6. spellbound

            i come home from school alone.  i go to my bedroom, to my grandmother’s dressing table, whose big swing mirror is my portal into fantasy, which is also the counter at the doorway to the restless crowd around the tables, the smoky candles, full ashtrays and hot coffee in big, chunky mugs in the cellar of libby ackham’s old house. a folksinger is singing an old ballad: 

‘...and he’s taken out his good braided sword

that’s a-hanging down beside his knee ...’ 

i ask for coffee at my grandmother’s dressing table which has become the counter of a sort of beatnik dive, and the thin, dark woman in the mirror swings away to get it. wooden chair askew, i rest my arms on the table, and through half-shut eyes i scan the room, i suss out each person, the women long-haired, the men bearded, the mood soft-edged, a little starved. these are neither my friends nor my enemies. they know me, and they know davy. we’re well-known as among the best folk and protest singers on the circuit. famous in small circles, afficionados. and that too is closer to some distant reality than ivy could ever guess...

cars and kids on bikes are going past our front fence.  i drink my coffee.  i turn the record over.  joan baez sings it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.  the grade seven girls are crying outside mrs nanqueen’s classroom.  there are masters of war out there, high up in castles, deep down in impenetrable vaults, makin’ wars.  they are gonna blow up the earth. they have power and authority.  they have sleek, evil thugs, handsome men, hard and muscular, with square, straight minds incapable of passion, clean-fingernailed, clean-underweared, clean-shaven, clean-cut men who have no minds of their own, but only the structures of heartlessness, little maps of finite logic without any context, programmes they were given soon after they were born for a suicide that will take the world with them. blinkered, they are serene.) 

i heard a sound at the door a split second before it opened, and i am already on my feet, spinning away from the dressing table, across the floor among the startled tables towards the narrow stone stairs, but too late! three sleek, handsome american men, clean-cut, clean-shaven, in grey suits, white shirts, and quiet ties, hard-muscled, smooth-minded masters of war, stride swiftly into the room and one of them seizes me while the two others show the crowd half-standing, frozen, round the tables the muzzles of their guns. i am thrown to the floor. there is suddenly a set of iron shackles for my wrists and ankles: heavy are the links of chain, clean-cut and  grimly smiling the steel of them. i am gagged uncomfortably and taken to an unknown destination in a van, which is also my bed upon which i fantasize. 

there are stone walls and iron bars, and a hard bunk bed. there they tear my shirt away from my shoulder. a device is produced; the tip of it glows cherry red. for nearly five seconds it nestles against my shoulder blade, sending its warm, despairing shriek of molten pain down into the deepest cavities of my body. it convulses me. i clench my teeth, my fists, the toes of my bare feet, but i do not cry out.

so i am a slave. i am a slave to be bought and sold. zeke is my name. 22 is my number. i am a boy. i am a protest singer, and now a slave, because protest singing is illegal and protest singers are outlaws.  instead of costing the mad, clean-cut, suicidal society money, being expensively idle in a prison, i will become a resource, a coercible labour resource,  a slave.

and ivy had no idea how closely her fantasy resembled the actual experience of people in countries far away... 

i’m nearly fourteen and i’m feeling my age...

i must admit i'm very proud of my poems. they are wise, witty and well-made, the rhymes pretty well perfect, the rhythm also, so they scan precisely yet without straining the sense of the words. a couple have appeared in the school magazine and one won the junior literary prize. this latest one will be a long one. it will make people laugh.

it occurs to me while i’m writing it that it could be a real poem. i could write real poems about the inner curve of our reality. people, even adults, would find them obscure, deep, disquieting - like the inner core of reality itself. i could be a poet, like dylan thomas, t. s. elliot, and ezra pound, though i'd have to learn greek.

my hair is quite long enough for it.  my face is very pale and thin with only a normal amount of pimpliness. i’m thin as a wraith, hungry-looking as any starving poet, i’m ugly enough, and when not in school uniform i wear sombre colours that look mysterious and suggest much in a darkened attic. or cellar. libby’s house has two big cellars, one under the kitchen and one under the servant’s hall, in addition to the big shadowy attic where all the action happens.

i could be a serious poet. slowly at first, but inexorably the idea takes hold of me, and at the thought, the beatnik i am becoming feels a long, clinging satisfaction along the left side of her belly, like a cat ecstatic on its back being stroked with a fingernail. many beatniks are black. it’s, like, a black thing, daddy-o. they call each other cats. they play saxes and clats. they play bongos. they are languid and muted. the girls are called chicks, but i am not a chick. not that i'm a cat either. there's not much ivy can do with that. it's the only bit that jars so it disappears from mind and the fantasy wraps itself around her nonetheless. she is neither a cat nor a chick. she is a poet. a beat poet? a beat poet. beat poetry is deep and obscure, like black coffee.

when suddenly it is announced that my room is to be redecorated i choose a grainy textured paper with large, earthy brown sunwheels with rare ochre flecks, cream splashes, and a warm, orange-red light glowing up from behind for one wall, the longest wall, opposite the door. it has a leadlight window in it, whose chunky, mock-tudor frame i leave darkest brown. the other walls are yellow ochre, muted, and the heavy folk-weave curtains are in shades of orange and brown. i was not permitted black. the carpet is unchanged. my mother’s choice, it is charcoal grey. 

beatniks make their own sandals out of rope and eat wheat germ. their paintings are abstract, their poetry vers libre and their sculpture unintelligible. they wear dark glasses. they wear the ban the bomb insignia on the sleeve of their duffle coat.

 

ban the bomb, chant the beatniks. see them on tv, swarming in the streets, long-haired girls, bearded men, holding up their placards with the magic rune of peace!

‘ban the bomb, ban the bomb, ban the bomb, ban the bomb, ban the bomb, ban the bomb...’

 i wear the badge on my duffle coat sleeve, and invisibly on my school blazer sleeve, too. where the mods have beatles yeah yeah yeah on their rulers and the surfies have beachboys forever, and the rockers have i love elvis, i have  peace  and dylan  and ban the bomb on mine. 

dannion says, ‘you’re a strange girl, ivy.’ but these days i scarcely wince at the killing things dannion says.

there are no beatniks on the radio, in the top forty, on tv. beatniks don’t carry a tranny. i don’t listen to the top forty. there is practically no ban the bomb there except on the news sometimes, when they’re reporting on the ratbags and commos who do peace marches in the city. peace marches! the wierdos...

and dannion looks so dangerous when she says, ‘ivy – you’re strange.’

and the poems arrive.

            alive in a tomb, my blood beating long pulses,

            i grieve for my captive soul.

            the walls of my coffin about my sight tower

            and the shroud on my flesh lies cold.

 

            life denied me, a false half-life rages,

            melodramatic, over-acted.

            its horrid cast woos my terror from stages

            death-dark, voiceless and wicked... 

real poets don’t do punctilious rhymes and perfect scansion any more. so mid-victorian. and nobody admires tennyson these days, least of all dylan thomas.  

a true poet would know all the best poets:  coleridge, tennyson, browning; but suddenly there's that: my idol the magical word-wizard of wales, dylan thomas, utterly despised tennyson and scorned mercilessly those who admired his neat, tidy, beautifully scanned, blank verse, immaculately rhymed stanzas, and prettily potted up sentiments, jeered at the man who knew his tennyson 'backwards!'/ 

well now that was embarrassing. i found that out after i'd begun to snuggle in with tennyson, really admiring his works, familiarising myself with it, acquiring a small repertoir of quotes. and yes, i'd been guided by the pundits, who all agreed that he was a wonderful poet, one that every poet should admire. 

why did dylan thomas despise him? and what did he think then of coleridge? of keats and shelley? of byron? poor ivy was flung into insecurity. what if she got it wrong, admiring all the worng poets, the passé? surely wordsworth is a worthy idol, although i can’t get near him, nor byron, because they belong to gerald. he's the one for wordsworth. he’s doing a b.a. he has been laertes in hamlet. shakespeare belongs to him too. so i'm thrown back on my own resources, and they're not developed yet. 

and anyway, apart from a school anthology and the selected works of selected poets in the school library, i have not much access to anything twentieth century. but i’ve got my mother’s old poetry book called the book of narrative verse, which was unpretentious and rather racy, about highwaymen and wicked pirates, and they weren't meant to impress anyone so it didn't matter that they didn't. and in the bookshelf in the lounge were milton and dryden and pope. and in school we were encouraged to consider the poems australians were writing: judith wright, kenneth slessor and a.d. hope. all rather painful, really. it’s like they’re trying hard in school.  you can feel their c(t)rying. 

in libby’s house my soul discovers a third cellar outside in the stable yard. it’s only small, with a heavy wooden trapdoor and rickety wooden stairs into its fusty, cobwebby darkness, with no light coming in at all when the door is down, except that which slides obliquely in through the slits between the planks of the door, and there’s a queer, sharp, organic smell of coal. it becomes a cave in a desolate desert landscape if you let it, the demon explains, because there is one, not a very scary one, a kind of spirit guide. it can shift into a limestone cavern underground, with a floor of fine, white powdery lime and a high, domed roof. you get in at one end through a slanting, twisted chimney through fractured rock, its entrance hidden under a tangle of dead thorn bushes. the demon is invisible, but has a strange, felty, slightly oppressive sort of smell. 

and i can reach that cellar very easily by intending to and whenever i feel the need i can cut across to the cavern. 

although, having escaped from the stone walls and iron bars, the shackles and the chains, mysteriously, for i am an escape artist par excellence, i am searched for diligently by the clean-cut thugs of orthodoxy, and stalked constantly by a quiet mind-beam from a source i can’t identify, which will much later turn out to be woden, the god but not yet, not yet, and although there is a price on my head, i am safe in this cavern. it is far from their cities in a vast, unmapped wilderness that terrifies them. they search for me in city streets, in the towns small and large along the well-known highways, but they daren’t imagine that i don’t fear as abjectly as they do these vast, ancient karst plains with their  networks of haunted caverns and tunnels, and their subterranean lakes and rivers silently sliding away to the inland sea deep below the ground. 

the vacuum of the womb torn open

by the birth of the lamb with funnel eyes,

sucking sensations into the void of its consciousness,

there comes a great crow at the damp face

to drink the wet eyes...  

it's a play on words, that poem, the blackbird/blackboard that steals little children's vistas when they're only five, replacing views of the visible reality with things you have to know or you'll fail, or get the stick, or both. 

i strike flints together to make the sparks that ignite my skilfully tended fire that burns continuously with barely a wisp of smoke. i replace my conspicuous clothing with garments made of the skilfully dressed skins of the hares and rabbits caught for me by fell, my goshawk, which i sew by its yellow, wavering light, while their meat bakes in its ashes. by the light of a rabbit-fat torch lit from it i write poems. i cover the walls of my cavern with long lines of verse in charcoal on smooth, white rock, of poetry as wise and wild and deep as the hidden, secret lives of the limestone caves.

 and at school, suddenly one day, there was leilani. i was sitting alone, reading a book, and suddenly she was there, standing right in front of me, her shadow falling over my book. a brief phatic exchange and then she says ‘you’re over-rated.’  

leilani rowan was only in 1b, but she did so well in the final exam that the following year they put her up into 2a with us. 2a's emphasis was on matriculating and going on to university. she has spoken to me, to my bemusement, only once before. ‘i saw you at the central market last friday night,’ she had said. with my mother and father and two brothers!  i winced at the thought. 

she’d been paying close attention the day chris leader had ticked me off about the cat hairs on my blazer. once or twice i had felt her eyes on me. magical eyes, she had, rabbits’ eyes – or no, bunnies’ eyes, dark blue and liquid, with sometimes a strange little quiver in the pupils. i had even been aware of a wide, yellow walkway being prepared between her and me. the work had been in progress for more than a year, almost two, but it had made no sense to me, and i’d lost sight of it. so i was taken aback. 

‘i didn’t know i had a rating,’ i said, speaking with difficulty because of a flood of love for her which dannion’s knot had destined for a guts-ache, and gratitude too, because i felt that in a sense she was there to rescue me, perhaps her soul had said so. so i spoke in clipped syllables, careful diction, a sharpish, edgy tone. leilani has the ghosts of two boys with her. they are best friendsalthough they are both in love with her, but she rebuffs them both though she likes having them around. they call her the ice maiden. they peep out of her eyes at me briefly and then they are gone, back to their bodies on the other side of the drain that separates the girls’ yard from the boys’. they return now and then to hover near our heads while we talk. 

she laughs. ‘well, you have.’ she nods, sucking in her cheeks, which are flat and pale, with almost invisible freckles and a fine coating of silvery down. there is laughter in her enchanting bunny eyes. she is flirting with my slowly dawning manhood, feeding it a giddy, virilizing power. ‘you’re much admired. considered an enigma.’ and i'm so utterly amazed i don't know what to say. i feel like a gibbering idiot.   

dannion is nowhere to be seen. the exams are over and she has gone to attend a summer school in mathematics, so she has not been at school since they finished. 

leilani asks me if she can see my insect collection, and not sure whether she is laughing at me or not, i let her come home with me after school. she is genuinely pleased with my tiger longicorn beetle, thalia, a handsome specimen, which i’d carefully mounted following instructions in a book gerald had given me. she was still manifesting the mad and dangerous elf magic of its cosmic soul, though dead for almost a year. she was less thrilled by my small collection of scarabs, but respectful all the same. she was impressed with my taxidermy, especially with the mounting of a large, magnificent specimen of a preying mantis, green as grass with jupiter’s own eyespot in vivid orange and indigo on the insides of her forearms; and as a consequence, she genuinely admires me, though birds are her area of expertise. 

i invite her into libby’s attic where the folk singers are so hep, but she can’t orient herself there. it is, as she says, a geas, man, which translates into her father won’t let her. but she knows more about beatniks than i do. her older sister is arty, a ballerina, an existentialist, and speaks fluent french.

in this third floor room full of tables and chairs the light is so dim that people who aren’t moving tend to become invisible. there aren’t many people here - not twenty, but there are a few among them whom i know fairly well, though i know most of the others only by sight. there’s also a strange couple, a young man and a young woman, who won’t be staying long. she has her hair in a style, lightly coated with hairspray, a soft, round, christian face carefully made up, and a big, apologetic bottom. he is a pathological smiler, with hair oil, aftershave and a collar and tie. they are obviously ill at ease, feeling the hostility to them coming from the rest of us. they are altogether the wrong nest-smell for this ant hole.

homer is singing the blues. he is one of the best blues singers on the circuit. i have travelled with him on foot between venues, through farms and forests under cover of darkness, in the company of gypsies and draft-dodgers, ever alert for the clean-cut establishment cops. i’m a slave if i'm caught, a runaway. often he has hidden me, covered for me, taken great risks for me. i sit deep in shadow and move little. this strange couple represent a threat to me. they could report me.

            down the suck of the long days, into the dark of the night,

            down the suck of the long days, into the dark of the night.

            you just never could understand, baby,

            why it’s so wrong to be so right . . .

but it’s okay, the misfits are paralysed, too embarrassed to move. they stand out like a pair of brand new jeans. they have come to hear folksongs, fresh and wholesome and full of flowers and sunshine, and the noble sentiments of protest. but homer is uncompromisingly a blues man, so their applause is insincere.

clumsily, frightened by the twenty pairs of narrowed eyes that watched them enter, they have stumbled onto a central table in the path of the blurred beam of daylight coming through a clouded window, and they’re dimly spot-lit there, clinging to their mugs of coffee, with stiff, paralysed smiles on their faces, their skin cringing under the hostility of that room.

deep in shadow in her own corner, dannion auger sits silent and alone. torpid and without power, she is a prisoner there. we have broken most of her spells, shattered them with our drums, with our searing, soaring harmonicas, with the sustained steel-stringed insistence of our whining blues-curses, with our soft and sinister spirit-singing songs. she is impotently resentful, trying to withdraw and not able to, she hates us. in self-defence she does. yet she is less alien than the misfits.

well, if you wanna get to summertown, you know, you gotta get over that high hill . . .

when the door opens softly, just enough to let a tall, thin, black man through, thin as a liquorice stick, moving like a cat, all eyes flick over him, identify him, and then turn away. it’s oscar. he glances around the room, stares mildly for a moment at the misfits, then his glance flits to the darker corners and finds dannion in her corner and then me in mine. then he swings himself round to the counter and leans over it towards the dark-haired annie, who stands in the archway between the kitchen and the stage, listening to and occasionally contributing a harmonica commentary on homer’s blues, nodding her head as if drowsy, and swaying a little on her feet.

oscar speaks, and she begins her answer, leaves off to bury her face in her harmonica hands again, and finishes it when she surfaces.

you know if you wanna get to summertown, people,

you gotta get over that high, high hill –

 yes you do, now.

and of everybody trying to get there, baby, 

may-ee-be-ee it’s you and me-he-he the only ones who ever will.

there is applause, a little laughter, hands are clapped, words spoken and muted conversation rolls briefly through the room. oscar is now talking to annie and homer, and indigo jo is sitting on the packing crate in the dim beam from the other window where homer just sat, and she’s tuning her lute and talking softly in vague phrases to nobody about the song she’s about to sing.

four more people, loud and laughing, swing the door open wide and come tumbling in like kittens: a skinny white girl in a black leotard and a man’s white shirt, throwing playful punches at a young boy with a downy jaw line who is a well-known poet though he is only sixteen. he’s never spoken to me despite my reputation, which is already equal to his though i’m not yet fifteen. the other two are lovers. they cling to each other, dragging each other about by the sleeves, barking with laughter at the other two.

they all fetch up at the counter, and oscar teeters back, holding a mug of coffee, and finishes off his conversation with annie and homer, who then turn indulgent looks on the newcomers, subduing them to quiet chuckles and then seriousness.

oscar brings his coffee to my table, much to my surprise. he’s neither my friend nor my enemy. he’s never spoken to me before. he's a high-ranking cat. he passes some empty tables on the way, and leans across one or two occupied ones to greet friends of his. he relaxes into the scene before he looks at me. my face is screened by my hair. i see him through the screen of my hair.

indigo is singing a gaelic weaving song and oscar is faintly amused by it. the exotic ghosts coming up out of the heathery isles appear in their plaids within the smoky beam of light in which she sits. we see an eagle in a hebridean sky for an instant, a mere trick of the mind, the hallucinogenic effect of a thrice-repeated melodic phrase. we see the dance of the deft white hands over the heddle frames, hear the thrum of the shuttles through the taut woollen warp, and the clack, clack of the beaters. by the end of the song oscar is wearing a newly manifested plaid waistcoat, which he lets me glimpse, because he finds it somewhat funny, and so do i, though neither of us smiles.

the rowdy newcomers applaud loudly and indigo barely moves out of her song’s enchantment before she glides into that of a long, slow aeolian lilt in irish, bringing the wildness of the open ocean into the room, which makes conversations happen around the hissing tables like the swirling of the flowing tide round rocks. they sound like the purring of tight sails in a good steady wind, with the strumming of the rigging, and the purling of the waves at her bows. above it soars indigo’s voice like an erne, sweet and clear and free, and filled with a poet’s love.

the light is fading outside. more people arrive. oscar says, ‘zeke?’ and looks at my fingers. i have on a ring of crudely hammered copper upon which someone has scratched a rune, lagu, and the number 22 is written in scar tissue on the back of my hand, branded there.

i answer with a movement of my head, drawing a breath through my mouth. he talks about a place to hide, a place to live and be safe from the establishment goons and immune to their torments, or at least defended from them. not free, but better off. few go there, he says, a very few.

i look at the floor while he speaks. homer brings him a plate of food and i ask for coffee. indigo sings a death dirge in english, full of the majesty and venom of the saxon skald.

                        if ever thou gavest hosen and shoon -

                        every night and all –

                        sit ye down and put them on –

                        and christ receive your soul.

 

                        if hosen and shoon thou ne’er gavest nane -

                        every night and all –

                        the whinnies s’all prick thee tae the bare bane –

                        and christ receive thy soul . . .

oscar tells me more, tightly engaging my mind, twisting it a little, but not painfully. i look at the abalone shell ashtray, at the bongo drums slung by a leather thong over his shoulder, and at the bits of coloured plastic he has threaded onto strands of his hair, but not directly into his eyes. his skin odour bewitches me, dark and richly grained, acrid and yet also honeyed like some kind of wood – acacia, maybe. at last i take in a long, deep breath and nod, just a little.

 indigo sings something hushed and husky out of the future. the air takes on a glimmering, the pall of smoke is a suspension of fine silver. we listen to a few more of her songs, not talking any more, and then she gets up and, somewhat disoriented as she emerges from her trance, she finds her way to a table and sits down.

‘oscar?’ annie holds up a set of bongo drums to him across the room. there is a smattering of applause and he gets slowly up, wanders over to the crate, situates himself carefully beside it on the floor out of the light and begins to play some magical rhythms that melt matter, to which atoms must surrender with a sigh and might evanesce – almost – someday . . .

he keeps it up for twenty minutes or so, by which time the room is full and noisy, and then, without looking at anyone, he leaves. the room is in a state of anxiety, held between being and non-being. the sequence of oscar’s thuds and taps has loosed its grip on reality, has shown its atoms the arbitrariness of their sense of being, and left it teetering between its one logos and its choice of an infinite number of others; yet it has no power to choose, even if it knew how.

 and then, taking up my guitar, i sing some pain-driven protest, harnessing the fear. the crowd listens, drinks my songs, channelling the essence of them through their minds into the collective minds of the cities, of the country towns, of the parliaments and schools, and into the minds, multitudinous and diverse, of all the people of this planet, and by the end of it the anxiety has resolved itself into something sustainable and new.

                        can you ride an atom bomb to heaven?

                        can you ride an atom bomb for free?,

                        it’s easy to afford,

           there’s plenty of room on board

                       and i know you’ve got a ticket for me!

                                    but no it isn’t all right

                                    no it isn’t all right

                                    no, mr president,

                                    it isn’t all right with me!

homer catches me on the way upstairs to the attic where you can grab a lumpy cushion for a pillow and an old, prickly blanket and sleep, where the thugs can’t find you, where you’re warned if the cops come in at the door, because they’re banning folksongs too. they’re banning all music except the beatles and the usual establishment-approved, american, boy-meets-girl babble on your yellow plastic trannie, yeah! yeah! yeah! and he says, ‘watch out for oscar. he’s a dangerous cat.’

i give him a glance into my future and he frowns; he sees that i’m already dangerous too. he drops his hand from my arm rather too quickly, and then nods, and then sighs, and then shakes his head, and then i pass by, out of his reality into my own, my body’s, where as my mother's daughter, as a high school pariah, i live a feeble, bourgeois life full of silly little ignominious compromises that sometimes leave me feeling as if i’m about to faint. though not quite the pariah now, with leilani in tow.

i’m an ugly teenager, thin, pale and pimply. i fantasise far too much, far too deeply: in bed at night, at the breakfast table, on my way to school, in class, on my way home, at the tea-table, after tea, instead of doing my homework, on weekends, at the beach, on the bus to town and back in the city streets, i linger in the toilet where i can whisper my part, play my role, gesture and smile or frown without being seen, i take an hour in the shower. 

even when i’m with leilani or with dannion or both, talking lightly of this and that, of things of interest to the teenager i can’t even pretend to be, i’m pretending they’re not there, that i’m with people who are hep, who say only real, deep things, and when i answer i pretend that i’m really saying something worthy to be said in reply.

sun, sea, and sand and dannion’s malice have dried, bleached and made brittle my hair. my jolly roger skull they – don’t ask me who - have shattered – don’t ask me how. i just woke up one morning from a succession of roaring dreams i couldn’t remember, and for three days my head ached fiercely and fever raged, and there’s my head full of this ectoplasm, dry and corrosive like ashes, like al kali, and i’m told, ‘expend it, slave!’ and i’m kicked.

it isn’t easy. it takes a few months and i think with difficulty through a thick fog until it’s gone. but gone at last it is. i shed tears, normal adolescent ones, and on the sudden erratic spurt of a newly forged hormone i throw a large, very sharp kitchen knife at my mother, narrowly missing her, but god wot, if she goeth not out of my head and letteth not myself have the managing of it . . .

and at last i take up smoking, which purgeth such gross humours, and is most efficacious to calm the wrathful, rectify the irrational and quell what, i inform my antique ghost from the plaguey past, we nowadays call ‘paranoid delusions’; though lamentably, i add, at the expense of pulmonary health and at the risk of lung cancer. at last what remains is converted to an ivory bangle, which leilani eventually gives me as a gift. i haven’t got a lot of use for an ivory bangle. but then perhaps she hasn’t got a lot of use for the brass kaleidoscope i gave her.

leilani fascinates me. her father is a professor of french in the school of modern languages at the university at which we both expect to study french, where her older sister is already fluent. leilani gives me an edith piaf l.p. for my fifteenth birthday edith piaf is a guttersnipe, and a deep gutter it is that she inhabits, full of harlots and gypsies and beatniks and orphans and the abandoned bastard babies of the nobs, and it draws me into its current, its winding urban ditch of fecund effluent, across france, south into spain to a place and a time that is my own. these are my people. i find a refuge for my soul there, and a resource, and i’m more comfortable

i give leilani a twelve page mock-heroic poem about herself.

‘beatniks smoke pot,’ leilani informs me. she shows me a funny greeting card on which a cartoon beatnik in rope sandals and sackcloth carries a placard on which is written begin with zen. zen buddhists, i discover in an encyclopaedia, are peaceniks. they are burning themselves in protest at the war in vietnam. leilani’s brother’s marble is in the draft. he might get called up. in another two years it could be gerald.

she gives me a copy of a portrait of the artist as a young dog, and she introduces me to tintin, in french, of course. she handwrites napoleon bonaparte’s love letters to josephine, in her beautiful curly script, presses flowers in them, and gives them to me inside books of poetry i’ve lent her, as she returns them. wordsworth, at last, t.s. eliot, and matthew arnold. books i have bought by saving two shillings a day of my lunch money, spending only sixpence on a tosca. 

i give her an axolotl.

the quiver in her eyes is from concussion when she was ten. she has lost some points of her iq through that. she speaks in isolated anecdotes, which are like nouns without grammar, which she asks me to supply, gradually learning to trust me as i get good at it. we make something of it that looks to us both like her inner truth. they are beautiful, her anecdotes, like glimpses of leaves and insects’ eyes through a water drop caught in a twist of wire. she paints beautiful watercolours, and writes sophisticated scraps of novels, in the style of charles kingsley first, and later, thomas hardy. they thrill and awe me.

her wit is venomous, scorn administered with a secretive sting and a little shudder of triumph, her philosophy mercurial, her aesthetic wormwood. i am enamoured in a childish, innocent way, as schoolgirls tend to be of their best friends. totally platonic. out of my stung hands flow nevertheless poems, chuckling like spider venom, crying like fire, swimming in the clouds like a drowning moon. oh, i love her!

‘ivy doesn’t suit you,’ she said. ‘it’s not the right name for you.’ but it’s that black angel made her say that. oscar. we’re listening to thelonius monk and that always seems to walk him in, strutting down the sky, so self-possessed, so cool, joe cool. it’s his opinion.

‘call me zeke then.’

‘zeke? why zeke?’

‘it’s a nickname of mine.’ i shrug, but she knows in her soul about the brand on my shoulder blade and the brand on my hand and the tattoo along my cheekbone that says i’m a recalcitrant.  it’s the name oscar has always called me by. it’s someone else i am. she likes that. she is silent for a while and then she says, 'call me sparrow.'

she's an artist but she keeps her pictures hidden and seldom shows them to zeke.

it’s brave of her to love me. she has constructed a bond between us that dannion, stung and stung and stung again by leilani’s barbed quips, can’t break with any spell or curse. she stays close to me though, having no one else to lay claim to. she is like a little wire-haired terrier barking round our ankles while our words go right over her head. leilani gives her a kind word occasionally, which she relishes, but i still regard her with fearful hostility and almost never address her unless i’m forced to.

‘what’s wrong with conforming?’ asks chris leader, now close to six feet tall and class captain, captain of the junior girls’ hockey team, junior girls’ tennis champion, and top in nearly everything now that ivy isn't.

it requires too much compromise between what one really is and what some invisible tyrant’s fixed conception of the norm is. our selves are naturally diverse. everyone’s traits come from a number of different streams of potential: genetic, cultural, historic; and everyone has different ways of manifesting them. conformism narrows the range of wilfully manifesting forms of behaviour. that which remains unmanifested by individuals cut off from their own sources by the need to conform will try to manifest without any conscious moderation in subconscious ways, or in other words, randomly, as disease, for example, or deformity, or madness, social unrest, or war. we all have to manage our own streams-of-being according to peaceful principles. the form to which we are being coerced to conform under concealed threat of psychological torture is mad, mindless and mute, and maintains itself only by torture. that’s why this planet is attempting suicide.’

but i only said. ‘the norm is despicable.’ because that was true too. feeds its face, makes itself pretty and comfy and rich, and doesn’t give a fuck about the mad, the sick, the starving, the oppressed, the poisoned and the dying: cultures, peoples, species, traditions, languages . . .

chris squints a menacingly shimmering look at me through her thick lenses, as hard, thick, square, curved and shiny as a horse’s front teeth and says ‘i would be blind, just about, if it weren’t for this civilization that you hate so much.’

‘i think it is possible to envisage a world that produces lenses but not atom bombs.’

‘you boast that you’re not a conformist, and yet you conform. you wear those clothes, you grow your hair long, you wear your little badges and affect that pose. you conform to a nonconformist norm.’

‘not on principle, and no, i don’t boast.’

‘no. no, you don’t . . . tell me, zeke, why do you hate us?’

‘i don’t hate anyone. i don’t know anyone enough to hate them.’

but these conversations with chris leader were conducted always on her terms, with her own angel firmly in residence, its feet within her feet, its hands within her hands, its wings enfolding her, its face shining mildly out of hers. sometimes it would inch chris towards me until its wings could touch me, caress me, a little closer, and closer, until chris had her fingertips just touching my sleeve, the bottle green baize of my blazer, so that girls going past would snigger and say, ‘ooh, lesbi-friends!’ but in truth, we were pure as angels, as girls that age are.

‘for chris it’s all cut and dried,’ leilani explained to me. they’d gone through primary school together, leilani and christine. there was five minutes’ walk between their houses. they visited each other at weekends and had exchanged bath cubes, as leilani put it, at christmas for years.

but chris had fairly had me there, with her jibe at my carefully cultivated beatnik look.

‘you’re deep, zeke,’ she jibes. ‘you’re way down underneath everything, like a sewer rat.’

‘just checking the foundations.’

‘and what condition do you find them in, my pet?’

‘beloved, there aren’t any! all our basic assumptions and most pivotal criteria are entirely unfounded.’

chris leader plays the piano exceptionally well. she has done all the exams since she was six. sometimes she lets me see her soul, which is as enigmatic, rose-coloured and as faceted as a rosebud jellyfish, for that is her dreaming. it is a sensitive beast, vulnerable, easily hurt, and not much able to defend itself with its unconfident, easily degraded venom. its strength is that it has stayed true to form for millions of years. time-honoured and symmetrical, it honours time and symmetry: the quiet and orderly successiveness of events, the tissues and veins and delicate reach of sentience into the polyaeval ocean.

‘what about religion, the constitution, school spirit, patriotism?’

and she sincerely believes in them all, despite the persecution of scholars and prophets down through the ages, the white australia policy, the war, the bomb, and the systematic slaughtering of children’s souls in churches and in schools. and perhaps if she didn’t it would hurt the perfect symmetry of rosebud jellyfish.

she doesn’t believe at all in these dreadful things: that religion has degenerated to stories of a cosmic santa and advice to young girls about drinking at parties, because even when it’s real it is never more than a thin tinkling of irritating music that no one even listens to let alone dances to: that the constitution is a fabric of lucrative loopholes that enables the economy to parasitise the otherwise preoccupied peoples of earth till it’s like having a tightly coiled tapeworm for a brain, that school spirit is the spirit of war still in the egg, that patriotism quails with shame whenever it’s glanced upon by any mind that isn’t in its stultifying thrall. and perhaps if she did believe it, then too the perfect sequentiality of immature rosebud jellyfish forms would degrade . . .

‘you’re exalting the us-against-them,’ i protest, ‘ and it’s ‘let’s pretend until it’s real’, and when it’s real it’s terrible. how likely is wynvale high to drive us out of our brand new assembly hall into the streets, to slay all our teachers and sacrifice our prefects to their alien gods, to rape our virgin first years and force our boys and ugly girls to labour in their ant parades and do all their yard duty detentions for them? the reds, now? look, if the soviet union or timbuktu, for god’s sake, or even america rises up against feeble little us, our hope will not lie in the splendour of our battle frenzy, or the muscularity of our patriotism, but in the sanity of people in offices with their minds on things, on avoiding war.’

she narrows her eyes, till she looks just like the news magazine hate icons of stalin. ‘do you mean we shouldn’t be prepared? do you want us not even to have the means of trying to defend our country?’

‘you don’t have to train the family dog to be aggressive to get him to protect you. it’s the dog that’s been allowed to grow up romping with the kids and snoozing with his head on your feet that attacks anyone who tries anything on you. that’s if he’s still got anything left of his soul, that is. look, against smaller countries than us, we could be kindly. against the big ones, ussr, usa, europe, what can we do but just smile vaguely and succumb?’

‘we shouldn’t have fought against hitler?’

‘it wasn’t patriotism that sent us to war against hitler. we were the family dog, the whole world is our family, and as family, the jews, gypsies, negroes and the rest had a claim on our loyalties. they were threatened, and we sprang to their defence. most of our militia weren’t professional soldiers trained for a career in killing: they just happened to care enough to fight for mercy; and not patriotically for australians, but for gypsies and jews and people who are black. patriotism is a tadpole tail. it’s time to stop investing in it. it’s a terrible drag on an emerging frog. maturity is altruistic.’

and perhaps i had her there.

the asphalt is grey and pleasant. i like the way it is broken like piecrust around the trunks of the gum trees. starlings and sparrows, urban birds, are all that we see in their branches. hardly even any parrots or cockatoos these days. pigeons coo and strut along the gutters of the high, modern school buildings. silver gulls beg us for crumbs from our oslo lunches. after the rain, asphalt has a peculiar sweetness like no other smell.

‘well, if not patriotism, what are our true foundations to be? universal love.’

‘vision.’ says zeke.

‘not love?’

‘love is the result of vision.’

‘love is the result of religion,’ says chris leader, a false hope dawning.

‘religion is superstition.'

'religion is superstition!' she echoes. '...killing all visionaries except the ones who see god on a cloud telling us how to cripple our children’s spirits,’ said chris leader’s crippled child-spirit, and to demonstrate she dealt me, with a strange burst of cackling laughter, a blast of a near lethal ray the impact of which didn’t register till i got home when the pain of it blossomed like a severe attack of heartburn and left me too debilitated to attend school for almost two days. deep, deep pain in the soul that turned my inner muscle purple and made nerves groan in my flesh. the doctor was disinclined to believe me, and he made that clear, but what else could he do? he wrote me the necessary certificate.

and was this a dream? i am under the forest trees. under the hazel brake the she-wolf lies down. two ravens watch me. dannion is there, shrunk to about three feet tall in a cloak of magenta velvet, keeping close to the trunk of an oak, camouflaged in its purply black shadow. muzzled, she cannot speak. christine leader is there full height, in her school uniform, but without her hat. she has her eye on the she-wolf; she moves like another shadow, made steely grey by fear, honed to razor sharpness by her fear. leilani is there a little behind her, cool and alone, outside the ring. mike avalon and jim eckhart, alpha males both, are there too, and four other girls and one other boy, also an alpha. there is menace and threat. leilani is cool. the she-wolf laughs softly but nobody hears her but me.

i will need help. acknowledging this, rapid rises and vanishes into the deep shadow beyond the heavy, green, liquid light of the clearing. they have hunted me here to this spot, stalked me, and now they surround me. leilani is cool, sometimes looking at me, sometimes not.

‘why are you here?’ christine thinks that the wolf has slunk away at her telepathic command and is emboldened to assume authority.

‘do you mean in this forest… on this plane of existence… on planet earth? i can’t discern your context.’

there is a silver flash, a flying arc, and i am struck swingeingly across my left side. our christine wields a whip, albeit invisible. the pain is acute.

(somewhere down there on the concrete path between our house and the school deep in fantasy, though not about this, i shift the weight of my satchel in my hand just slightly, and with that swingeing whack in the ribs of my left side i wrick my thorax. the sudden pain takes my breath away. for a couple of days it is severe, and then it just aches for long time after.)

leilani is impassive. dannion’s terrier eyes are full of pathos, of expressions, of language i can’t read. i’ve never had a dog. more than once i’ve held a little warm being squirming in the fragrance of its soul, its animal appeal, its promise of the depth and beauty of dog, in my hands, tried to give it to my mother, tried to plead with puppy eyes to my father, and they’ve said no. so though i read well between the malice and envy of wolf the pride and ferocity of its love, i don’t speak or read the language of dog. i can’t read dannion’s appeal.

‘why are you here?’

and i still don’t know what she means. 

i’m in a lot of pain. my neck, my shoulders, my back, my ribs, my spine, my pelvis. my fingers feel broken. i can’t remember the rest of my dream. i turn over in bed with great difficulty. but there are no marks, no swellings, no bruises. leilani calls me a malingerer, laughing softly with what could have passed for affection. woden, standing in the corner almost camouflaged by the black coffee and amber sun wheels in his dark brown cloak, keeps his one ice-blue eye on leilani. rapid’s scent is in the room, but not rapid. 

leilani speaks haltingly, softly, like a spider. with one fork of her tongue she says, ‘you could capitulate now, and we’d all be your friends.’ simultaneously with the other, the one that’s supposed to be the only one that’s real, she is saying, ‘you’re a big disappointment to us all, zeke. you’re a sham.’ she doesn’t seem to have seen woden or to know that he’s there. and i’m really confused, still looking for context and not finding it.

‘does it really worry you that i miss a lot of school?’ two days off this time, maybe another day tomorrow if i still feel bad. i barely passed my exams this year, with only one a, one b and the rest ds. don’t my latest poems please her?

                        ‘over this grey mountain

                        cold grey rivers run

                        pushed in on each side by cold grey stones…’

she only shakes her head and laughs softly. would i like to go bird watching on the weekend, up to the mount danger conservation park?

yes, i would.

there are red wattlebirds there, somehow, she insists, very interesting they are. a totem spirit.

would she like to hear my dizzy gillespie lp?

like, yeah.

she fights hard then to capture in her aura the form, the shape, the outline of the dark, sculptured face and lean physique of oscar, trying to invoke him as she does jim eckhart or peter avalon, whenever she wants to, as she boasts. but oscar declines that kind of invocation. leilani releases him with a sigh. but he walks in on the music and helps her to dig it, sharing his experience of it with her. real cool, daddy-o, says leilani.

‘we really only wanted to be let in,’ she confessed a few minutes later.

‘we?’ i see my brother robert walking with her as with a lover, like the picture of bob dylan and suze on the cover of the free-wheelin’ bob dylan towards the door of my house, wanting my attics, my cellars, to sit among my charismatic ghosts. christine is with them with dannion looking like a little monkey, in her leather muzzle, making wide-armed monkey gestures, showing them the way in with a fixed smile of betrayal. but the more they walk towards the door the further they get from it. they cannot reach it.

‘there’s more to it than that,’ i venture. 'you're not on the right wave-length. i can't fix that.'

‘you could if you wanted to. why don’t you go out with boys?’

‘i don’t want to. that’s the road to marriage and i’m going to stay single. i don't like kissing.’ besides, i said, with the other fork of my tongue, i am a poet. but i couldn’t tell her that. she’d think i was boasting, and i wasn’t, not at all. ‘i’m neuter,’ i remind her, and she laughs.

‘you don’t have to marry anyone. it’s just a way of being normal. having fun. socializing. of showing that you like us.’ there was a flash of threat with that, then: ‘why don’t you let us into your house?’

i’m slow catching on. she isn’t really my friend. she really isn’t my friend. she isn’t here to soothe my wounds. it isn’t her and me against the rest of 3a. it’s me against them all. it shafts through me, that insight, like a ray of cleansing light, leaving me light-hearted and easy, resting lightly and easily on my bed, not minding the chill and burning of those fingers of pain that cradle me as a mother’s hands cradle a baby.

and then woden detaches himself from the shadows and moves to my bedside. he reaches out with one long arm, and with one long, aged yet still shapely finger he touches my cheek. i barely flinch. to me he says, ‘i have bought you, slave.’ to leilani he says, ‘tell them that. tell your friends i have bought this slave. that this slave now belongs to me.’ but perhaps she doesn’t know who he is.

it gets dark and chilly and leilani must catch a bus. i hear her chuckling with my mother about something, and i hear the front door shut. her footsteps over the concrete, the swinging of the little wooden gate between the hibiscuses and i am alone again, listening to the quaking of my inner being though it sounds so distant and so irrelevant, dimly aware of the beating of a drum somewhere in another reality and the stop-and-start cooing of a reluctant flute. or is it some kind of swan? then a vicious-faced young woman and a quiet old woman with shrewd eyes come through the chimney breast and tend my wounds, paralysing my light flutter of fear with their sharp words in a language i do not recognise.

i have always loved the mallee,’ my mother says. ‘there isn’t a more beautiful tree on earth, especially after rain. to walk through the mallee after rain…’

i see her among those many graceful pink- and grey-armed trees, and she’s balancing her large bulk ridiculously, because she has recently grown rather fat, and having been painfully thin all her life she has not yet got over the embarrassment.

‘don’t you love the mallee?’

‘no,’ i replied. ‘it’s ugly. not enough leaves, and they’re dull-coloured, and they’re all in clumps just anyhow, and there’s all that dead rubbish under them.’

‘how can you say such a thing? you grew up in the mallee.’

‘no. we were in the town. we hardly ever went out into the scrub. and when we did everyone was too worried about snakes to let us have much fun. there were only ever carpet snakes though, and i hardly even got a look at them. you know what boys are.’

‘i just don’t see how you can say it’s ugly.’

but most things are ugly. some dogs aren’t. cats aren’t. plane trees aren't. some flowers aren’t: fuchsias, foxgloves. most music is. and the night sky sparkles like the stinging of eczema.

raymond fennis was 4a’s class teacher. he looked like a giant panda. his black hair had silver-white patches at the sides. his eyebrows were black and broad, his eyes small, brown and alert for danger. he had co-written a physics textbook, edited past exam papers and was on the high school physics council. he walked tall, barrel-chested, sleekly handsome, silver and black.

‘ivy, i just want to know why. you are a fine chess-player. that takes a mathematical mind. why are you failing maths?’

‘i don’t think i play chess mathematically. i’m not aware of maths when i play.’ it was more entomological, really: the passions of a wasp, the instincts of an inch ant, the finesse of a leafhopper. if she tries to pincer me between her bishop and her knight, i manipulate my mechanisms so as to strike deep into her rook rank with the hot, sharp end of my queen, slice into her pawns with a few clanging snatches with my bishop-pincers, and zap anything that challenges my open file clean off the board with a savage attack from sir hornet the knight backed up by an alert army of selfless, dedicated worker-pawns. maths is nothing to do with chess. chess is a fantasy. it isn’t true, but you can believe in chess, and not in maths, even though it’s all strictly true. ‘in maths, there’s no threat, nothing to defend.’

‘the world’s best minds find it challenging enough.’  but they don’t. they just find hard bits of it to challenge themselves with. maths is impassive.

‘mathematics doesn’t interest me. euclid’s engaging, but so what? so is tap-dancing.’

‘physics? you’re coming last in that, too, with bare passes. as a poet you are concerned with beauty. i may be biased – physics is my subject – but i find physics beautiful. it explores the nature of things.’

‘it’s school i object to.’

‘aha!’

i was only five - see how round and soft and dewy they all are, and crying for their mummies – when i was taken from the world which had barely winked its crows, snails, cars and many women’s faces at me; and from my father’s hands planting geranium cuttings, where i was learning about leaves, flowers, stems, roots, weeds and watering; and held by force and threat and menace, glued to a chair that faced uncompromisingly a green-called-black rectangle upon which all relevant things were henceforth to be defined in chalk. i was not permitted to look out of any other window.

wayne harper ran away every day, but they always brought him back, dangling him by one chubby little arm, screaming, a fountain of all our baby tears, and they scared him (and us) rigid with threats of the truant officer, but he still ran away, and one day they just didn’t bring him back any more and no one said a word about it. and we really did believe that they had put him in jail in a cold, damp, grey cell with no windows and only a hard little wooden stool in it to sit on and nothing to eat but dry bread and water. we really did believe that they’d do that to us.

now if you want love and beauty in it, and they do go together, take a look at that geranium. i was interested in it, and its beetles and caterpillars and the centipede under the stone. there’d be the starting point for an education. but honestly, six hours a day with your mind and body in traction ruins you for the rest of the day, and after a few years of it you’re fazed for a lifetime.

‘well, the system isn’t perfect. but change will come from within. you’ve got to be part of it.’ because if you are perceived to be against it, it will see you as a kind of virus and kill you.

‘oh, the system. it has rejected me. i mean, okay, it does this thing, and it can’t explain to me why, because the answer is beyond my comprehension, and maybe its own, but it is still far better not to be a part of so crushing and voracious a beast. it damages souls.’

he emanated a keen thrill of menace, with a dangerous silvery-bladed frisson behind it that was actually a kind of bloodlust. he disabled my motor nerves and i stood stiffly. was he gonna kill me? laser out bits of my brain to make me stupid and compliant? slither in a nasty little implant that said i love to conform and leave me with a zonked expression on my face and a zombie’s approach to getting on with it? i lived in fear.

‘you have it all on a plate. you should be among the top students. why aren’t you doing well? aren’t you aware you are a slave?’ sharp blades glittered. his soul loomed, tugged at its forelock, saying, ‘do this! why aren’t you doing this?’

‘i would probably not feel these things if i were doing well, but they’re not the less true,' says my soul. 'and as for doing well, how can i do well? i’ve got dannion’s diseases and they’re trying to manifest their symptoms in me. chris leader’s curses and cruelties cripple me, yours do, schilder’s do. the system has rejected me. on another plane of experience it is torturing me. i am between its mandibles. i can direct a thin scream of home-truths into its soft parts with my stinger, hack with my mandible-bishops at a few of its most blatant guardian lies, disable its primary deceivers with a swift injection of high-potency veracity. that’s all i can do – if i can do it at all. that’s what i’m instinctively equipped to do. that's why. i am a slave, mr fennis, but not yours.’

woden has appeared at the back of the room rather suddenly, just as fennis, gracefully shape-shifting into a steel leonoid robotic beast with raking claws of glinting surgical steel and an insane array of glittering implements projecting from its chest, like some deranged and hysterically animated version of a swiss army knife, is on the point of lunging at me and shredding my subtle bodies, killing, or at least maiming me if he could in my aethereal flesh and blood, after which my body, having nothing to sustain it, would soon die, would soon think of something to die of.

but woden speaks a charm, giving a sharp intense torque to the fabric of the situation that detaches fennis from his intentional trajectory with a ringing, entirely un-physics-ic ping, and sends him spinning and clattering to the corner of the room, where he lies whirring, hissing and emitting blue-black sparks and evil-smelling smoke among the window poles, the fire bucket and the bin. 

i have a troubled glimpse of a disappointed andean condor relinquishing the wreckage and rising to soar in an andean sky before the metallic beast melts back into an organic form, a dry old man, which is allowed then to clamber to its feet and fight his way with clicking joints back into his body, which has been idling gently with half-shut eyes, pretending to think. 

this new ka connects with a sigh, and he says, frowning, ‘it’s my duty as a teacher to try to help you, to impress on you the need for effort and discipline. but the effort has to come from you. on these two points, ivy: your lateness in the mornings and your failure to present your homework when it’s asked for – if these don’t improve i’ll have to refer the matter to mr krasler.’

krasler? the principal? but he’s one of the few people on this planet who actually likes me.

after this incident a difference comes about in the way i’m treated. dannion stays close to me, holding her muzzled monkey-self by the hand. she has cropped her hair very short, off-loaded most of her karmic burden, stopped grinning and no longer emphasises her high, bulging forehead. she has disciplined her dog who now lies quietly behind her eyes, feeding his dreams from her daily experience, instead of leaping out through her eyes to lick or bite whoever she loves or hates momentarily. she has been to parties and pashed on with mark ely, and also with david greening, called greenie because it recalls snot, although greenie is a clean, good-natured lad – nearly good-looking if he weren’t so short.

but she still clings to me. i loathe her still, though the diminution of her pain has made her less terrifying. oh, yes, she is still devoted to me, perhaps loves me, so i treat her kindly – and her monkey. i’m not cruel.

leilani is still apparently my best friend, but she is already dismantling the structures she’s built of friendship and intimacy with me, offended mildly at first and then deeply as she realises that they are all of her own building; and that while i may have held up a strut here or propped up a beam there during the building of them, i have contributed not a grain, not a splinter, not a brass nor even a tiny tin tack. i have only watched and wondered.

her ghost thinks the tears that drown me for a whole afternoon are because of the ferocity of her anger with me, the strength of her curse, and she turns and walks away up into the air, across the remains of the wide yellow road that disintegrates behind her as she goes. she thinks it because it is convenient for her to do so, because it justifies her rage, which is her defence against her fear, which is the one thing in the world she really fears.

but i’m crying because not a splinter, nor a grain, nor even a tin tack of that friendship was ever from me. the mechanisms of friendship are defunct in me, or absent, as they are in those wire-mother monkeys in that cruel experiment in that mid-twentieth century lab.

in the schoolyard they get sassy with me. i am set up as if tied to a pole in the yard. they front up to me, braggadocio. ‘if we don’t respect what laws we’ve got we’d all kill each other.’ they pounded me with that one. ‘we should not respect our laws if our laws are not respectable,’ i tell them, ‘and our culture wants to kill all other cultures.’ ‘what’s wrong with boy-meets-girl songs? isn’t being in love a legitimate part of life?’ ‘these songs are honey biscuits with your cup of tea. nothing wrong with them, in fact they’re quite nice, but if that’s what you get for breakfast, lunch and tea, and snacks, and no cheating now, girls, no nipping off out the back and pigging out on something wholesome, we get sick, we get psychedelic chunder. we erupt in boils, we get nausea, we get fever, and we get delirium, coma and death, just like the starving millions do, just like the dying cultures do, in our heads, in our lives, in our planet.'

this planet feeds itself through our brains just like dannion auger’s little australian terrier, i tell them. billions and uncountable billions of brains human and animal all make up a kind of compound experiencer, like a compound eye, except that we’re sensing and processing much, much more than we know, most of it for the planet, who harvests it from us as our brains harvest vision from our unseeing retinas. we can’t pretend that all we wish we ever had to do outside of school is suck each other’s mouths. we’ve got to break through to reality.’

and they try, oh they do, to understand what i’m saying, because they know it’s the holy scarab who knows the true fate of the world, of every species in it, who talks through me when i talk like that: and it just isn’t true that i don’t love them all. i truly, genuinely do.

it is to the sea i go; it is one continuous day on the wide, white, weed-strewn plasticine beach. the dogs on a winter’s day. the dolphins beyond the sand bar where the dangerous riptides are. the gulls, the rats among the boulders, the sudden finds on the tide-line: octopuses, a flying fish, a pop-eyed poisonous puffer fish almost spherical with rage and already dead.

woden stands me up in front of my grandmother’s dressing table mirror and makes me look not at the fantasy people behind it, but at myself. my hair is long and dark and not quite straight. it curls lazily like water from a slow tap down over my shoulders. my eyes are dark, although blue, and haunted. my jaw is firm with tension, and the constant chewing of gum has developed it, altered the shape of my face. i am an ugly girl, flat-chested, bony, ugly.

i peer into the mirror, trying to find anny, or homer, or maybe even oscar, but woden thumps the end of his staff impatiently on the hollow, dusty wood of the empty attic floor and i jump. once or twice he has hit me with it, quite hard too, when my attention has strayed, and if i don’t want to be further ‘improved’ with lumps and bumps and bruises i’d just better do as i’m told. it is myself in the mirror i must look at, without judgement, imposing nothing, vetoing nothing. the war in me ends, vision the victor.

and suddenly i see myself, just for an instant, beautiful, strong and masculine, and i am amazed.

humour flashed in woden’s one eye. ‘you see,’ he said. ‘you are a handsome boy.’