Yes.

What are they of?

His face brightens, and he comes to stand beside her and pulls some books off a low shelf.

These are the places Im going to go when everything is back to normal. Im going to sail around the world.

Really? You can do that?

People have. Look, have you ever heard of New Zealand?

I didnt even know there was an old Zealand.

Look here, he says and opens the books onto bright photos of rolling hills, tall mountains, curving beaches, foreign markets populated with street stalls and colourfully dressed people picture postcards from all the world round a collectors set of beautiful places. And heres Australia, and this is Tahiti. And Madagascar. Even Greenland, which isnt green at all but frozen in ice all year long.

Gosh, she says. You know how to get to these places?

He closes one book and looks down at the binding of it.

I would try, he says.

Then why aint you goin now? she says. Greenland aint coming to you. What you waiting for?

He looks at her uncomprehendingly.

With things the way they are? he says. It would be impossible. But one day, when the world gets back to the way its supposed to be.

What you know about the way its supposed to be? You aint that much older than me. You were born into the same world I was.

But Ive read about it, he says, sweeping his hand across all the worn spines of the books on the shelf. All these books. Hundreds of them. I know what it was like what its going to be like again. Grandmother says its only a matter of time.

Richard Grierson smiles, but its an inward-pointing smile, a smile of someone folding himself back up for storage in the colourful corners of his own crayon fantasies. She looks at the books, their titles hazy with a thin film of sawdust, and she looks at the toy ships built for imaginary journeys along the red dotted lines of a childs map, and she looks at the exotic pictures in the books still open flat before her, and she understands that these places are just places of the mind, and she wants to be able to exalt his wild dreams and imaginings along with her own, but theres something about them that make them the saddest thing shes ever seen.

*