemporary, said mrs nanqueen. and she sang dynamically, with a sob in her voice like a pop star, into an imaginary microphone, and she boogied like a wicked teen-ager at the palais on a saturday night, her ten year old body already voluptuous with the generous swell of her thighs and her premature pagan breasts.

‘ivy, you’ve got beautiful eyes,’ she told me. deeply religious people tend to admire my eyes. they’re like deep, deep rock-pools. you can see the various levels and layers of my soul-lands through them right through to the bottom, as you might see through the layers of water and ooze in lakes, where hidden things stir slightly in grey, uncertain lights. their waters glimmer with grief and deep feeling and through them we catch flickering hints of incipient wisdom; though the things half-seen in its deeps, you are on occasion startled to consider, might sometimes be venomous and inclined sometimes to strike.

which is interesting because that is how i see you, you who are reading this now and perceiving that our ivy is getting  a little bit out of hand and might be needing a bit of a check. 

heidrun was plain in a very attractive way if she hadn’t been so broad and thickset. she was a bit short, too. i had believed myself to be an ugly little thing, tall and thin, but gangly, with a bent nose and a big mouth, but perhaps robert had misled me. my parents had joined in the general mirth when robert answered 'pretty ugly' when i’d asked if i was pretty a year or two earlier but no one answered seriously and i’d never asked again. but boys make up their own minds about such things and they have their own ways of making their opinions known.

constantinos papadopoulos and two of his cousins kept a grim watch on my house for a few weeks during the september holidays to see that i did not go out with any other boy, but he never spoke to me, not a word. he never asked me out, and although he was good-looking, wonderfully handsome, in fact, with his flashing eyes, his strong, greek hair, his celtic freckling, light as stardust and finely sprinkled, his swagger, his machismo, i never acknowledged the messages he sent me by word of mouth through chains of two or three, as if just incidentally, just in passing, that he loved me, would die for me, had told everyone and was ready to fight all comers for me, and in order to ward off rivals was keeping watch over my house – with a knife.'

i even caught sight of him once with two or three of his clan leaning on their bicycles a couple of corners down not looking at me. they were all good-looking, but none as good-looking as con. i loved him, there’s no doubt, and i said as much to one or two: he was a magnificent boy, just the sort of boy i would have been myself if i'd been a boy, but i feared him too. he seemed like a dire warning to me, though i scarcely knew what of. he was in the other grade seven, my father’s class. my soul ran often to my upper floor window to peep through the curtains, to gaze along the street, to catch a glimpse of his soul, standing in the middle of the road, straddling the white line, not minding the traffic, calling out his love-song, announcing his devotion to me long after his body had gone home.

i was not mature. i was notoriously immature. you should have heard me carrying on when my father wouldn't let me have a puppy. one of fran's blue-heeler cross puppies. the tantrums, the sulks. would i ever grow up. big girl like me? not likely. and yet... i reach for a brightly coloured shawl from a thousand years ago, for a sheer, white muslin or gleaming samite veil from two thousand years and more, i reach for a stern old duenna, but there isn’t one now – it’s only a thin wild echo from a not yet quite extinct past. but it enriches my spring time and it grows me up splendidly, and my love fills him and hallows him and strengthens him for the wars he must fight, for he is taking arms, he is a warrior, and wears his short tunic and red plumes with a recklessness beyond pride.

then suddenly, just three weeks before the end of the school year, all of them, mrs nanqueen, lyyrli, heidi, even con and the rest, they cut me dead. they all did. the witches they are flipped my soul into the deep heathen chaos below hades in which the dramas our earth acts out are brewed, where i shifted through alien forms: they twisted my substances into new forms, they lopped off my tentacles, my branches, my roots, my rays, they carved runes of a dozen strange worlds in my flesh and arrayed me in the spent splendours of the ancient pasts of a thousand distant planets, the stiff, silly manners and hypocrisies of the present and the sarcasms and filth of the times between.

somewhere i knew, perhaps i had dreamed it, that they had made a totem pole out of me somewhere, with my eagle-winged head above my coyote-head throat, and within my ribs the firm and steady faith of the vulture at rest. in my belly the war spirit of a man. in my womb the incubating water duck, deer speed in my legs, and hera’s anvil that was nine days a-falling tied with a piece of cuchullain’s fresh, warm, bloody gut wrapped and knotted to my ankles for the amusement of zeus. and of course, slender white hands for pouring tea. or were they wings?

well, fair enough. it was my slice of the human predicament.

but there are bits ivy doesn’t remember in there, between con papadoulos and his vigil and the silent time of solitude, when i was like a ghost in the schoolyard full of children who were no longer permitted to be such wild, flying horses, no longer my friends. something had had to be done, we had had to be stopped. there was nothing at all wrong with us on the surface. we only seemed a bit childish to some of the teachers and the maturer girls, but some others admired our spirit, take con for instance. perhaps that was because, on the soul level, we were a bee’s whisker off bi-locating, shapeshifting, entering into another reality, or worse - or better, because, as some of the boys said, it would have been good riddance to bad rubbish, because we were also that close to letting god knows what from another reality into our reality, and we mightn’t be able to manage it. so we played with less and less intensity and less drama and less wild whinnying and shaking of our long flying manes.

because there are centaurs through those gateways, powerful and obtuse with a sense of responsibility that give them a licence to kill. there are unicorns whose yard long spiral horns are weapons, and they aren’t quite visible to your soul just straight away, and could rip your subtle body to shreds in seconds and you’d soon be down with pleurisy, peritonitis or worse.

i was already alienated, preferring the company of beetles and ants, but still loosely associated with them all, on the day miriam wendt, kay milde, and helen kostoulos, and several others, all the most intelligent girls from my grade seven, were crying in the corridor outside the mixed six-and-seven’s room, and eva bronowski and fran doolan and olga karatkov from the other class are all around them, crying too because they are, because miriam, whose father is a methodist minister, and kay, who lives next door to them, and helen, who is kay’s best friend, have suddenly understood the implication of the h – bomb, the cold war, and the war-like nature of man: they are going to destroy the world.

there is nothing anyone can say to that. even lyyrli only cries too. i don’t cry, because i am already practically ostracised,  but their fear infects me. it is wild, like insects crawling up glass and touching scared feet to a pricked tracing paper sky.

they are going to blow it up.

there is nothing to say. but i know that the greeny-blue-black scarab in the hollow of my hand, which is like a heart, and a womb and a tomb, and the heart of the world, and the world, and the human body, is serene, secure in the inevitability of its ever-tumbling future, and it is a sickle-footed and money-eyed, sky-scrapered and wildernessed, flippant and queer future, the future of this myriad world of ours with its soul of a gypsy.

and so inexplicably, for those last few weeks of grade seven, increasingly visibly alienated, ostensibly for one thing or another, for real reasons lost behind the gathering smoke and fume of their fear of me, and their fear of themselves, and their fear of my being able to see them and show them their selves, flatly and adamantly (and themselves feeling quite famous for it, though not a word is ever said) i am driven out of the herd, the remnant of the fine big herd it had been.

i am a lone stallion again – no, a wolf. i am alone in the schoolyard, but walking, pacing, loping about in its shadowy places, not standing with my heels against the wall. i’m striding across the empty oval, strolling over to the almost deserted shelter sheds, walking briskly past the infant block, and i’m alone. even olga karatkov only lowers her lovely, religious eyes as she goes past.

i am alone.almost, except for the intermittent scimitar swoop of a brisk, keen kid who resembles a carolling magpie, called maggie schneider, whose mother was french and who spoke german at home, though not the same german as heidrun spoke. maggie does a perfect imitation of donald duck in a fit of rage, and quotes copiously with faith and fervour, from the three stooges, complete with the voice and gestures of the once called curly.

and that’s significant because, garlanded and alone, with an unexplained enchantment of nine bright circles around me, only such a no-nonsense bird as she was could ever have reached me there, even for a few snatched moments of giggly nonsense, and only every few days at that!

and i notice that nobody else seems to see me at all.

except teachers, or anyway, one of them. because ivy excels as a child soprano in the grade seven girls’ choir, which does the carols for the infants’ nativity. my gloria hosanna in exelcis mounts like a soul itself into the aether although being brought up atheist i didn't believe in gloria but did love the soaring ecstacy of the song. 

and lyyrli it is who says the extemporaneous grace so movingly at the christmas/break-up classroom party lunch at the end of the year . . .

god we have so much and there are so many in the world who have nothing, whose babies die for the want of food. grant us all the grace, o dear, good jehovah . . .

            bringing a visible tear to the delicate grey eye of mrs nanqueen.

and though she’s cut me as completely as anyone ealse, the reason lyyrlie loved me the most of all, she revealed, though i was amazed to be told it, being so grim and fierce, and so always alone, was that i loved even snails, as i had once mentioned to her, for their beautiful necks, which are like the necks of tabby cats, graceful and strong.