Indeed, because they did not realize my difference, my mother and grandmother dreamed of the nice house with the charcoal-suited husband, where I would water the flowers with the rubber hose. They had banished the unknown; banished all uncertainty from their lives; my grandmother diminished death, by saving for her funeral. They loved me enough to wish the same for me. Surely, they reasoned, my quixotic desire to enter the High School, with its exotic Latin and French, its unknown consequences, would complicate the life they planned in all their love.

And suddenly, everything was threatened by the aridity of that world of preparatory commercialism I entered. The split that began when I ran from the sinister wooden tower, from those who claimed the Pierrot costume, to find my mother, had always been with me. I had always been two; I had always had my fits. But my two selves were complementary, they came together.

I was threatened. The green glass shuddered in its panes; the roses and grape-vines, the ivy and lavatory-creeper could not protect me. Even my fits eluded me; they became ceremonies I could not comprehend, as I scratched the angry patterns on my wrist. The two people I was separated. There was the pale one I despised at school; the wild one who came home — took off the shoes and the hat and the tunic, and was free.

Thirty

THIRTY

Another autumn came.

Blue days were hazed with smoke from burning rubbish; green evenings washed with rain.

At dusk, the sun cast a pinkness over the garden. For a moment the autumn flowers were bright: brittle orange and red dahlias vied with mauve geraniums. The sky bent low; the garden dimmed. Wind rippled the lawn, and the dahlias and geraniums turned fickle — sprang from the earth, blazed above.

The wind rippled again; the sky garden, too, grew pale. Reds and mauves and oranges faded to indeterminate evening.

The garden was muted with acid swatches of bamboo above the fence; with darker ruffles of almond and quince, pierced by fish-shaped leaves of orange. Gum specked the apricot, stems of coral roses leapt. Only the berry bush, flecked with red, recalled the day.

Yet the dahlias and geraniums blazed on; there were rose hips everywhere. The Easter daisies trembled open; I picked them in armfuls, and the sleepout became a beehive: honey lurked at curtains, in my pillow of feathers. And I felt lazy and half asleep, yet knew that winter came.

The sun pounced on a blowfly’s back and turned it green. I watered the earth, and beetles threaded the creepers with minute glistenings as they scrambled to safety. Nan knocked the leaves from the peach; carried them to burn.

Spiders were everywhere: brooding in the middle of webs, perched shameless in the air, revealing mechanical undersides. I saw five of them swinging silverly — by the apricot, the fig, between the berry bush and the clothes-line, amongst the vines.