But not for everybody, not for this lost soul. The violet blue morning glory cannot screen them or protect them forever from the outside world, within the fortress of the school. Here, then, is that moment of truth. The world has changed. All life, all pleasures of this world are subject to decay. ‘Our voices will vanish,’ Christina thinks to herself. ‘Now we are young, but I am grown up, I am beginning to be aware of the bloom on my cheeks, the glow in my eyes as if fireflies have flickered and passed over them in the night. Everything will pass. The birds drop down in unknown coverts to perish, the wild flowers lose their lustre and are stripped of their frail transparent petals of gold and purple. The grasses burn. Our steps effaced. Our teachers grow old and die. Forgotten. We will have long since ceased to learn from them. The sky, the clouds take on the colour of flint, grow cold. The earth will be blackened and charred. All flesh will perish and go back to earth. How quickly life is transformed in death.’

The air is so still. The wind silent.

‘I must see for myself what lies beyond this wall of grass,’ says Christina. She is alone. The others have decided to return.

She separates the thick strands. They rasp against her skin. The valley flickers in her eyes, the serpentine river winds down below, coruscated silver. The mist has altered the perspectives of the further ranges and she steps into seeming safety, upon a ledge of vapour. She has a vision of her body plummeting down the precipice. Her step does not falter as she steps forward. But then she draws back. She closes the screen of mana grass. If she plunges from the ledge, stepping into vapour, there will be no foothold. But no, the act of dying is the ritual she must enact in her mind if she is to emerge out of her lonely discovery. The mountain must fall too, the summit of its strength collapse; its falling rock engulfing the valley, the garden, the school, the playground, burying beneath it those toy figures that no longer have any reality.

The others are safe, for the moment, where they sit, suspended in time on the rocky ledge. They will go back to the valley but the road will not return to the same conclusions. They will discover with the passage of time that the valley is as dangerously deceptive as the secluded mountain.

Two Women and an Apple

‘Witness says that about 12.30 in the night she left the hotel. The man had given her an apple for her children.’

—Evidence in trader’s murder case

Voice One