Janine is reminded also of her father’s grief and sorrow after Budgie’s death. ‘Janine,’ her mother had once told her, ‘your father was so disappointed when you were born. After Budgie’s death he had wanted another son.’ Was that why when she was very small her father had once wanted her to be dressed up in a pair of blue shorts and a white shirt. He had asked her to come to where he was with his friends, near the engine turntable in the railway yard. The children used often to go on the big steam engine as it was turned slowly round on its steel rails.

‘This is my son,’ he had told his friends. Janine had blushed and felt very shy. How many disguises do adults always want children to put on? Are they not too old to play these games? Or are they so serious about them that fantasy may be transformed into reality?

Janine feels she must find strength in the fact that innocence had once existed not only in those closest to her but also in herself. Mungo had sought to protect her from all the manifestations of evil. Those pretty flowers of orange and gold, of white and red, that lay strewn and scattered from the pideni, still bearing their freshness—Janine had wanted to pick them up, but they had been touched by evil. The moon had been wrapped in the flames that swirled above the head of the exorcist, the burning brands scattering their sparks. The sky was red and the great bali demon, Riri Yakka, had loomed out of the dark, towering over her life.

She will never find Mungo again. She finally knows that that safety would never have endured. The protected garden had belonged only to childhood. The stones and pebbles they played with in their ritualistic games have grown into sharp, jagged rocks to be hurled with great murderous force, to kill and maim. The blood from the slaughtered cock bird is now the blood from the virgin who is raped in the forest where the flying foxes screech as they maraud the fruit.

There is guilt and sorrow now in the lives of those around her. Janine had known it all along. She sees it once more as clearly as she had once done when she had stooped to pick up those flowers, red hibiscus, yellow marigolds spilled from the pideni, lying on the red earth after the bali drums were stilled and the flames quenched from the exorcist’s torch. And once more in the kamatha the cobra with its outspread hood has crept out.

She stands suspended, for a moment, before she takes the next step, nearer, nearer, towards that inevitable confrontation with violence, with death, with destruction.

A Husband Like Shiva

Man desires an apsara in bed and the woman, a husband like Shiva.