in thrall

this is 1a, the top forty iqs. we are the baby boom, the crest of the wave of postwar babies, and the energy of our icoming souls is booming like a wave breaking on the shore of time. we're not aware of it. there has always been this power and it has become like white noise, something everyone has long since ceased to notice. like our parents, our teachers have been through the war. 

looking back i can see now that i, ivy, was under scrutiny. it made me feel slightly ablaze with a kind of radiance i took for excitement. but i was like the eye of the peacock’s feather here, attracting attention i was not then aware of. it was not altogether favourable, and i felt heavy, like the deforming drip hanging from the rainbowed film of a bubble held in the twist of wire, not drawing anything to me, but everything flowing slowly towards me. 

i attract attention. i’m odd. i will be a problem. i am exceedingly, intensely texturally dense, a threat to the fine, splendidly rainbowed fabric of sharing and mutually respectful attitudes of spirits so serenely dancing with such rewarding splendour in the light beams shone to them by the smiling elders. they already hate me. and there is no way  i can ever clamour over to their world from where i now am, alienated, calmly adapted to being ostracised. 

nevertheless, no one swivels, cranes and peers, and looks at me any more than at any of the others, except one. a weird puppety thing with utterly unjustified, great, green-eyed, greedy grins which are astoundingly ugly finds me every time like a compass needle finding north. but i don’t actively draw them, these grins, they’re part of the flow down the bubble film to me, the quiet, unconscious gravitational flow of soul and ghost to me. and yet i know with a sort of dull misery that she’s got me as surely as meg godden had.

dannion auger’s hair is hectic yellow-orange. each hair had the quality of the fibres in a coir mat, wiry and yet strawy, but they were all twisted hay-wire, instead of flowing together in shining waves. it looked like the coat of a wire-haired australian terrier, of which her family had two, with its large, illogical curls, lumps of disconnected frazzle, and straight, dead bits sticking out like straw. it’s a shock at first glance. it takes a while to get over it.

her bones are very big and uncompromisingly there. her jaw and cheekbones are like another pelvis. her skin is blotched with so many such large pale terracotta freckles scattered like cornflakes on a pale tablecloth, like scabs, that again you’re shocked. even her green eyes: irises, eye-rims, lids, the lot, are as freckled as the coats of spotted jungle cats are seen from far enough away. 

not her fault, poor thing, but beyond the material body, it's not much better. her aura is a syrupy glassy green, like molten plastic, or thin, flexible perspex. it lies deep as a sea over the pebbles of her skin, a green lagoon, but it defies life. it is a lacquer over a bed of dead pebbles, its only fish is she, and that not living, but preserved taxidermically in green glass, molten, poured over, and then cooled hard. and the more you look for her soul the more you get scenes like that. it is as if a book full of pictures of museum specimens has replaced what ever she had once had as a soul. 

again and again i glance up, collide with the sight of that neon face pouring now a dense orange ray with a flavour between volcano’s breath and rotting carrots at me in a flood, and i’ve lost my footing. it’s like being caught in an undertow. you swim with it, not against it, and saunter off sideways towards the beach. it’s a relief when the teacher gets up and makes a speech and we all have to look at him.

but there comes a time just before the recess bell goes, while i’m still struggling with the fear of it, when her eyes clamp onto mine, the green flow of that syrupy energy surges down the length of her grinning gaze and becomes like two rods of steel binding her eyes to mine and i stare full at her, bemused, for three seconds or four, till it hurts. a little brilliant emerald green eye opens up in the centre of her forehead and a butterfly soft glow of emerald light flits with a quick flash across the room, over the desk tops and wire chairs, over the shiningly shampooed heads of 1a, from the centre of her forehead to the centre of mine.

smooth as a snake it glides and strikes the centre of my forehead and i didn’t feel it touch. but there was a quick glow of triumphant glee at the point of contact and a joyous light in the grinning face from which it came. i could see from there, six desks away, that she had big teeth set wide apart that looked as if they’d been carved out of ivory. like big plastic tiles they were, scrabble tiles, or polished stone, large, each one standing alone. tombstones.

and then my eyes are free. but the embedded fish, the steel rods, the flow of glowing light - this soul is not hers. it is something in some museum. it has projected itself into this little human, this ugly child, this mad, eczematous human body, and has made colours of it, brown, orange and green, with flashes of green where the soul should have smiled like the not quite perfect angel that smiled from almost everyone else's aura - except of course, ivy's. 

but its dwelling place is a museum somewhere, and that’s where she’s put me. i can only stand there on that whitey-grey tiled floor seeing the planes and metalled edges of the display cases, tasting the chemical air, aware of a mythic snake and a monstrous baboon and a wide-eyed blocky structure like the front of an old holden fj, looks like ancient cardboard somehow, a bulky, ugly statue with wide dark slits that eyes of glowing green might haunt glowering above an eagle’s beak, or an easter islands face, or the sandstone nose of a lion. it’s a museum. it’s the museum in town. 

i stand there feeling the cold hardness of the floor through my shoes for a few moments, just long enough to feel the chill, and for a long, deep shudder to build and release itself, shaking me back into the 1a classroom.

look at her back now that she has turned away, and i’m confused. she has a pink, sucked thumb. i’ve seen it sneak its way deceitfully, slyly to the corner of her mouth and wangle her jaws apart and try to get in. she has cascades of dandruff falling like a visible rain continuously over her shoulders. she has bitten her fingernails down to the quick; there is scarcely any nail left at all on any finger or thumb.

what does she want? why does she show me these things? does she want to know what god i am? i can tell her nothing much that isn't to do with underwear. half the class are girls and we are all wearing a bra and 60 denier stockings held up by a suspender belt for the first time and the whole room is full of the consciousness of it, and the suspender belt i’m wearing with its rubber buttons and the metal loops you slide over them are magically speaking, counter-indicated and so are the stockings especially when it’s hot and you’re sweating.

i am haunted by a very early memory concerning suspenders. and if this very strange girl wants to know my earliest memory besides sitting in the dirt eating a handful of sand, okay, that’d be it: of putting lips that at once became grey-white rubber to the grey-white rubber button, of trying a tender tongue-tip around the firm, rubber, grey-white, slightly dimpled perfection of the button on my mother’s suspender, leaning against her flesh-scented leg, until my mother snatched the thing from me saying, ‘what are you doing, you little ninny, licking that?’ and stretched the fawny-orange-brown tiny knitting of stretchy here-it-is-and-now-its-gone 19 denier stocking welt over the lovely white button and jammed the painted metal loop, which was just the shape of a baby bottle teat, down hard over it, just like the front one, and the front and back ones on the other leg. 

i’m lifting my face up to reach the top of her thigh, and it all smells of cold skin and wild nylon all washed clean with good plain soap and all the soap rinsed away and there’s a flat smell of body fat coming through her pores, but not perfume like cats have, not the smell of a healthy animal. every pheromone of her love and hate , hope and fear, happiness and sorrow lies poisoned to death at the bottom of the bath and is washed down the plughole and you can smell them all dangerous and dead and exhaling evil in the drain outside. i hate it.

she waylays me at recess time. we become, according to her, and to my immense dismay, 'friends'. no one else can get near me. she talks about the museum. she thinks visiting museums is being 'intelligent'. it's a  word uses often, and she pronounces it as if it refers monumentally to herself, as if it is her own name, and she is graciously trying to extend it to me. ivy feels trapped. dannion breathes over her possessively. ivy can’t escape. ivy can't be rude. it is more than pathological politeness. it is a deeply mind-controlled, cruelly conditioned actual paralysis of will.

one afternoon my sinuses convulse, suddenly my inner being yawns and my young, yearning body goes into labour. i push out a thin, blue-white, aching bone of ectoplasm, wrapped in a slick, whitish membrane with one red and one blue vein intertwined, as long and blunt as a finger. and i bleed a week-long umbilical cord. 

i know all i need to know about menstruation from a tiny leaflet handed out without a word by our physical education teacher, and i have corrected my initial error that it was talking about my 'public' area. pubic, not public. oh. i had never encountered the word before in my life and had been taught not to notice small errors in other people's performance. 

my mother keeps me home for a day, but i’m fine, except that i’m nonplussed. i can’t believe i really am this thing tucked up under motherly chins as soft and voluptuous as bread dough, like a pillow to be wriggled into its slip, to be kneaded and bullied into my over-laundered soft and fat-chinned future form by fat, soft, many-chinned mother-ghosts of many ancestral lineages now, claimed like a great fat caterpillar by a flock of huge plump chooks, all wanting their own way with me. 

obviously you don't go along with that. ivy doesn’t go along with it. i try to imagine what sort of girl would, and shake my head in wonder. nobody would surely. i bury my blue baby-bone in the furnace outside and i count my countable ribs – you can see through them, like a ghost, see? and i wear for a skull a death’s head, and my collarbones are the sacred ancestral long bones: i wear the jolly roger for them all to interrogate, and i will not be the voluptuous pillow under .the voluptuous chins of the mothers, i will not enter the flounced white slips with a soft, downy sigh of repose. i am a wild girl, strong, tough and competent as a boy. i won dill kitto's marbles. for two years i led the wild herd as a stallion. i stalk the dunes as a wolf, i am an eagle, a panther, a wild child growing up feral.

robert is now tanned and muscular, with that smouldering hatred behind his eyes which i hate. his hair is stiff with salt, his eye rims red. he slags. he swaggers along the jetty with his newly erectile dick tucked up in his tiny little red nylon loincloth. his shoulders are beginning to be broad, his waist slender. there are starting to be long, black, curly hairs, soft and shining, on the insides of his thighs. 

cathy jordan loves him and her ruler declares it. 4-ever. so does mirja levic, and she tells me. so does heidrun muller. i place a long jawful of glinting, snarling wolf fangs between him and them. but anyway, he loves evangela christos from 1d, which isn’t surprising, really. she’s a sassy girl, with eyes like flashing starlight in a crystal fountain, laughing lightly within herself, never outré.

my father thinks she’s a bobby-dazzler. she was in his grade seven. even though she’s half greek, so you’d think she’d be classical and complex, like helen lazaros, she’s just like an irish girl ready to dance any jig, poised for the balance to tip her lightly into the first step, calm, disciplined, blithely and lightly to lift and skip, to float and flit, to slip swiftly through the slit in the air into the land of the sidhe, as clean and sharp and sparkling as any dagger between the ribs, and out again, with barely a ripple. oh, a waterford dream she was, an cailín sin, so many lifetimes ago, who left you with a near visible thread of her almost metallic laughter just vaporising sweetly in the air. but her eyes were greek.

‘ivy’ll be an old maid,’ said my mother to all and sundry. ‘like so many of her father’s relations. they don’t marry, that family; they’re all spinsters and bachelors. all her father's uncles were bachelors. so was my mother’s only brother, so she's got it on both sides. she won’t marry. she’s not the least bit interested in boys.’ oh well, realistically she’s right. i’ll never marry. i’ll be an old maid. a spinster. and on reflection i feel very good and safe and right like that. true to myself, never one half of a couple. but i’m still too young to believe in sex. nice girls never talked about it in those days. ivy didn’t even have a name for it.

i turn from my locker and make for the 1a door – just six steps. peter moore is soft and warm beside me, his green blazer arm to arm with mine, soft and shy, like love. surprised, mouth open, wide-eyed, because i’ve already heard him and trevor norman laughing at me and caught their taunts as i walked by, i turn and look him straight in the face, utterly undefended.

he is a little taller than me and looks down into my eyes, smiling a little, like a lover, and he says, smiling, driving his lavender grey love-light deep into my wide open pupils, ‘ugh! how did you get a face as ugly as that?’

so i’m ugly am i? so what was kon seeing? so i changed over the holidays, did i? and now i wear the ancestral relic, this jolly roger skull, superimposed over my own face. to keep the boys off? to honour the lineage? or did dannion put it there to punish me for thinking her ugly? 

peter moore is no hero. he is not an ugly boy, although he’s thin, pale and weak, and has pale red hair, of rather pretty golden and flame colours, soft and shiny and inclined to be curly, eyes of a clear, textureless blue, a little watery, and very white skin with blue veins visible through it, his freckles large and indeterminate. looking at ivy's skull, his face goes green and sick and dying.

and looking at him, ivy sees a sailor, a poor drowned pirate.

but they concede my point, and my mother’s point; and the pillow-patting mothers let up. i am neuter by common consent. ‘neuter’ they call me tauntingly. sexless, unsexy, a thing. but moore and then ian norman, green, drowning ancient sailors both, can’t help it; they can’t leave me alone. they call out to me, ‘hey, neuter, wanna date?’ and they make comic, pathetic gestures of drowning love and worship. they see their ancestor god, my skull, the jolly roger, and they worship it with their souls from the coral lagoons of a thousand years ago where they lie drowned, their ship shattered on the reef, their treasure lost forever.

i’m drawn like a fish on a line among the long legs of the 1a girls, led like a dog on dannion auger’s lead, putting my feet down just anyhow, taking it on trust that they’ll reach the ground. i’ve evaded the mothers, but still there’s the hot, aching congestion of putrefying bloods in my purple-fisted womb every month! i’m breached. i bleed. i’m in shock. i wrap my sodden babies in the news of the world and commit them to the fragrant flames with a non-comprendo as big as the world and a million years long.

i'm a girl. girls are weak. i'm a girl.

not that ivy ever wanted to be a boy. boys are ugly, vulgar and cruel. well, not all boys, but most boys are. not davy, and not dill kitto. but most boys. and if we’re delving into our earliest memories, there’s a high chair memory, where ivy has orange bias binding round her bib, and mummy is feeding her and she suddenly isn’t there for a while, called outside perhaps and ivy is left in the chair, fingering her bib and sucking her last mouthful. and robert and gerald are there, gerald standing by the stove and robert by the passage door. the room is still and quiet and mummy’s voice and a lady’s are heard like creaky crickets in the distance, far away.

robert is singing and swaying on his feet and suddenly he starts going ‘bub bub bub, bib bib bib, bubba bubba bubba’ at me and lumbering towards me with a face full of hatred. scared, i start to wail and the wail rises to a shriek and i lift my christening cup which is full of water and wave it at him threateningly. i might have tried to stand up. hearing mummy at the kitchen door, robert runs into the passage and just as mummy comes in ivy hurls the cup after him.

overarm. did i mention that daddy was a crack fast bowler? often came in wearing his cricket pads. he was a good enough wicket keeper too. the cup flew on a direct hit trajectory, and robert, equally adept, survives barely by dodging it, and ducking into the parental bedroom where none of us had permission to go. the cup chipped a lot of paint from a door a good fifteen feet, about five metres away and was dented ever after, as a reminder to me of why they reduced my strength, and i never after that could throw, not even a soft rubber ball, except little girly underarm throws, too gentle to hurt anyone. girls are weak.

‘we’re a couple of outcasts,’ says dannion, making a sad, black pestilence for us both to crawl into.

‘i’m not,’ i say, declining it irritably. ‘i would rather die than be one of them.’

‘why?’ she is genuinely horrified.

‘they’re cruel. they’re cliquey. they’re shallow.’

‘no they’re not. they’ve all got high iqs. we’re 1a.’

‘intelligent people aren’t cruel.’

‘well, i wish they weren’t cruel. i wish they’d let me be one of them.’

snap goes her pestilence between my fingers, a dried out silver grey twig i’ve found among the grass. dannion only wants me to like her, but the slide of her green, freckled eyes in their pink and terracotta blotched rims, flakes of eczema caught in their lashes gives me the creeps, as she slides me the stinging, prickly, pain-radiant mantle of her disease so that now i can have no friend but her.

and right before my eyes she takes out a wet, chewed handkerchief and wrings it thin and she ties the knot in it tightly round my inner axis between my navel and solar plexus so that i can only scream soundlessly in shapes of pain, not words, and only protest in twists of my qi below that knot, and must bear her horrors peaceably.

the boys call her gollywog, or bozo the clown. but it’s not just her appearance. through her soulscape you can see the fields of defeat spread out all around her, so many ancestral generations dying in howling fields of blood and guts and gore, so many screaming childbeds of ancestor mothers dying in beds awash with gore and torrents of blood. and even in times of peace and health, still horror, horror, horror; the horror of radiant gods nestling in the hollows of the hills. dragons with treasures of gold and silver, fairied and pixied and goblined woods and hills and caverns and towering cliffs where the next wars were brewing and the next generations of marriages were being scratched onto the parchment by mad wizards and half-crazy tyrant queens…

… of which she would once have been one.

with a pain she has come to endure because it accompanies the best of her magic, with conversation so cripplingly banal you’d weep if you weren’t too proud to, she sings into me the genie in a bottle, carving its name into the glass in brittle, eczematous hexameters, and to seal it there she says to me, ‘i think you are a genius.’ and she tears at the end of the knotted hanky with her teeth, wrung hard by the writhing serpent of jealousy. but how can she say such a thing? i’ve said scarcely a word to her, and nearly always only to contradict her. and wormy and emaciated as i am, i’m surely as unwholesome, dysfunctional and ugly as she is. she terrifies me though i scarcely know why.

bert schilder is the vice principal. he was at teacher’s college with my mother, though of course, they were in different groups, she in the primary, he in the high. it was during the depression.

at nine o’clock in the morning his soul is still with his toast and honey and the nice, warm cup of sweet fragrant tea he had with it nearly an hour ago. nice warm cup, like a friendly brown eye with a pupil of black, oracular tea leaves submerged at the bottom and a haze of enchantment, smoky and mysterious permeating it all.

it winks a little in its clear china white, having no eyelid to blink against the sun coming in through the window. it is a patient little friend, that kindly brown eye: come, kiss me now, at last, it says, smiling its big meniscus smile, as friendly as a puppy. and he does. he takes it up gently, respectfully he kisses it, affectionately, and a little thrill of delight takes him, which he gives back to her. but her complex green, singing medicine, that chilly-warm and soft-aired tangy ceylonese garden, those cinnamon hands and these warm, doting eyes are all under his vest, now, and there are honeyed toast crumbs in the grinding out of his cosily reluctant voice. ‘i’m looking at your attendance records, ivy.’

i am unable to speak, my voice incarcerated in my lowest dungeon.

‘you’ve missed five mondays out of nine this term, the last four consecutive.’

‘i brought notes from my mother. i was ill.’

‘always on mondays?’

tell the truth now, ivy.

the truth? 

i spend friday evenings on my bed fantasising furiously. my fantasies are weird, out of control. i am dragged by one foot through a thousand miles of ocean while sharks feed on the flesh of my limbs, my trailing gut tangled and ribboned with kelp, buzzed by schools of small fish, butted by sharks. i am a cavern of flesh inhabited by squid and small crustaceans, anemones have squatted along my ribs, wrasses flick themselves about in my skull. i am reclining on my side at the root of a great reef.

or i am the lone survivor of a shipwreck, dumped by a violent wave of a storm-wracked sea onto a beach of powdered coral, miraculously still alive after twenty five years of solitude, shocked to my innermost being, even until the shivering of my splendid oaken timbers, by the stately english vessel now within my crying reef, now lowering a long boat to the jaded green water, english hands on the oars, english faces towards my shore. i flee into the interior and it is three days before i shake the captain’s hand.

i spend saturday plunged and lunged and managed and bashed and thrashed and bullied by ghosts i can no longer see and no longer hear, hooded is my hawk, my horse hobbled, and my hound muzzled and chained, and saturday night i am torn by lions, bound and gagged and thrown into pits of venomous snakes. i see the penetration of the fangs, the pressure on the venom sacs, and i feel the sting of the injected venom, the burning flood of the venom in my veins, in my arm, in my hand, my leg, my face, just below my eye.

my foot is in the steel-jawed trap and i feel as much as hear the heavy tread of boots across the lea towards me. nowhere are my fleet, my rapid, my cry. nowhere my davy. i am alone now, without any friends. the gun is raised, aimed, fired. helpless, i die, and again i die, and again, and again, and again.

sunday i am wounded. perhaps hands heal me, a woman with black, gypsy eyes flashing behind her tangle of grey hair, a tramp. a neanderthal girl, pursing up her lips and doing wise things with herbs, turning back my tide of death for reasons i can’t fathom.

or i flee, escaping to the beach, to the sea, evading them all, all the ghosts, the beasts, the civilized savages, the men with guns and the callous, malevolent women, those who know right from wrong without even thinking about it and those who guard their lovers with knives. sunday night i fetch up on a sweet, green bank, face down, the sun on the bracken, the sharp-scented air, the hand that refuses to be davy’s any more closing on the back of my head so that i can’t turn round to see him. i can’t hear him. i don’t know who he is being, or what he wants me to be. i go helplessly into the dreams he gives me, and when i wake up i have forgotten them all.

on monday mornings i awaken in chains, i am paralysed, my will bent and broken. when my mother unchains me i have power for only a little lethargic movement. she can’t dispel that with cross words and threats. she writes a note for me and lets me stay home. on mondays i do exorcisms. not until the ghosts are laid can i get up and move about, make coffee, a sandwich, play patience or read. after the exorcisms i’m a bit deranged, disoriented. sometimes there are gods, strange angels i don’t know, inhuman beings perhaps engaging my inner mind, and i’m away somewhere, away today, away…

it’s not always that bad, but lately it has been.

ivy says nothing.

‘i notice here that miss fridd gave you a general science test yesterday, and you missed it by being absent. last monday you had a latin test, and before that a french test.’

‘no, it isn’t the tests. there’s a maths test today and i’m here. i’m coming top in everything except maths.’

‘then what illnesses do you suffer from that always strike you on a monday and hardly ever on any other day?’

‘i feel ill, and i’m too weak to get up.’

‘every monday?’

and besides that i am oppressed at school. dannion is tyrannical, her pathos and her pitiless weeping wounds exhausting. and the boys’ persecution is sometimes knives and whips and goads. it hurts. after a weekend away from it, it baulks at coming back, this body of mine with its scared, snivelling soul. but how can i put that? it isn’t that i’m a sook. but nothing fetches me…

‘well, if you won’t speak up for yourself i’ve got no patience with you. this attendance record is not good enough. see that it improves. now, get back to your class. you’re wasting your time and mine!’

‘what do you mean by shallow?’ dannion enquires, chastened by i don’t know what into listening to me instead of making me listen to her.

‘they don’t know the meaning of life and yet they think they know what’s right and what’s wrong. but they never ask … the fundamental questions. they don’t know why any of it is happening, but they’re all doing it, doing it and woe betide anyone who isn’t doing it too. and doing what? they don’t even know what the whole mad mass of activity is for. they just do what everyone else is doing. and they’re cruel, killing, stultifying, because they’re stultified. they haven’t a clue why they do what they do.’ STVLTVS -A -VM, we both did latin so we both knew that word. it means ‘stupid’.

‘yes they do. they’re preparing themselves for life. they know what it’s for.’

‘no they don’t. they don’t know what life is for. they think they’re coming every day to this school that people have made so that they can get an education so that they can get a job so that they can earn enough money to live on. but those aren’t their reasons. they’re the school’s reasons. they’re here because it’s compulsory – they have no choice. if they wagged it they’d end up in reform school and be forced back into the class-room.’

‘but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid.’

‘yes it does. it’s stupid of them not to know that that’s their real reason for being at school.’

‘but it isn’t. you have to earn a living. you have to be literate and educated. you have to take part in the culture.’

‘why? what is it for?’

‘to make it possible to all live together and,,, not get bored’

‘but why? all this to avoid boredom? so many millennia of millions of people doing things without question, without reason -  and why this precisely? all this business? money and work? money and war? bombs big enough to destroy the world? all so we won’t get bored! why do you say such a thing? why do you take this so lightly? if they weren’t stupid, they’d pull themselves out of it. but when the teacher says line up, do your homework, absorb this, learn that, become this, desist from that, why they don’t admit that they obey through stupidity like oxen, plodding on innocently and refusing to believe in the goad because it’s too hard to keep remembering that they’re not doing it off their own bat, by their own will, and they’re not smart enough to know what a furrow is for, or even that there is one.’

‘but we’re not just plodding. there’s more to what we’re doing than that. there’s culture. there’s nature. there’s travel, evolution, and the economy. so much in it that’s interesting. don’t people intrigue you?’

which alarmed me, filling me with fear of a probing intelligence than infiltrated my mind, got in on my experience in order to view, eagerly, the intriguingness of me. it had never occurred to me to see people in that way, as intriguing subjects for my study, delight and entertainment. i scarcely knew my way round my own share of the reality. i wouldn’t presume to succumb to being intrigued by another’s. ivy didn’t know how to say that so she said nothing.

suddenly inspired after a deeply inhabited pause, dannion says, ‘you’re not stupid, but you’re doing it to, going along with it’

‘but i’m not denying the goad, that we’re obeying a will we’re too blinkered to identify. anyway, it’s not the point. they can’t think of a single reason for doing anything at all, except out of boredom, or out of a lust for sparkly, tantalizing things, as you yourself admit, and that’s not a good enough reason to create a culture, so they’ve given up thinking so that they don’t have to recognise that. and instead they calculate things and measure things and put things together and reason about them and read and write things and paint them and sculpt them and express great heaving passions in music and they satisfy themselves that that’s thinking and feeling and glorify themselves on account of it, but none of them is game to ask why about any of it, because they know they have no reasons at all, not even for breathing in the next breath.’

‘well, what are the reasons?’ she challenged.

‘well, there aren’t any. none that any human has ever brought to mind, anyway. what’s stupid is not admitting that.’

‘but that’s an awful way to think,’ said dannion, attacking on several levels, trying to quell me with a wet gush of pity, like water from a fireman’s hose, to push my words back down my throat, to scrub them out of my mouth with soap, and i see her big brother ashley’s eyes grinning evilly at me from under her lashes for being a threat to his sister.

robert and johnny jorgen are inseparable. model vintage cars are their passion. they spend their weekends together at jorgen’s or at our place. they say to me, ‘look, i’ve got a stiffy!’, sometimes robert and sometimes johnny. and they double up laughing.

they have girly magazines that they flash at me, and they hide them from my mother.

they play ‘split’, which is a game you play with with knives, heavy-handled army issue pocket-knives i’m not allowed to tell my mother they’ve got. they set their feet apart on the lawn and spin their knives with great force into the turf, as close to each other’s feet as they dare, and no flinching. they’ve banned it at school and they confiscate your knives. it’s a game of love, of trust, of i dare you not to trust me, an exquisite game, and i wish i could play it too.

once you get used to him, johnny’s bean-shaped head, his tallowy skin, his long, soft nose that seems to be dripping from his face like a dribble of wax from a candle and his teeth all set on edge like vertical venetian blinds are not so weird. of course i looked worse, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t see how ugly i was. he was just this kid practicing his macho swagger and his amorous glances on his best friend’s little sister – just fantasizing. and stiffy a-waggle, his astral body stalked me night and day, leering into my face, whispering into my ear, trying to blow in my ear and whisper me down to the floor like a horse. going ‘mine, you’re mine, you are mine, baby’.

and ivy didn’t know how to respond. so she turned over and fantasized something grand and wild that never knew of such visitations. but he wanted a reply and he knew the one he wanted. he was writing the script and he gave me personality he wanted it from, so compellingly that it hurt me, but i went under his power and gave it to him, though it was way outside my repertoire. so i gave it to him: oh! he offended there! it was offensive! an offence!  

what did he think i was? his mother? mine? it was so exciting, this offendedness. it was so very tall and towering. it had johnny jorgen’s eyebrows, this enormous offence-takingness. it had its hands on its hips and it stepped with spike-heeled shoes right out of a dirty magazine. it was blondie out of dagwood, and the big tits, big rubbery bums, little waists, loooonggggg legs and wagging finger grrls of the saturday evening post. it had a little wet twat and a mouth like an outraged matron. and he made an obscene gesture at it and leered. women are prudes.

but i was there, i was having a response. i was scared. i went: not me! not me! don’t do this to me! i am not this fe-thing, this gal, this broad, this shiela. i am neuter! and i tried to banish him with my waves of fear. but there he still was, dicky up, strutting, every step sending little ripples through the soft muscles of his little white bum. it stalked me on the beach, it stalked me on the street, it stalked me all the way to school and back, and the more i tried to shake him off the more i couldn’t.

and suddenly he was stalking me right into the schoolyard and only i could see him. well, ivy’s soul could but she could not bring it to consciousness.   

it was too full-grown for ivy, this indignation. it bore its flimsy images on an indigo flow out of who knows what movies, films that she’d never seen, who knows what mass-media wellsprings or where. it was living, beginning to be alive, moving with the speed of a waltz in full swing it caught her up, like a willy-willy picking up a column of quiet, innocent air and gaining velocity. with ivy for its soul this furious being danced spinning in ballet shoes ivy never owned right out of the brothers grimm, no, out of libby ackham’s attic, and it spun her and it flung me, swooning and sighing on the ground at his feet.

‘oh, yonny yorgen, my dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeamboat! i swoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon, i sigh, my daaaaaaaaaaaaarling, oh my swaiiiiiiiiin.’ batt, batt, batt went my eyelashes. and my body went running up to him in the schoolyard and said that, jeering back at him, ‘swooooooooooon.’ because i was still in his thrall and still compelled to act whatever part he wanted from me, according to his script.

and when he looked at me and sniggered, that did it, the dam busted, the portals opened and in from the schoolyard soulscape came a sharp, chill gust from the hollywood wasteland that in those says was just being infused into adolescent minds worldwide; and then, through the magpie dance of lenore thomas taking possession of me, in came the death swoop, along with these flying feathers that that willy-willy picked up and spun in, posturing, hand on hip, shrilling, ‘well, now, how do you like that?!!!!!!’

in it all spiralled, a gale-force pirouette culminating in a hard, hard, ringing, stinging resounding slap on the broad, hard cheek of his bean-shaped face. then ivy and lenore separated again, but there was a dozen or so others standing by, lending their energy. that was their sisterhood, souls of girls to my rescue.

again i sighed, i swooned, i spun and i slapped, and again, and again, spinning across the schoolyard with the deadly aim and inexorable intent of a willy-willy, before which his little willy, stiffy or droopy, his silly little willy-willy was mute.

and again, across the broken summer grasses, my feet on air, black on top and pink below, spinning, dancing, wild with rage spun from fear, spun along with the madness that is its own explanation, eyes blazing with a ray that could kill, i was the ghost, the spirit soul, the wirreenun in the wind, spirit of my sisters over and over again, slapping him down, until he’s just this young man of anywhere anytime singing spirit madness into the dreaming, singing the dreaming, singing her, until she rears up and lets flow a few dozen reptile-scaled and sinuous-necked avidly seeking heads down along her dreaming paths, finds her offender, this rude, offensive boy and strikes him smack in his face, slap bang in his puberty, right in the prime of his twentieth century. it spins itself into a devil, seizes every weapon it can, including ivy, spins into itself every eddy and column of silent air and strikes, again and again and again and again until he stops!

and then out of my head fell the crashed old tin cars, the trash of his childhood, his shame, his embarrassment, and every faulty thing he ever was, that he had rammed into my jolly roger skull, though he knew that hollow was a sacred place, the secret cavern of the talking head of a god.

until he falls down crying, and although he pretends that his two tears are only due to the stinging of the blow, we all heard the one gasp he gave and the one sighing sob.

no one could say it was fair – it wasn’t. as i said, he was just this kid . . .  but we were all just used by that flood of dreamtime rage, me, the magpie, lenore, johnny, robert, maybe even gaia; none of us had written the script. how well we the chorus scorned the fallen god johnny jorgen, beautiful now as any fionn maccumhaill on his thirteen year old knees in defeat, captured in the first of his sins, felled by the shock of ‘justice’ as orchestrated by the angel miss fergus, the headmistress, from the aethereal plane in a body of light, her wings still folded wetly under academic robes, her radiance small as yet and spitty with peccadillos of shame and pride.

oh, the sobering smells of asphalt close up. oh, the steely rap of it against the bended knee. nobody intervened. miss fergus’s body did not come running. the afternoon sun shone on the chromed handlebars of a couple of hundred bikes in the bike racks nearby. johnny jorgen stands slowly up again, and robert follows him away.

without a word, a girl named judy piper takes hold of my invisible chain, plucks at the bottle green sleeve of my blazer, and leads me away. donald chad is her boyfriend. in a safe niche we have conversations. in a triangle of love (they both love me, to my amazement), i’m held kindly; don’s eyes are casual, amused, hers are intelligent and scornful, like ivy’s. we talk about athletics, the sea, horses. and my insects. oh yes, nature. that they respect.

judy and i do laps round the oval after school, the cold rain stinging our legs, our breath hard and demanding in our chests. all winter long i get up at six, go to the beach and swim, sometimes with heidrun or robert or both, sometimes alone. after the swim i run to the main street jetty a mile away in my bikini, even in the winter storms, easily keeping pace with robert, who likes me suddenly, now that johnny jorgen’s family has moved away and johnny has left the school.

no longer haunted by that boy, i am feeling my strength again, the sun on my hard muscles, the hard fist of the wind in my chest, the massive power of the stormy sea failing to pull me off my firmly braced feet. though it sucks the sand away from around them, they dig themselves further in, and the lion’s-paw waves claw futilely at my ankles, and then slide away empty.

judy, and donald who lives near us and is now temporarily robert’s best friend to go surfing with, are feeding me power and kindness every recess time under the rafters of the shelter sheds. i take it in like a basking lizard, without trying to rationalise it. dannion auger, circling about mournfully at a greater and greater distance from us, finally attaches her unwanted self to the largest group of 1a girls, who all ignore her.

this is a court and has two queens contending. the prize is the throne. second prize is not second place to the queen, but ignominious banishment. they contend furiously in the sunny mornings outside the 1a classroom, their satchels between their ankles, and as bell time draws near, we paeons sometimes find ourselves imperiously bidden enter.

the contending queens are the two tallest girls in the class. amanda jones is the prettier. she is a dancer and a singer. she has her hair put up and permed for the stage and wears spangled costumes and long, white marching boots with soft soles. she shows us all the photographs, big glossy photographs in full, rather lurid colour. but chris leader is intelligent and strong. she has large knuckly fists, piano-playing hands with a good wide span, and a queenly demeanour. amanda is flirty. already she is turning vicious, anticipating defeat.

i come top in everything except maths, which chris leader, who is coming equal top in english, second in french, top in geography (which i don’t do), equal top in science, and close to top in everything else along with three others, and is also a possibility for top of the class, notices. ‘what is pusskin’s name?’ she asks me, lifting a soft whiff of cat hair from my blazer with a carefully manicured finger.

‘bluey,’ i tell her.

‘boy or girl?’

‘boy.’

‘you shouldn’t pick him up while you’ve got your uniform on. dismissed!’i smile fondly at several more cat hairs on my sleeve. chris shifts her attack to judy, her rival in athletics. i can run faster and swim better than either of them, but for davy’s sake i don’t do it for the school. i remain distant, reflecting their hostility. that way i stay open to him.

the talk is about horses, the management of a difficult mare. although chris is not a horse girl, she has seen judy with her mare. they went through primary school together, and were once best friends.

‘too much condition on her, that’s what’s wrong, and she’s not being ridden enough. i’ve got too much homework this year. i shouldn’t have taken on latin. geography’s easier they say.’

‘do you still ride her round and round that little ring you’ve got set up?’

‘when you’re training them, yes, there’s a lot of that.’

‘round and round and round? poor things.’

‘they enjoy it.’

‘just going round and round endlessly? round and round in this one same little circle, over and over again? this eternal trotting round and round . . . ?’

they wrestle the conversation this way and that, and soon judy weakens. it’s opaque, that kind of ploy, the way chris plays. she learnt it from english schoolgirl magazines and annuals. sometimes she crows, ‘oh, jolly dee, girls!’ and ‘i say, simply spiffing, old stick!’

by the time chris had finished with her, judy’s transcendental self was on that transcendental mare going round and round and round with a peer-group audience peering through the railings at her, and she’s explaining her riding skills (she’s a bit inclined to skite) to them all eternally as round and round she goes. a beautiful work of enchantment it is.

and when it was done, dannion was at my elbow, her grin ugly and big, her eczema stealing over my skin, her dandruff on my sleeve. chris took my chain from the defeated judy and handed it to dannion, showering down upon us a warm shower of honey fragrant golden aethereal light, her sovereign approval, while the inner court applauded.

amanda gives me a look of pure hate and stalks off with a big fluffy bunny tail bouncing on her pert little dancer’s bum.

dannion sang a steel blade of vile venom and madness between me and my spirit, and called in the spirits of her brother, her sister, her mother, her aunty, and very often one of her dogs. she poured her furious warm vomit of comforty love that smelt like warm baby piss into me in the form of conversation that was sick in every idiom and metaphor, poisoned in every intention and wish, maudlin and mawkish and mad.

‘don’t you wish you were chris? she’s popular, she’s intelligent, she’s got a good figure, she’s attractive too, without her glasses, in her bathers, i mean. she’s so tall and thin. aren’t you jealous of her? i am. i’m green with envy of her. what ho, what a sinner i am. oh woe is me.’ she bestowed on each word as she pronounced it the pus-weeping scabby lesions of her disease.

she clove to me until school broke up, with me still top in everything except maths, in which i came bottom, with sixty three percent.

‘why?’ my mother asked me. ‘you were very good at maths when you were still tiny. you knew all your tables up to your twelves when you were only five. what is it you can’t do now?’

there was none of it i couldn’t do. but i couldn’t do any of it.

flinging away from the sink she accidentally catches me a stinging smack in the eye with the wet end of her tea towel. i clap my hand over the streaming eye, sucking in a long, cold breath. pain!

‘let me see. ivy, show me, for god’s sake, let me look!’ she pulls at my wrist and her soul flows via her ajna centre into my attic, where libby ackham hangs from a peg like a wooden coppelia, blinking gently, half asleep, where the dust lies undisturbed by dancing, the cobra skin gone and the closet door, the toilet door, shut tight. she battles with its rattly brass knob for a long time, and when her hand slips off it at last, despairing, snap!!! it springs open like a jack-in-the-box, and there, squatting like a malicious little devil obscenely on an inkwell toilet that somehow symbolizes me, is dannion auger, her head almost split in two by her malignant jeering grin. her lips, her big square teeth, her eyes did not move.

no sound came with the flow of words from her to my mother. ‘it’s mine,’ she snarled. ‘maths is mine.’ she pointed to the inkwell, and now my mother sees that it was once mine, long ago, when i was only five. it was carved from wood in the shape of a chess king with silver trimming, and its cross and crown formed the lid. the well itself was lined inside with porcelain.

she herself had let me have it, with a quarter inch of real, clear blue quink ink, and a real nib pen to dip into it. i’d lost it, and she’d been cross. it had been my grandfather’s. a vile stench of dannion’s shit comes from it now. but for all that, and for her hard work upon it, dannion was never very good at maths, though it was her best subject.

‘i’m too tired.’ said my mother. ‘i can’t deal with this.’

‘it’s all right,’ i tell her. ‘it’s the least of my worries.’

‘how will you do a science degree without maths? you can’t do science without it, and you can’t do entomology without science.’

‘mmm.’

all summer i’m on the beach. i pass heidrun’s house on norton street to get there and sometimes we go together. occasionally i go to the jetty with libby ackham, who is still not allowed to swim outside the flags, and who anyway, likes ogling the life savers. but usually i’m alone. i swim out deep alone, duck-diving, swimming under water, or floating, adrift upon the heavy green water, the music of the breakers bearing me up like an offering.

i walk alone at the edge of the water, looking out to sea. dannion auger lives right on the seafront in a big stone house with no front garden, only a sort of long, low dune with some wiry bits of couch sticking out of the sand. i don’t look up from the bit of beach i’m walking on, at the people on the beach, those swimming in the sea, or at dannion’s house. but she’s never on the beach any way, or if she is, she doesn’t see me, or anyway, she pretends not to. so all summer i’m alone.

i hear the ocean, the seagulls, the children’s shouts, the laughter of lovers, the amorous cat-calls of louts at sheilas only a year or two older than me going past in their bikinis with their trannies dangling from their wrists. the beatles are all along the beach with their sobering graphite-grey harmonies, and all the girls squeal with the agony of loving them, they’ve got such warm and cuddly big brown dogs’ eyes.

but not me. i’m not a girl, a sheila. i don’t want one of them, or anyone who looks like one of them, to wanna hold my hand. i’ve heard no music on this planet but the sea and the wind and the thunder in the storm. (the only songs i’ve ever really loved were barefoot boy and i wanna be free, but that was years ago. no one sings them anymore.)

there is a hard tension in my jaw. hard-mouthed, i am. i catch the faintest trace of davy now and then, in the arc of a gull’s flight, in the shift of light over a curling breaker, the glance of sunlight off the wet, glistening sand. but the forest is gone and my fleet and rapid and cry are only the friendly beach dogs who are willing to go a mile with you for a scratch behind the ear, and the demanding gulls incessantly trying to extract from you the crust of a pie or the end of an ice cream cone.

i chew gum, walking alone, invisible on the crowded beach. no one knows me. i have no identity. i’m just this passing stranger, barefoot and free, with an air of mystery.

when i go into my bedroom, it is an inn, a tavern, some hidden, underground dive. when i catch sight of my reflection in the mirror i see standing beside it a man, a stranger standing in the shadows calling my name, a boy’s name: he calls me zeke.

my grandmother left me that dressing table. its large swing mirror, set crosswise in the corner and tilted at the correct angle, reflects my face - head and shoulders, chest up, waist up, or hips up, depending on where i stand, from almost anywhere in the room.

this stranger wears dark clothes, a suit and tie, and a dark grey hat; his lines are vertical. he has sad, hard, eyes and busy hands, and he shuffles some small pieces of paper he’s holding in front of him.

i spin to face him. two men close on me. each seizes an arm and a leg and together they overpower me. i could struggle, one against two, break free and escape, leaving all three men stretched out cold on the floor, but the man in the mirror is holding a gun. it is aimed at my heart. i am subdued.

he speaks, his long, slow voice reluctantly grinding words to which i gradually succumb. we are not after all in an inn: it is a large, almost empty room, l-shaped or t-shaped if you counted the recess under the stairs, with a few pieces of bulky furniture, indistinct in the grey, dusty light. footsteps on the creaking wooden floorboards overhead are echoing from the high, unceiled roof. one of the rooms in libby’s old house?

the man in front of me is bert schilder the vice principal and he is examining my attendance records.

he’s a very good man, bert schilder, a rotarian and a voluntary charity worker. suddenly something he says shocks me. i jerk my head up and glare at him. he is tall and thin, and behind him burn seven candles in a candelabrum. i hear myself say, ‘no, padre, i know nothing of this.’ i twist and writhe and my hair is seized and my head pulled back sharply, and i stop, shot through with pain.

bert schilder, seeing that i’m controlled, steps forward and touches my head, asks me questions to which i reply, ‘no, rabbi, no, father, no, sire, i know nothing of these things.’

when my head is released i spit magnificently onto the floor at his feet, an inch from his polished school shoe toe as i’ve seen a woman do in an intense drama on tv.

at once i am slapped hard in the face, the impact splitting the inside of my cheek, almost breaking my neck. my mouth fills with blood, blood appears on my lips, runs down my chin. my head rolls from side to side, but i do not lose consciousness.

i hear their voices like voices underwater, and i know that they’ve let go of me, these men, and i’ve fallen to my knees.

i am propping myself up on trembling arms and swaying a little, my vision clearing. the king still stands in front of me. a man still stands at either side of me. a few other people stand further back in the shadows deeper in watching laconically.

i stare up at bert schilder, the king, i try to sit up, and they let me, though it takes some time, and the room swings wildly. in the swirling haze i see the long, slow slide of his sword from his scabbard. i feel its point, cold and stinging, prod the gristly swell of my larynx. i bat it away with my arm and the effort nearly tips me forward. i see the blade spring back. i feel it hit me on the right side of my neck, feel the pressure on it as he tries to steady it, to regain control of it, and incidentally, he steadies me.

he fixes me with eyes of cold stone. my eyes are just as hard and cold. he laughs and i snarl. i’m recovering. i’m bunched, ready to spring. he lifts the sword and flashes it in my eyes. the vague daggers of white dazzle spraying from its edges hurt my eyes vaguely. it is a very long double-edged sword of tempered steel, a single large ruby in the pommel.

‘just answer my questions, rebel, and you’ll live. refuse, and you die.’

‘i have answered you,’ i tell him, in hard, dry voice.

he raised the sword. up high into the air it flew, and at the zenith of its swing there was a loud, crimson shout shot through with scarlet and yellow, and the sword came down wild and askew, hitting hard at the base of ivy’s neck, side on, cutting muscle, sinew and vein but not the artery, bruising the flesh around the wound. blood spills out upon the floor. ivy slumps forward and bert schilder and the shadowy men and women fade away in a fuddle of drowned sounds and are gone.

when i come to the room i’m in is one of the little garret rooms in libby ackham’s attic. i have an awareness of the sprawl of the empty house beneath, two floors of dusty, hollow-sounding wooden rooms, grey with many generations of human, bird, cat, dog, rat, mouse, parrot and bat squames, and the soft downy scales from the wings of moths long gone.

libby is hanging quietly beside a door, on a coat peg, pale, silent, her eyes closed. she is beautiful like that, in that context, in her leopard skin leotard, her hair unkempt, her eyes long and lynxy even while closed.

my wound has been skilfully doctored and bound up with herbs.

i walk about the attic for a few moments, nursing the long, slow, sucking ache; touching the big, empty packing crates, the rafters, the walls; peering through windows too dusty on the outside to see through, too stuck to open, this attic, this home, and she hanging there, silent and still.

‘why is this here? why am i here?’ i ask her.

she opens her eyes. ‘it’s yours. don’t you like it? you go downstairs and the outside doors open onto england. surry. it’s beautiful there.’ it’s always mud and icy slush in your shoes, sleety and cold, chilblains and wet misery, oppressively a-scamper with voles and moles and weasels and shrews, all pretty and velvety and dripping wet. ‘and you can go back more than four hundred years in the old wing, to when it was first built.

‘there are people living here most of the time – a whole succession of families and servants and summer-long guests. oh yes, they’re aware of you. they don’t mind you. you have to play along with them a bit, to have hanged yourself in the attic a few generations ago – like this; only you only pretend. you bang up and down the stairs and they catch glimpses of you. don’t you want it? i’ve finished with it.’

‘what will you do instead?’

she sighed, and was a long-legged bird on a high branch, a metal-taloned eagle on a cliff, a black swan on the frothy cappuccino drift of a billabong. the hands of the river gums are working her soul into their cats’-cradle dreamings, are weaving her turunga out of clouds and the smoke of burning emu bones and the spirit of a heavily antlered she-ant with her campfire way up in the sky.

‘will you keep your cobra skin?’

‘i have given it to you.’

i find it around my waist, fastened like a belt by a turned wooden buckle to which it is crudely stitched with white cotton doubled, the ends chewed off and left hanging. between my fingers it is as smooth and liquid as when the snake wore it.

my fingers have a memory of it. they’ve been touching it in awe for a few days, trying to tell my mind.

but my mother has decided that i have stolen libby’s house, for which cruelty i amply deserve dannion’s nasty little devil, and that’s why dannion is being allowed to punish me. now that libby has gone, dannion’s devil works an evil magic, intricate and stultifying, made of many silver silken strands. ‘oh, i’m so intricate,’ she says. ‘don’t you find me intriguing?

because she’s there when we go back to school, waiting for me at the bike racks, green with envy now that she’s seen me with a friend. all she wants is for me to be her friend. i don’t want her. i can’t address the problem. i can’t achieve an attitude to it.

she’s ancient, or her soul is, look, four hundred years is nothing. and yes, ancient is the scary little doll she’s being, jade-eyed, mother-of-pearl-skinned, golden-feather-haired and magical, dressed in soft, fine kid leather, adorned with iridescent beetle carapaces and shiny, scarlet seeds, still potent and alive and ready to grow.

one day she’ll precipitate it, soul, spirit and all, as potent and alive as her seeds, permanently into the matrix of the matter we’re made of, the atoms of this continuum, she will. the ancient gods have promised it eternal life!

she threatens to make a shower of solid gold which will fall from the air within her intricate, envy-green aura: oh please, like me, do! and nearly busts herself.

but it hurts, it cloys. i say, ‘i don’t want it, all that gold and glitter. i want to be libby’s ackham’s beatnik, austere, solemn and wise, and nothing aglow.

‘my aunty onny’s got this farm, with this decrepit old house, great fun if you like old houses. its full of all this ancient old furniture – old sofas, big old dressers, eight jacobean dining chairs with an enormous carver – worth a fortune every stick of it if she’d sell it, but she doesn’t need to, she’s got pots o’ dough. pots o’ dough!’ i find my head stuffed with feelably hard-edged gold coins that impair thought.

she is like the duchess at alice’s shoulder, and like alice, i’m helpless. no she's worse. she whinges.

‘oh, it’s not fair that i’m ugly. look at chris leader! she’s pretty, intelligent, popular – she’s got everything. wouldn’t you rather be her than you?’

‘there’s not one fragment of myself that i would be willing to swap for any part of anyone else.’

‘but you’re not happy! you’re not pretty, you’re not rich, you’re not popular . . . ’

‘dannion, i don’t understand how anyone as intelligent as you are could deal in such cliches.’

‘but are you ever happy? i never am.’ but she was chastened a little and beginning to bleat.

there is a slow, cool ripple of a breeze through the light reflected off the asphalt. kids’ voices are like birdcalls; hurled like yonnies they are making rainbow parabolas, taking bird flight across the sky. many colours, many shapes, much information. there is a rolling undertow in the vibration from mansfield road that carries a light but steady flow of traffic past the school, drawing away gross humours.

‘i’ve got an inferiority complex, that’s what it’s doing to me. i’m depressed. look how bitten my nails are. we’ve tried everything: bitter aloes, gloves, everything. and everyone knows i still suck my thumb. just when i’m thinking – i’m not even aware of it, even when people are looking. it’s awful. i just feel so inferior. don’t you feel inferior?’

‘no. i don’t admire them.’

‘ah, yes. but you’re intelligent.’ she narrows her green eyes and plucks up some grass, for we’ve now reached the 1a lawn and sat down. ‘my dad’s a headmaster. yours is just a teacher, isn’t he?’

‘yes.’

‘has he got a degree?’

‘i don’t know.’

‘mine’s got a b.a. hons.’ she let that hang in the air for a moment before she conceded, ‘my mother’s only an infant teacher. yours takes grade six.’

‘yes.’

‘how many rooms has your house got? ours has got ten.’

‘eight, if you count the bathroom.’

‘have you ever eaten shark? my aunt onny always has all this food: ham, pork, fish - mmmmmm! pot’s of dough, they’ve got! pots of dough!’

i felt ill, replete, and bloated.

ivy's aunty and uncle have a wheat and sheep farm near furthing. ivy's aunt breeds racehorses for a hobby and her uncle’s on the wheat board. ivy doesn’t know if they’re rich or not. they kill a pig every now and then. they often serve venison – there are wild deer on their land. their best horse is mr proud. he’s won several races, once or twice with a world famous jockey on his back. i’ve patted him and fed him wrinkled apples. his stable name is george. my aunt broods turkey chicks in her kitchen oven turned down low with the door open.

‘my aunt onny’s got this dam full of the biggest goldfish . . . ’

i let my hair grow long. i lose my school hat. i chew chewing gum from the moment i wake up until i turn out the light to go to sleep, taking it out only when i eat food hot enough to melt it. in class i suck it discreetly and i’m seldom caught.

heidrun says to me, ‘what are you, a rocker or a mod? i’m a rocker. i like elvis.’ we still swim together, often meeting up on the beach.

‘i thought you were a surfie.’

‘no, not anymore. rockers have more fun. hey, i know. you’re a folkie. long hair, jeans . . . ’

‘i’m a beatnik.’

she stares me through and through but she can’t find me with a peer-group. all she can find is a dark, dusty attic with a couple of large empty crates for furniture, an empty noose hanging beside a door, and a big bloodstain on the dusty wooden floor attracting flies.