7 banned

banned  

anger! there is anger all around me. it is almost crazy in its effort to self-destruct. many faces are making hard, fizzing rays through the polygonal personalities of my compound ego, the lenses of my compound eye, my compound i. it doesn’t hurt. it is a suspended threat that will not pounce. but i move with difficulty.

i have failed leaving, my prematriculation year, with an a for english and another a for french and most of the rest es, except there’s even an f for fizzics. ha ha. that’s a joke.

except for me and one other, 4a has become 5ah and 5as, humanities and science, mingling magnanimously after all these years with the b stream, kids they haven’t mixed with since primary school, who have proven that even though they haven’t got the brains, they’ve got the dedication to work hard for what comes easily to those who have.

i’ve got the brains but apparently not the dedication, so i’m still back in 4a again. dannion, leilani, christine and the others turn left and go upstairs to the 5a rooms and i’m under their feet with the class that was 3a last year, kids who were first-years when we were second-years, much remarked upon as being astonishingly small and unbelievably young; and they still look wet behind the ears.

at recess times i am clutched at by a scared renate gruber, the only other one from 4a who has failed. she cannot find her last-year’s friends. if it comes to that, no more can ivy find her old milieu, not that she’d been looking for them. leilani, christine, even dannion are nowhere in sight. it’s amazing how we can’t find each other. they are in a different dream. 

renate has a long, elliptical body. she has very long, very straight, light brown hair like a plastic doll’s. it is combed back smoothly to the top of her head and tightly caught into a ponytail. the comb-tooth tracks stay visible in it all day and through them her scalp looks like the excessively orangey ‘flesh’-coloured rubber of dolls’ heads.

she clings to me while she orients herself and then leaves me alone. she has made a friend somewhere else – maybe. i don’t even see where she goes or who she takes up with. i just see her repelled from me as if by a magnetic force. apologetically, she avoids me.

i am not humbled. i am wide. my poems are well known. i play championship chess. my radical stance is emulated. i wear woden’s runes.

i’m not, strangely enough, like the ivy plant, i’m like a tree. the kids who run up to me suddenly and mention my school magazine poems, my reputation as a radical, or something i once said to someone or other are like monkeys at a tree, or shy maids and in aprons and boys in ’bockers who skip about excitedly with panniers ready. they jump at my lower branches after a fruit, a nut, a blossom, or a coloured leaf, a scandalous retort, an astounding quip, an exquisite, iconoclastic insight with implications as sweet as nectar and a good sound kernel firm and ripe and raring to go within. 

i failed because i am a rebel who says ‘look, the people who like the rules obey them, or they’re sorry when they don’t - without being punished. the ones who don’t like them don’t obey them, and aren’t willing to delude themselves into believing they’re too scared of getting yard duty to disobey, yard-duty that they can’t even be made to do if they don’t feel like it. look, consenting to be driven by a puny non-threatening threat is an insult to your own intelligence, to let yourself tremble and cringe your way towards a resolution to be good, just at the mere thought that you might have to, gasp! pick up rubbish . . . no! not that . . . after school – or not, depending on how cowed you’ve consented to be. besides, all the punishing in the world won’t make me repent of doing what i couldn’t help doing. it wasn’t my fault i was late. how stupid do we have to agree to pretend to be?'

'are you amoral then?' 

'no, not at all. quite the reverse. fear of punishment is not morality. it starts with self-respect. it comes with experience.' 

their souls are like birds who approach from among the shadows of their strange personalities and while i’m not looking they spring out from behind their masks and leap like monkeys into my branches and run amok there, and then they fly back into their bodies which are looking the other way pretending not to know. this leaves me deranged of course, and i have difficulty concerting a personality, or sustaining a train of thought.

so i start to stutter, which embarrasses them and back away and after that they tend to ignore me, which frustrates the ghosts who try to possess them, trying to get them to front up to me. half amused, half-abashed, they are bewildered. they want data.

but some of the the more determined of them don’t just flee away. some stand bravely by, savouring the fruit, defensively derisive or grave and rueful, sometimes with counter arguments, sometimes not.

lily wallace is one of the - tentatively - derisive ones. she is one of the stars of 4a. she has captured a boy with eyes sky-blue, milk-white skin, translucent, honey-coloured freckles, hair of real red-gold and a weak, wet mouth with lips of watermelon pink. she holds both his hands and monopolises his gaze. he’s only a little bashful, as she has hypnotically commanded him to be, which adds to his charm, makes him crinkle the corners of his eyes, smile a lot and sometimes he writhes a little and laughs a soft little laugh. yet he acquiesces, because he is finding her large, hazel eyes so lovely, so full of love. he is under her spell and he cannot resist her,

margaret o’shaughnessy, wide-eyed with wonder and a little shocked, because she sees what i mean and doesn’t mistake me for an anarchist, agreeing that yes, we do need a saner contract, is descended from ulster kings. she is silver, a heron. her eyes are windows to the sky. she wears an iron calliper on her right leg which is withered. otherwise she’d look like an irish dancer, tall, dark-haired and very thin. 

karen emerson is a tall brown girl with her eyes on the asteroids, as if she’s expecting reinforcements to land on one any day now. aloof and derisive, her love is spread wide about her, thoughtlessly, like an old cloak. she is a shrewd girl, and tests everything i say carefully from many angles and then nods slowly. 

julian king is a beautiful aquiline youth with hyacinth curls and a hard, defensive air. he reads poetry and is aware of art. he wants to know who my favourite artists are and who’s poetry i’m reading. he writes daring, brash, political poems with feeble, fumbly logic and faintly ridiculous pretensions. jejeune.

and ted callum is a rebel, a serious-minded boy, a seriously promising poet, political, deep-shadowed, and sound, because he’s a disciple of graduate radicals; and he’s better looking, with his straight, dark brown hair combed down over his deep-set brown eyes, his angular jaw, and the crystalline planes of his finely freckled face, even than julian - the flower among them all. he doesn’t speak to me, but when the others do and i answer, he suddenly becomes still and silent, listening.

now don’t imagine, o ye ghosts of this 1969 4a classroom, (mind the grey filing cabinet there, the class teacher’s locker – it’s slightly electro-magnetic, that’s all, just ‘file’ past it, haha, mind the pun) that you are the only witnesses to this. now you can see the big, clear, rectangular room, the angles and planes of the furniture, give it a moment to settle. you’ll see the other ghosts first – they’re astral beings too. now quick, come up here! there now, can you see yourselves just coming in through that door? just a glimpse as you momentarily are a reflection in the glass of the picture of matthew flinders who circumnavigated australia in the investigator, between the two windows opposite.

now you can see the aisles, the desks, five or six kids in the room, others leaving, more outside. second row, third from front, right-hand desk, tall languid lad, there, moving very slowly, lingering to listen, occasionally looking – that’s ted. two big girls in school uniforms in the second aisle, lily and karen. third from back, right-hand desk, white-faced, pimply, hair in regulation pigtails, skeleton-like in a rumpled school uniform, stuffing a dog-eared test-pad into an overstuffed satchel, that’s ivy.

narcissistic, egotistical, radical, iconoclastic, sexless, juddering between artistic and 'autistic', and a poet. nobody bonds with her. nobody knows her. 

this new class is different from the old. it doesn’t hold scandalous parties where everyone pashes on; their courtships are more real, and at sixteen they already have marriage in mind. in school, except when they’re actually interrogating me, they don’t speak to me much more than civility demands, politely, in passing, but before school and after school, on the streets outside school, as i go by on my bike, or on foot, their souls fly out of their bodies and cry out to me: ‘show us woden’, ‘who’s the black one?’ and ‘why does that evil one follow you around?’

that invisible ‘evil one’ wears a grey suit, darkish grey with a lighter grey stripe – or perhaps it’s a trick of the light playing over the fine, sheeny weave of the fabric. he wears a dark grey hat of the kind businessmen wear. he carries a silver-tipped cane. his style is impeccable. he is thin, thirtyish, upright, even graceful, metallic his aura, steely his soul. it’s this metallic glint in him that they call evil. sometimes when i stand outside with my back to a school-room window or pass between the glass doors of the school building, the outline of his ghostly profile is fleetingly reflected or at least suggested, there, close to my left shoulder.

he watches me keenly, and sometimes when i’m alone in the room with the sun-wheeled wall, or on the beach in cold, windy weather, he is close to me, silent and sinister, with almost a sneer or perhaps it’s a snarl on his lips. ivy cannot hear the things he says but is am aware that he speaks to her soul and her soul likes what he says, does not fear him, is inclined to wear a dim reflection of his sneer. he calls her zeke. 

but woden is still there too, and he’s not just there to dither about comically for our amusement. he pulls ivy's life into a new shape, dismisses the merely parasitic ghosts, and introduces some new concepts. ivy is at last perceived to be an unhealthy teenager. potato gems and fish-fingers and a tosca for lunch aren't sustaining health. a sudden fad for french cuisine introduces garlic and a growing admiration for all things greek brings olives.  other vermifuges are added to her diet, and a tonic from the chemist brings her vitamin c levels up to almost adequate. her cheeks grow rosy though not at all plump, and her blue eyes sparkle and sometimes blaze.

libby ackham’s old house is sold and all its visitors dispersed. oscar remains, and one or two others, and the mirror now opens into a kind of nissen hut, a gift to me from woden, which is sunk to the depth of nine wooden steps below the ground, so that the window sills are up over our heads, and the dusty windows are just hooded slits, with dry old geraniums full of spider webs filtering the daylight. oscar and anny and one or two others are running it, and the clientele, though echt enough, is new to me.

with woden and his associates they are on terms of formal courtesy. we cruise deep into blues and jazz and jive, deep beyond the music; and we climb the ladders of saxon chant to the airy fairylands of the ossianic celts.

and i’m thrashed - how dare i throw it all back in their faces - for the last time. ivy strikes back. the biter is bit. the evil mother is slapped hard on the cheek. aghast she falls back, saying, 'you struck me!' and the father comes thumping up the passage in full battle array, with a 'what's going on?' and the mother says, 'she struck me! her own mother! she struck me!' and so he lunges forth to strike his child and she clenches her fist and airborne collects and delivers a solid whack on the cheekbone, and the mother runs for a bucket of water. heedless of the extravagant wallpaper, not thinking of the velvet-soft burgundy axminster, she throws it over the brawling pair, the man now aging, the child now strong enough to hit back. 

we both got a black-eye out of it, and the father had no more to say.

but the mother can't let up.

‘why won’t you even try?’ her voice is hard-edged with anger. she is threatening to have ivy charged as an uncontrollable child. often she’s left for her school at eight o’clock in the morning, and ivy has stayed home on a forged note with these ghosts and gods, or changed out of school uniform into her rune-charmed duffle coat and skinny black stretch pants and spent the day invisibly, unfindably at the beach, dogged by this fascinating steel-grey man. but she knows nothing about that. all she has on me is that i don’t do my homework.

and i answer back. 'i'm not a performing seal.'

but concerning this mother, i find woden on her side. he beams a probing ray through me, finds and unties dannion’s knot, liberates a shy mausileinchen of love that has been living in the sore shadowy humid space at the bottom of my left lung since heidi, and enters into conversation with the wicked little black and yellow salamander that climbs my chakras and slithers like a cool shine through the grey-suited man’s snarly sneer which i now wear on my lips; and which now, taking a dislike to my mother, strikes like a little snake at her: just a feint, but it touches her. i say, at last ‘why did you make me drop latin?’

‘why on earth would you want to do latin?’

‘i loved it.’

‘you wanted to do science. to be an entomologist.’

she likes woden. all she’s had to put up with – these ghosts, these souls, these gods… woden at least is courteous, and he is elegant: a pattern of courteous, dignified, healthy old age. and he is on her side.

‘i like insects.’ i try to explain. ‘they are intensely alive, passionate. their sentience is almost totally unhuman – but the thin wedge of overlap is highly significant. we need to understand them. entomologists just find ways of poisoning them. i’d want to do greek too. at uni, i mean.’

‘you want to go to uni?’

‘not as things are. not to do just a vaguely ornamental ba with teaching or walk-the-plank at the end of it.’

'classics.' she sucks a tooth and stares out the window at the men in their creams going past our house to the bowling green on the corner. ‘cloistered you’d be.’ we hear a cockatoo screeching a few houses down, and between cars, the regular breaking of waves on the distant beach. ‘oh well… it’s probably where you belong…’

but what did it matter? why do anything? why have a reality at all? look, if we all agreed to stop doing it, to stop perpetuating it all, all this experience happening in so many places so elaborately over such a lot of time, and so what anyway, wouldn’t it all just stop? wouldn’t it? then it wouldn’t matter at all to anyone or anything what ivy did for a living, because there wouldn’t be anyone or anything, not ivy, not anybody else – it all would just have stopped happening, everything would have ceased to exist. no more injustice, no more war. no more starving millions. no more sickness and sadness and madness and pain. 

school, the beach, the haunted teenager's bedroom. and the constant irritation of parents and siblings and the household chores and meals. 

‘entomology.’ as he spoke, the grey man projected the word in big silvery letters into the air. it was the first time i’d ever really heard his words.

‘no.’

as he said that, the ‘n’ and the first ‘o’ left their places in the silvery word and stood together above it. ‘e-t- mology’, and ‘no’. ‘no etmology’. the gaps closed up. he frowned, stroked his chin, flicked a flick-knife glance at me and said, ‘why?’ a large silver y appeared and muscled its way in between the t and the m.

he left me to spell over the new word, his answer. ‘etymology.’

‘ask no questions. you are a slave.’

‘not yours, though. woden’s.’

he frowned as he vanished.

but nevertheless, the dictionaries that had long ago begun to cast a kind of glamour over me began to fascinate me. i’d become absorbed, wandering deeper and deeper in, just like little red riding hood, tempted from one flower of a word-history to the next, having long forgotten what word i’d been looking up originally. 

and i began to have a consciousness of ravens, though i didn’t meet the wolves straight away.

it’s late in the year before i begin latin by correspondence. the grey-suited man stands beside me with a birch rod, and i immerse myself in study. every day for a couple of hours or more, i snatch at them, i grab them greedily, i snap them up: the five declensions, the four conjugations, the irregular verbs, the three moods, the two voices, catullus, vergil, tacitus, caesar, livy. chomp, chew, swallow. never a hiccup or burp. good stuff. does me good. fans the fragile flame of my life. and as well as that, maths, physics and chem all gradually improving. 

and where’s woden? and where’s oscar? where's the nissen hut? gone! at least for now...

the schoolroom is small, grey stone walled, filled with a dry, grey-white light. it is a tiny cell, sparsely furnished. my bed and my desk are of crudely dressed wood. my pen is a crane’s feather. my ink is soot, mixed with rain, and sometimes spit, and sometimes even mead. there are some heavy tomes on a stone shelf. there is no glass in the small window in the west. there is no door in the doorway to the east. through these openings through which slant cool sunbeams in the mornings and evenings and rain during wet weather, i can see dense forest. my clearing is small and edged with brambles, the noisy haunt of many birds.

in silence i write, bilocating into a new, salubrious reality, abandoning the old. i find my food in the forest. my bread is of acorn flour; woodland fruits and berries, roots and fungi are my summer fare, and i gather a store of nuts for the winter. i catch fish in a stream nearby and smoke them in the chimney, and fat-legged frogs, and now and then i trap a pheasant or a duck.

‘cum timor totam urbem pervasisset,’ said livy, ‘alius tumultus ex arce auditur.’ ‘while fear pervaded the whole city another uproar was heard from the citadel.’ whoever said latin was hard?

but i sleep badly. my body tosses and turns, drifting in and out of sleep, my soul frets, and sometimes i find it wandering about the suburbs, or trying to go through trees, or fleeing from something it can’t identify, and can’t remember any more than my body can remember its tedious dreams awakening from which i find myself calling out telepathically to woden. i look for him in the dark, in the dark blue sky. there must be a way to invoke him, an etiquette, some form of prayer.

in a dream i find him at last in some dirty city street somewhere, in a tired, hot, irritable city, one i don’t know. it doesn’t feel like a city of the earth. it is filled with brittle-tempered, hot, tired people with grey, foreign eyes filled with alien thoughts. it could be one of the higher worlds, or one of the lower, or i think perhaps it is a world of dreams, of the troubled dreams of insomniacs. but no, more real than that - an astral world, it is, i finally conclude, one i’m coming to know. they wade chest deep in our rubbish up there. our old newspapers blow about in their streets, and our old cardboard boxes tumble along and get squashed under the wheels of their cars. and they see us as clearly as we see the shadow people on our tv screens and they understand our affairs in ways that not even we do. and they’re among the ones who buy and sell our souls, and they feel justified in doing so for reasons we’re not yet ready to understand. or so they say . . .

woden looks mildly surprised to see me, frowns, and says nonchalantly, ‘oh, i sold you,’ as if he’d forgotten to mention it, it being a matter of small importance. so i go back home to the grey-suited man whose etheric steel collar i now consent to acknowledge i have on. it’s safer that way – i’m not up for grabs. in fact it's the only safe way. he accompanies me everywhere, pulling me along by my chain, speaking to me in latin, greek, ancient hebrew, sanskrit, ancient gaulish, egyptian, old norse and phoenician. i understand every word he says, just like a dog, but not a word of it can i bring to consciousness.

with my mother’s consent, he refurnished my bedroom. standing in the dark, uranian rich and tapestried weaving of the dim, glowing highlights of the brown and orange sun-wheels on the wall, under the little leadlight prison window, he put an owl perching on a twig, bringing it into existence as an image projected from his own mind. warm and feathered, small and alert, it would fly lightly about the room and find my shoulder sometimes. if anyone came in, it would return to its perch. at night, it disappeared.

an aunt, as an unlikely gesture, perhaps willy nilly, supplied its material manifestation: an owl vase she bought at a white elephant stall and gave to me. she had never given me anything before except soap. it was clumsily given, and it embarrassed her soul to be doing it, not least because it revealed that, church-goer though she was, she still ran errands for the gods, as charmed by them as any heathen; but it did stitch the two realities together a bit and reduced the metaphysical tension in the fabric of both, with the result that blustery winds that had blown increasingly boisterously for more than a month ceased, and spring began.

in the same way and with increasingly less effect on the weather a motley array of silver, pottery, wooden, leather, sea shell and china ornaments appeared: bulls, ducks, swans, frogs, lizards, a silver snake that flowed through your fingers, china flowers, lace doyleys, old photographs, framed calligraphy, candles, bottles and a big, iron cauldron. my aunty, my mother, friends of my brother’s, even an uncle, would bring them, just small cheap gifts they thought i’d like – and i did, very much - and i bought some myself. my room was like a magical cavern, full of strange, enchanted things.

but all realities are magical. the enchantment operating on me and leilani, christine and dannion that made them invisible to me and me to them at school was absent on weekends. they kept visiting me, suspicious and silent as i was becoming, and they peopled my room more than ever libby’s old wooden house had been peopled, with the ghosts they brought with them: the hostile, the curious, the congratulatory, and the concerned and of course, you, who are reading this.

sometimes they brought others with them: girls i knew a bit, and others i knew only by sight; and for the first time, boys: avalon, eckhart and others, no longer calling ivy ‘neuter’, no longer sneering at her because, they said, they understood her better now. they no longer thought she was evil.

i was still mystified. what had they ‘understood’ about zeke? what can anyone ever understand about anyone – themselves, even? and what had made them think zeke was evil in the first place? and who were they to care? if they hated evil, why didn’t they hate hating? hating zeke? wasn’t hatred evil?

thugs in their own right they were, willing to grow up to be astral scabs, pimps and torturers, just like their teachers and their mums and dads. but they’d decided i wasn’t after all ‘evil’ and they came round me now, not quite chumming up, respectful and letting themselves be held at arm's length, but liking me now (reserving of course the right to hate anyone else if they chose).

well, all right, that was life-sustaining, though they were just like pop singers, whom they all resembled, boys and girls. i liked them too well enough, despite the fear and yes, mutual distaste.

leilani was in love with michael avalon, but going out with ian eckhart. michael is the superior boy, she explains. she holds two images in our minds: one of a composite beatle, combining mccartney’s childishness with lennon’s strength of character, with harrison’s ardour and ringo’s disarming appeal. the other image is of michael avalon. he is a fair approximation. he wears his straight dark hair in a carefully groomed beatles haircut. ian eckhart has golden blond hair with a strong wave through it, cut in the same style. he is by far the handsomer.

i gawp at her. she has never spoken of these things before, but she is helping me to understand. eros? the mating call? doesn’t neuter understand?

she tries me a little further. ‘meredith furmish has body odour.’ she makes a face and blows hard, fanning her breath with her hand. meredith furmish is voluptuous. newly arrived from salisbury plains, england, she is sophisticated too. she is going out with michael avalon, and so leilani is making do with eckhart. doesn’t zeke, like, dig?

leilani makes a great show of relaxing, which betrays that she is doing something underhanded that zeke can’t see. injecting lethal venom, or intending to. but just at that moment there’s a ripple in the fabric of reality and there’s the tip of a sword in the grey man’s hand quite suddenly at her throat. inertia keeps her talking, makes her deliver the rest of her confession.

‘you see, zeke, this is me after all. nasty, jealous, and venal. and superficial. doing the cliches. i’m shallow.’ and the energy in the room writhes with the pain of her breaking.

she has, like, sold out, mamma. sold out. and now she is trying to kill zeke. to kill ivy. to kill me. she makes no sound when the sword goes through her throat. her eyes follow the withdrawing blade with a kind of lazy love. and she is relieved when they carry her astral body away. that was one reality she’d been longing to be shet of.

but astral deaths asides, social deaths are gradual on planet earth. weekends come and go, and we’re still talking ‘deep’ from time to time. i write a last poem for her about the ecstasy of water moving between soil granules, the exquisite creep of it, the seekingly sweet enquiry of the tiny white root hairs. when i show it to her she doubles up over it and groans and i don’t know what that means. then, as the corruption of her astral dying begins to seep through to her earthly self, she begins to ridicule it - though people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

or specifically: she has begun a novel. a virgin draws the drunken meander of her dying soul with salt poured from a saltshaker over a green tablecloth, her own turunga, and then dissolves into tears which fall into the salt which dissolves... but i can’t say anything. when the time comes to comment i am kept silent, tightly gagged. i can barely manage a queer little sound in the back of my throat and a nod. but i do tell her it’s good later, but i think she was unable to hear me.

of course it was good. it was very well written. evocative. 

but the signs of her soul-death multiply horribly. she succumbs to a preference for iced teddy bear biscuits which she dunks in her sweet, milky coffee. hundreds and thousands come unstuck and float on the surface. ‘i never could take my coffee black,’ she confesses, and we both deeply interrogate the symbollism of that, in silence. and she seems to imply that she’ll never write novels. 

her glance swims towards oscar who has taken to carrying a cane, which he taps against his foot. sometimes he looks blind. but leilani never could look directly at him. she swerves away and looks sad. ‘i’m thinking of giving eckhart the bullet,’ she says.

over her shoulder she lets me see a soft green and russet pathway between hedgerows. here and there soft, mossy trees interlace their branches over a damp but not muddy road. bracken and brambles fill the ditches. it is a scene she has down-loaded from a thomas hardy novel, from the trumpet major, or from jude the obscure. in it, leilani is walking away down the road, her feet leaving a trail of precise prints in the sand. this is her fantasy and i’m in it, my ethereal forms interacting with hers.

i see myself appear on the road behind her. i call her. she ignores me. i speed up. her pace quickens, perhaps, or does it? i almost reach her. my hand is out to touch her shoulder, but she turns suddenly, for an instant i see large fear-darkened eyes and bared teeth in a pink mouth in a scared face that turns away at once, and she breaks into a run. her school uniform has turned into a faded, dirty-hemmed gingham and lace dress of a century and a half ago. mine has become the hairy goatskins of a wild boy. i go after her, losing her now and then among the deep shadows of the overhanging branches, and then seeing her a little way ahead i increase speed with renewed hope.

‘i’m am thinking of giving eckhart the bullet…’ but she really means me. she’s been having these fantasies, and ivy hasn’t been turning up. zeke has been malingering . . .

she leaves the path, and i lose her again among the shrubbery. there is a suppressed cry as she catches her foot in the brambles and she trips and almost falls into the ditch. but she pulls herself up by the tough bracken stems and finding her feet again, she suddenly clears the ditch with an unlikely leap and is away through a gap in the hedge, leaving a light lace shawl snatched away by the twiggy claw of a whitethorn and collecting in return a garland of scarlet roses caught by its thorns in the sleeve of her dress and even the flesh of her upper arm and torn from its bush as she bursts through it. she bleeds a little, but she doesn’t notice the pain.

across a ploughed field i pursue her, tirelessly, not wanting to, but unable to stop. this is her fantasy: she is scripting it, not me.

so why does ivy acquiesce? to prolong the liaison? why? it is clearly over.

by the time i have caught up with her and my hand has her shoulder and has arrested her, and she has let out a piercing scream and by its power turned herself into a smooth-barked young laurel tree, my feet have become goat hooves, my thighs and buttocks have become great hairy haunches, i feel the weight of two horns on my head, and i speak when i do in a ragged, nasal bleat that cannot be shaped into words.

but the scene shifts and when the hedgerows return leilani has on an elegant scarlet uniform, cutaway coat and knee breeches, elaborately frogged with gold and heavily fringed with twists of cream-coloured silk. making a low bow in the french style, she presents me with the jewelled hilt of her sword.

i look at it, not understanding, with only a reviled faun’s understanding.

‘just take it, zeke,’ says leilani quietly, with a half laugh, although when i look at her again she looks very serious, although she’s still a little sniggery. and then briefly her face is that of dannion auger, who is walking swiftly through her as if she were a door. she stops just in front of leilani, having passed through her, and leilani retrieves her centre and is like a door closing.

it's the grey man's hand, not mine, that takes the sword of surrender, which he holds between leilani, who is laughing unconvincingly now but still keeping one eye fixed on me while her soul seems to be having some kind of fit, and me.

and that was the very sword that loki would use two hours from then to slay leilani some eight or ten weeks earlier. lo and behold, earthlings! that’s what all that gilt-braided frogging does to your timelines!!!!!! twisted like pretzels. because now the space people could get in.

so leilani ebbed a little further away while the on-coming fortnight pended heavily instead, full of information about itself that we poor earthlings haven't got the sense or brains to read.

and so it's dannion again who claims my weekends. and the company of the the space people, who will teach her to find the senses that can read her etheric mind, because her soul has been in the deep past when everyone could and her etheric body can. 

and dannion it is who at last identifies the grey man. she makes a magical gesture with four fingers of her right hand, pink as it is, wet and pruney, and almost nailless, like the cocking of a snook but from the forehead, with a strange, foreign context that makes it a form of obeisance; and she says in a hallowing whisper: ‘loki!’

and now, at this point, allow me to introduce my uncle.

my mother’s brother is from another city, nearly a thousand miles away. having read his t s eliot pretty well, he is a hollow man, stuffed with ill-assorted parts made up of old screwed-up newspapers, boat plans, maps of china and car manuals, like a bath heater. his laughter comes out of one nostril, snorting and rattling the whole works like hot water and steam mixed coming out of a tap.

he is a tool-maker in a physics lab, and in his spare-time he makes wonderful scientific toys, some of brass and old paint tins fitted with nipples and valves and pistons and metho-driven engines, and some of blown glass, delicately tinted blue or pink and fading to almost clear, whose action depends on water under pressure.

along with a ferrety look from his london-born english mother, ivy’s grandmother, he has inherited semitic features from his father's half gipsy-half, jewish-mother, ivy’s great grandmother, and the gypsy’s indomitable stare. my mother has passed the olive complexion and pensive, passionate dark eyes on to robert, but not to gerald or me. we resemble our father’s people, who are all of irish descent, fair-skinned and freckled, sea-farers mostly, and with plenty of the ubiquitous traveller mixed in.

this uncle, eric by name, and his australian-irish wife merle, who was as inscrutable as a dress-shop window dummy, and as impeccable in her careful make-up and expensively tailored clothes, had three daughters: sheryl, the eldest, then valery, who is a little older than gerald, and then, six months before i was born they had abigail, who from a tender age was clairvoyant and saw ghosts. she was also beautiful in a flamboyant, voluptuous way, despite being fat and neurotically conceited. it's about this abigail really though she's easier to understand once you've met her father.

she was sometimes cruel, and pinched rather viciously, or scratched with her long, red nails.

she was a helpless prevaricator, fantastic and theatrical, infatuated first with judaism, then with the romany, then with her mother’s catholic inheritance and the holy virgin mary whom she thought she resembled and perhaps she did, and then later with the baha’i faith . . .

she had had lessons, so she played the guitar better than zeke, and sang publicly sometimes at girl-guide and church youth-group functions. she had a collection of five friendship rings strung around her neck on a silver chain, each from a different discarded lover, and one still on her finger at which she addressed enchantments from time to time, presumably intended for the boy who had given it to her; and she talked about going ‘the whole way’ with him, this boy, gazzer, she called him, who resembled, she said, normie rowe the pop singer. one day, she said, she was sure she was not going to be able to keep on saying no.

ivy was too naive to laugh at her, only slowly coming to realise that abigail was a little bizarre, and not entirely truthful. 

she took an hour putting on her make-up each day. ivy didn’t wear any, and agreeing in the main with hamlet did despise her for hers, though she didn’t say so. she seldom spoke at all while she was with abigail, who much preferred it that way as she had a great deal to say and not much patience with listening. she took over the entire surface of my (our) grandmother’s dressing table and its two little shelves as well, strewing them with a fragrant dust of pale pink powder. when i lifted the duchess set after she'd gone, its pattern was perfectly stencilled in pale pink on the dark gloss of the blackwood surface below.

she made good use of me, although she despised my plainness as much as i did her glamour. i fitted so neatly into her fantasies, was so pliable for her, a fascinated audience, not even guessing - let alone protesting about - what kind of adorable, darling little roles she was handing me. she took me to town, made me walk her on the beach, out along the jetty. on a clear, cool morning we were seen together in the square, on the esplanade, in the umbrellaed public gardens by the shore, and at night we went together to unlicensed folk-clubs where you sat on the floor on dusty, lumpy cushions, or at trestle tables upon which candles burned in bottles almost hidden under their mountains of dirty wax, in which moths, matches and cigarette buts were embedded.

she talked about having babies out of wedlock: a neighbour she knew just a little younger than she was conceived out of wedlock. she had a spaniel bitch who had had seven little puppies all in their separate cauls just like plastic bags.

she talked of a sports teacher at her school who had pubic hair right down to her knees - you could see it when she wore her short skirts – and of a hermaphrodite she’d heard of, attending a normal school somewhere, who had both male and female body parts so that ‘she’ couldn’t be classified as either a boy or a girl, though they passed ‘her’ off as a girl, which they had to do because of the size of her breasts, which were a 36 c-cup, and of a famous folksinger who looked and sounded just like a man but was really a woman and refused to wear jeans so that no one would mistake her for a man or accuse her of wanting to look like a man.

and it wasn’t all fiction. i had seen and heard this woman on one of the reciprocal visits my family had made to my cousin’s every other year since i was twelve. she had stuttered and growled her way manfully through a rugged, even a grim selection of blues and ballads, and done so quite magnificently, and i admired her. as gaby said she looked very strange with her roller set and lightly teased hair and her austere a-line skirt, and her blue skivvy lying slack and wrinkled over the almost superfluous peaks of her bra. she was broad-shouldered, very tall and lean, with uncompromisingly masculine lines.

and after what woden had said, i had stood in front of the mirror trying to match my image to hers: the breadth of her shoulders, the easy angularity of her postures, the masculine aura she gave out, the strong, deep-drawn sureness of her glance. i had the advantage of an almost prepubescently flat chest, flatter even than hers; but then she was older. and i thought i understood her. not feminine. not feminine. not exactly masculine. just neuter.

once, when abigail was late home from school after a sports practice one winter evening (she told me) when it was already dark, an older girl who caught the same train as she did sheltered from the rain with her in the station baggage room, and before she knew what was happening, the older girl had kissed her. ‘i thought she was just joking, but she wasn’t. it was a real, deep tongue kiss.’ (‘i’m lying of course, chicky,’ her soul told me through her eyes, ‘but you can see what i’m driving at?’

‘i’m naïve,’ i said with a laugh, which came across as stunningly sophisticated to her.

so on the last morning, standing among her packed luggage, dressed for thirteen hours on the train and waiting for the men to come and get her heavy case, although i could easily have carried it, or she could, she put it another way.

‘ivy,’ she says, and pauses dramatically. i have not yet had the use of my voice restored to me, so i answer with a look of enquiry, which she has shaped on my face with her eyes. she turns softly and goes and shuts the door, and then comes softly towards me where i stand beside my (our) grandmother’s dressing table. ‘i really have enjoyed my holiday.’

she steps out of her body and i see the silken wraith she has become slide behind the big swing mirror and station itself there. her body moves slowly, as if filled with a deep and mournful grief. she has somehow made herself smaller than me, although she’s the same height and a lot heavier.

‘you are my cousin, ivy, but… no… you are more than that, my chicken, much more.’ perhaps that was true. there'd been moments of deep connection. it was not improper to hug each other goodbye, but i baulked. oscar looked pained. loki was impassive, and i was offered no help. i return the hug awkwardly and i look down, because genuflecting slightly she has made herself shorter than me, frowning slightly, scarcely breathing, into her large, mournful eyes and i see that her lips are parted, her tongue visible between her teeth, her throat exposed, with a little pulse beating along its length.

a kiss was demanding manifestation between us, and i was stretched in the tension of it like a mosquito in a web, while loki waited to see what i would do with it.

but suddenly abigail releases me. perhaps she had wanted me to kiss her, not just a cousinly peck on the cheek, a real, lovers' kiss. her breast and belly still pressed erotically to mine, she lays her head on my shoulder which, still under her enchantment, feels broader and stronger than before, until she hears our fathers and gerald in the passage outside.

‘goodbye, chicken,’ she said, and brushed my cheek lightly with a cousinly kiss.

david yarrow was my english teacher. one night he stood humbly, bare-headed, bald-headed on my bedside mat and when i looked at him his face melted into an interference pattern of wrinkles around a sad, sick smile, wrestling with a snarl and a leer, and a mad, bad, grimace of a fear, as if something more than emotions were twisting in him, below his surface, and he said apologetically as he undid his buckle that it was, he was afraid, a matter of sex, and he let his trousers slip with a soft sigh to the floor. i tried to sit up, but my hands were tied to the corners of my bed. i could stand, but i would leave my astral body there at his mercy if i did.

‘this is correctional,’ he said. ‘you are outside the range of normality. i am normal, the norm. my genes are sound. yours aren’t. you are outside the range of acceptable variation. my semen contains normative dna. it will dominate yours. it will cause mutations in you – quite profound ones – that will swing you back towards orthodoxy and conformity, working through to your physiology via this, your astral body. you must not fight me. you must not let your body fight my semen. you must fantasise this. it's normal at your age. let your cells be instructed, otherwise you must be killed.’

there were other people in the shadows, one or two teachers from school, bert schilder, ray fennis, one i knew only vaguely by sight, and a couple of them who were not from the school, and perhaps another one or two almost lost in the shadows i couldn’t identify at all. perhaps they were women. perhaps some of them were armed. not quite grim, they seemed glum.

‘lie still.’

but of course i didn’t. i spun. i flew. i fled. i wrenched my whole consciousness, myself, into the sun-wheeled wall; i went wheeling there, and made a maze of silent screaming, of ultra-high-frequency keening, that radiated back into the past and up into the future, and was a vibration you could feel for all the length of that wall’s life. more than seven hundred years – my soul fled.

my body lay helpless in that fantasy, that was. not. fantasy. why didn’t anyone help me? my mother? my father? were they so deeply asleep? not yet. it was too early for that. lost in tv. my two brothers? woden? gone from me? oscar? loki? my friends?

but i have no friends.

so i’m slowly sucked out of the wallpaper and drawn back into my body like water through a straw. something snaps shut and i’m held.

this is ‘sex’. not ‘if you are a boy or a girl’, but ‘when you do it’. ‘have it’. when you ‘have sex’.

no.

this is ‘i want to go to the toilet’, not a sex fantasy. there’s no one there. 

but my hands are tied to the bedcorners and i can’t get up. and there is someone there. there are men standing there, and perhaps women and some of them are armed and mr yarrow is talking to me about . . .

sex.

no.

no. 

i haven’t got a sex. i am not meant for sex. i will never marry. i will never have sex. my mother has often said it: ivy will never marry. she’s not the least bit interested in boys. and she can name five maiden great-aunts on my father's side, two on his mothers, and three on his father's and my father's twin bachelor uncles, and her own bachelor uncle - all sexless - and without mentioning it, she would allude to her own faint-hearteness concerning sex. we are not a physical family. 

no. 

i’d had sex education, seen dogs mating, seen queen ants mating with their tiny males, i knew all about it. i knew that birds do it, bees do it, even little educated fleas do it, but when it came to myself i was still appalled. in those days sex was still dirty. decent girls were saving it for mr right. only within marriage was it ever all right, some were even saying it was a thing of sacred beauty, to be honoured as a holy act. but many said it was a tefious chore. 

i did ask, actually asked out loud while talking to chris leader once: how could anything that involved the dirtiest, germiest part of a male body going right inside the smelliest, dirtiest, germiest part of a female body, places too germy to touch, even with four layers of wet strength toilet paper between them and your fingers, so that you have to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water after wiping them, be the world’s most pleasurable event?

yes, ivy's attitudes were that bad!   

and yet was she the only one dealing with that? weren't they all evading that same question in their own minds? 

and here’s neuter now, with those attitudes stapled, tightly screwed, hard-wired into her neurosis, and this is, this man is on me, a big man he was too, this huge weight of meat around bone inside his milk-white, pearl-pink, and blue- or mauve- or grey-veined skin, this is sex . . . to have sex . . .

oh! my panic explodes like an atom bomb, i will break out of my skull, i have entered his brain and i am screaming through all his nerves my rage, my fear, my pain. this man’s going to... 

but ivy didn't have a decent word for what this man was going to do. she's trying to bite him but she's gagged and can’t shut her teeth, can't clamp them together. he has rammed something between her jaws. he’s so heavy, skinny little ivy is nearly not there, is only bones, hard, big, bones and a rocky cavern under her... there isn’t any word for down there, he’s going to put his... and there isn't a word for what he's going to put in there, not a decent word...

no.

not in me. not in my body. no. not in my cavern under the high, hard, bony hill with an eagle flying high above. there was a sudden thunder clap and the wet street between its nearly neat twin rows of norfolk island pines and the nice fat rich rows of solid stone houses either side of the road with their gardens blooming and their green wintry lawns were momentarily blindingly lit, like an over-exposed photograph, and a gust of wind flung rain down. so sudden. so unexpected. there was a cracking sensation and the whole scene shifted. 

zeke, like, split the scene, daddy-o.

this is not now a sex fantasy. 

it is this one again where i'm in the cavern in the karst, with its crooked little tunnel leading steeply down from the tiny, hidden entrance under the dark mass of thorns. the white, cool powder, the damp exhalation of the cold, hard floor. i am flat on my stomach on the cold, white, damp, hard floor, hearing them at the entrance: there is no escape. i may kill one, but not the others. i have only my knife.

i slide backwards into a dark crevice. i am wedged there, tight as a shadow, in the narrowest extreme of a cleft in the rock.

if they find me, if they come in through the entrance, i can’t escape. i will have to stand and fight.

i haven’t long to wait. the rocks are falling, tumbling down my little crooked tunnel, dust is falling into my cave, falling in from the tunnel which is too narrow for them, because they are big men and i am only a thin girl. they are pushing their way through, dislodging rocks, sending the powdery limestone dust swirling like smoke into my cave.

shaking off the fear, i get to my feet, and stand. throwing back my head i stand firm in the centre of my cave, my knife ready. i am wedged as far back into the furthest crevice as i can go, like an earwig in a brick, or a cockroach or a slater.

or, no, i stand firm in the centre of the cave.

the walls surrounding me are mazed all over with my poetry written in soot, and with my paintings in paints made from plant dyes and ground muds, burnt earths, ashes and soot, rabbits’ blood, powdered insects, and lime, all mixed with spit. i stand in the centre, almost suffocating in the dust, holding my stout staff in both hands, while the swirling dust fills my cavern, fills my eyes, my mouth, my nostrils. i do not, by an effort of will i do not wheeze (i do not wees); i do not even gasp. i stand firm with my knife, no, my arrow notched to my bowstring, my bow strongly bent, the arrow silent and intent on its tautly tensioned string.

the first to enter shall die. there will be time - his body will block the tunnel – to nock the next man’s arrow while he is dealing with the obstacle of the first man’s corpse, and he too will die. firm i stand in the middle of the cave, fierce and calm and sure... and yet i’m so deeply wedged into the darkest shadow in the deepest niche in the back of that cave that no one would ever find me. i have become part of the rock, its shadow, its grey meniscus of dust drift, of the scared dusk under the ledge, is now all that i am, and yet i know that they will find me and i am entirely unarmed.

there is a sudden soft, purry, thundery-thuddy-thud thundering of dust and big soft clods of light sandy earth and the sharp wedges of broken oolites and whole ones the size of oranges, and the cave goes dark. dust overcomes me immediately. i can no longer see, no longer breathe, no longer hold my weapon, no longer stand. i fall to my knees. choking i fall onto the floor in the dark. in a swirl of delirium i hear one, then another, then another man land. i open one streaming eye just enough to glimpse the barrel of a gun. a flood of white light fills the cave and blinds me for a while.

my cavern is searched. i am handcuffed and dragged to my feet. i am not found in the crevice in the back of the cave because i’m just a slight variation in the texture of its shadow. i am searched, identified, branded again. they are reading my poetry by the light of bright white electric torches, they are examining my pictures, making sounds of awe and wonder.

i lie still on one side and say nothing while the one who kneels over me, still holding a gun at my head, asks me questions i don’t answer that echo softly off the damp white hard-sucking stone of the floor and the walls and the ceiling of the cavern, and i get my breath back as the dust begins to settle, and slowly i begin to see again, through eyes filled with stinging grit.

two policemen come in and they take me away, dragging me out through the tunnel, which they have widened, to the entrance above, through the flattened thorn bushes to the skylit plain, to where a four-wheel-drive and a station wagon are parked at the end of their own tracks, and i am driven across that roadless wasteland back towards civilization, which they know will not hold me except by force.

i am taken to a red brick building with a darkly frowning face and in a back room with one barred and weld-meshed window that gives onto an expanse of red brick wall not three feet away and admits a slab of cold air tainted with rat piss from the alley outside, i am examined and my sex being determined, i am declared a lesbian. but i’m not. i’m neuter.

‘we’d thought it was a boy,’ they exclaimed, chortling, to the grim, growling man at the desk. they tattooed the word on my cheekbone in capital letters half an inch high. lesbian. and through pathways and channels of corruption and for a large sum of money i’m handed over to the near-invisibles, who are a bee’s whisker off being establishment-approved, despite or because of the cruelty and therefore effectiveness of their mind-control techniques. 

i faint.

i come to. groggily i listen to the supersonic screaming of the sun-wheels, the smothered sobbing from under my grandmother’s dressing table. i turn over and it’s gone, and instead i struggle, face down in the centre of my cavern, clawing the cold, clammy white flesh belly of my cavern, feeling the hard-edged scrape of a boot against my vertebrae and the searing red-blue and purple-black pain of the branding flooding into me spilling out of my mouth in a twisting moan that flows over the edge of my bed and onto the carpet below, where it has already manifested as a pool of poison mixed with blood, which i spilt there three weeks ago from a bottle of red quink fountain pen ink. not exactly in anticipation - it was just a piece of shrapnel from the event explosion that was now happening that had been violently ejected back through time as others were now being ejected violently in all directions and through all dimensions.) i watch myself being dragged away. i let my face flatten itself in the cool white abrasive dust.

i swoon. i faint. i rouse. and i’m back in my schoolgirl’s bedroom, full of the magical objects that loki has given me. and the weight of a man is upon me and my teeth close hard on the gag between my teeth, wishing it to be the flesh of his shoulder, willing them to tear or cut through the pallour and stench of his skin.

he holds my head tenderly now. he breathes his warm breath into a shroud about me. he looks directly into my now open eyes so keenly that they are all that i myself can see: my own eyes seen through his, wild blue oceans each one and within them i can see the men in the shadows lounging, in the deeps of my ocean eyes i see mr yarrow helplessly enraged a slight sliver of a turn of the reality away, unable to reach me, unable to leave, while a little china owl flutters angrily at his face, striking with savage little talons at his eyes.

so it is not mr yarrow’s eyes looking into mine, his body on me, his doctor-thing that he pees with in me.

no, it is not mr yarrow!

it wasn’t! it hasn’t been after all! i feel for my own eyes to see with, pushing back from him; but these are muscular arms that hold me, small tight muscles of steel, the steel strength of a slender man. hard is the gag between my aching teeth. it is a firm, youthful body on top of ivy, fully clothed, protective. 

my head rolls right and left until i can focus again. i look into a square, hard, uncompromisingly proud face, with slightly cynical grey, steely eyes and almost a smile on a wide, handsome mouth.

it is loki, after all.

loki!

it is a week before i can turn to him angrily and say, ‘why did you let that happen?’

he makes no answer. but i’m left with his fierce, almost resentful train of thought unwinding in my mind, a retort: that i should never have had at my age such immature notions of fucking, that i’m too old not to know any name but dirty-minded little boys' name for that thing he did it with. penis? i wasn’t sure how to pronounce it. or even if it was the right word. i had never heard it pronounced, not even by abigail. but i knew it was from a latin word for ‘long, thin, sharp, tapering thing’, for ‘prick’.

'besides,' he finished, 'i did fight them off'. '

as the bonds of love that once bound us yield and break, leilani and i smile wanly over an empty distance these days. but it’s not just inertia that keeps bringing us together. there are still bonds to be severed, unfinished business to attend to, uninformed bits of ourselves that need to be told. we see each other less often now, and yes, things are strained and yet, still, it remains good, the conversation, the inspiration, good enough to keep doing it, oh well, sort of . . .

leilani’s parents had built a carport on the side of their house. the garden was a wild piece of english woodland, although a bit dusty for it, and no moss. out the back was a big, sprawling utterly undisciplined patch of sage, impressively healthy on its daily meal of the family leftovers. and something of a conversation piece. 

the garage walls are lined with books. there’s an old wind-up gramophone and a pile of crackly old seventy eights: varsity drag, i’m my own grandpa, my canary’s got circles under his eyes, and lots of old fashioned dance music of our parents’ era.

leilani and i are doing up an old dolls’ house. i’ve made a shelf of books with turnable, readable pages for felicia, the teenage daughter of the house, and a guitar, a school satchel with books and a folder in it, a display case with a collection of shells, chosen by felicia herself from a drift of shell-grit on the beach, the tiny, five and a half inch high astral ghost standing nervously at the edge of the drift, her feet bangled with the deep menisci of the water, her hair falling over her arms like a long, honey brown veil, pointing: that one, the dark greeny blue one, the perfect little mussel shell there, the limpet, and that pearly one over there – oh, is it broken? – well, not that one, then, another one just like it . . .

she has leilani’s hair, straight and fine and shining, but misty soft, not glossy, and zeke’s gaunt, intense features, and she has a way of laughing that leilani and zeke have developed between them, that they use only with each other.

and zeke rigs up electric lights and running water, which unfortunately only comes out in slow drips because the plastic tubing is too thin. there’s a debate about whether to sacrifice the ideal of keeping everything to the scale of 1:12 to utility for the sake of a better flow, still not resolved. leilani makes tiles for the kitchen floor out of squares of lino, and a three piece flowered linen lounge suite with piping, a polished balsa wood staircase, chairs, a bedroom suite, a kitchen dresser and curtains. we work on it together for whole afternoons and i take work home to finish during the week. 

there is a half-holiday on the last day of the school year. it’s a dark heavy day, the sky full of dark, heavy cloud. robert is waiting outside my door when i get home from school, his brow dark and heavy, his shoulders heavy, his fists big and heavy. he doesn’t accuse me of anything, but he says in a dark, heavy voice, ‘i’m sick of you.’

he watches me walk towards him up the passage to get to my door. we’ve been on reasonably friendly terms lately, and this doesn’t make sense. i take it for a joke. he looks fierce and dangerous, like a gorilla, and as i get close to him i say, spinning past him on my girly, girly heel, swinging my femalely fragrant, frothy white under-skirted frock that i’m not wearing, and never in a million years would be wearing, at him.

‘skeeeeeyoooooze me, puleeeeeeeeeeeez.’

and there i am, wearing evangela christos, or rather, she is wearing me, or else we’re just accidentally tangled up with each other somehow, after all these years – didn’t even notice when she left school, two years ago, or was it three? still jeering at him, she’s also crying diamonds cut like pears or tears. they are all a-glitter with the tinkling fear of shattering champagne glasses. her eyes shine through her dim and turgid aura like streetlights in the rain. her beauty fills the hall. 

 robert attacks. me.

a fist on my cheekbone, pain in my eye socket, the heel of my hand on his ear, his knee jabs upwards at my stomach, both my fists on his ribs. enraged he roars, but i win. i seize his hair, and pull him down to his knees, i give him a hard whack on the side of his head with my knee, i leap over him and i flee, slamming the door in his face.

not the first time he's been rough with his sister, though always before he could pass it off as play, perhaps taken too far, holding me too long under the water while playfully ducking me, pressing his thumbs too hard into my throat and shutting off my breath and circulation too long, ignoring my struggles, just for fun. but there's nothing playful about this. 

i have five cents for the phone and ten cents for child fare on the bus if i can still get away with it, because i've turned sixteen. 

leilani and chris and a couple of others had given zeke a party for it, and some elegant gifts, with a card saying BAN ZEKE over which leilani had scrawled some comical beatnik cartoons. BAN ZEKE was also written in black texta all over the gift wrap, which leilani had designed and decorated herself. 

leilani is surprised, but she says, all right, come over, and so i do.

i find her distracted. they have admired the dolls’ house furniture, her mothers arty friends, and so they have stolen it and put it in alvina dewey’s craft shop on new marten’s road among all the posh shops. someone rich will pay five dollars for it. that’s two pound ten in the old currency. leilani will get two pound five and alvina dewey will take the other five shillings. or whatever that is in decimal. we were reluctant to change.

‘come and see what i’m doing now.’ she has made a tiny chair of balsa wood and is weaving a raffia seat for it. you can feel felicia’s grief, and there's a whitish precipitate falling from the air like an ectoplasm after some kind of exorcism. i let her walk up my arm and i help her climb onto my shoulder where she clings like a monkey to a strand of my hair.

‘um, zeke,’ says leilani.

i only look at her, not speaking, as my cousin taught me to do. it’s leilani’s eyes i see leilani through. it always has been.

‘i don’t want to see you any more.’

i hear the bang, feel the sudden tongue of fire, the spit of the lead, the explosion of a rib in my side, not yet actual sensation, and i do see the gun because i’m looking obliquely up at her, me squatting on the floor, she standing, and she has fired from the hip. in her eyes i see her hysteria given a sheen of watery calm by subliminal weeping. in her aura i savour genuine regret. no, we stopped being friends a long way back, and she has died at least one death on my account, but we’ve kept seeing each other in defiance of chris leader, and have still been fascinating to each other, the uncertainty being poignant. even now, she evidently loves me.

‘why not?’ i ask her, after a long pause made uncomfortable by the caving in of bricks somewhere distant and long ago, their mortar crumbling into dust, their dust rising as a cloud and then trailing away in the breeze. but i don’t get an answer.

after another pause, she hauls in a heavy sigh and says. ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ then she looks contemptible, but i feel a blossoming of shame in me, as if i am, and of course i am. a poor sort of poseur without originality or finesse.

i walk the three miles home with a crippling stitch in my side.  robert ignores me. my mother complains that i should have let her know i’d be late home. loki himself dresses the wound, laughing sardonically at me. he gives me a big drink of some herbal brew, a sort of meady ale, and lets me sit up to drink it. i find that he’s chained me by one ankle to the wall. ‘have a cigarette,’ he says.

it’s a slightly better cigarette than i’ve rolled before. the tobacco cost me most of a week’s pocket money. i smoke it, leaning on my window sill and blowing the smoke out through my window so as not to poison the axolotl. leilani has returned all zeke’s gifts.

so zeke. zeke is morose, reads rather a lot, listens more to blues than to anything else, plays aggressive chess. the insects are gone, except for the best specimens on their silvered pins in their cork-lined case, which is seldom opened these days. ivy hardly ever watches television. it makes zeke restless because of the subliminals.

oscar and loki appear to be friends. oscar has taken to wearing a sash of vibrant psychedelic red, black, blue, green, yellow and white paisley looped over one shoulder and pinned with a gold pin over the opposite hip. like a mod. his drumming makes a protective shield around my reading. no one can get into my head.

zeke reads poetry and learns latin. i can manage a fair arpeggio on the guitar now. loki makes me play it like a lute. i sing mainly old ballads: lord randall, the demon lover, the unquiet grave. i know a dozen or so, and i have more in my collection that i’m to learn as well. i have to get good. even ivy, or maybe especially ivy fears zeke’s perspicacity, zeke’s ability to scent even the very faintest whiffs of falsehood, and the fear response that that evokes, the frisson of dismay, the freezing over, the dull thud of the end of a friendship, of the death of a hope. and ivy was just average as far as that went, few fibs, some self-delusion, not much else.

every one i started high school with is leaving this year. i am like a snake changing its skin, and this new one will blend with my new social milieu as the old one blended with the old.

that was the blessing of the cobra woman, whose skin zeke still wears for a belt.

dannion is the only one of them who still comes to see me, greeting oscar respectfully but not so timidly now, giving loki a kind of antique courtesy that he acknowledges by sliding a grey, metallic ray into her aura as a kind of nourishment, a medicinal, text-rich load for her to absorb, which she does slowly and appreciatively as she talks to me, as a child would suck a lolly. he seems to like her, eczema and all. and sure, there’s a lot less wrong with her now.

she’s been up into the future through a crack in the maths she made by getting her graph wrong as she struggled through her maths 2 exam. loki’s owl sits on her head, startling her, and then delighting her, while she talked about it, her soul to mine.

‘the world doesn’t end,’ she said. ‘i adopt four children and send them all to uni. none of them has eczema, brittle hair or gaps between their teeth. my husband is gifted, and i’m not. leilani is overseas, married to a frenchman. she has a phd. chris leader is in advertising, very rich, no kids, no husband, a series of very civilised love affairs. you…’

‘i know.’ 

‘…will go insane.’

this last sentence emerged into the spoken conversation we were having about her probable career in economics, in parallel with the subliminal one, broke through to consciousness. it came in oddly, after i’d said something vague about what i thought my prospects were, and she looked at me darkly for some time afterwards, as if doubting whether or not she should doubt it, but ultimately determined to stand by it and not let me see that she was wondering what had made her say such a thing.

it thrilled her, and the thrill communicated itself to my aura so that i felt it as an emotion of my own. titillating, i found it, and said so, though a looong moment passes before i laughed. 

but i caught that there was something ruthless about the way dannion found me so entertaining. she doesn’t like me much. she prefers loki, and it’s him she comes to see, and if she had anyone else to talk to she wouldn't come at all. but even so, without that news from the future she’d already have lost interest – except perhaps in oscar, whom she timidly adored. she talked of other people, of boys, a boy, a very small one although exceptionally good at maths, who had danced with her at the social and had not despised her . . .