Her breasts have no nipples, and I wonder who bit them off. I stare at her scant pubics, and the cobwebs under her arms; her marble legs have varicose veins, her toes lie crooked — fringed with little hairs. Her belly is a peach with a bruise of navel. I want to put my thumb in.

But it is best when she puts her head in my lap and I can get close and squeeze for the worm of pus. I make marks with my nails, and say there is a blackhead; I find ingrowns and pull out silver that didn’t go blue. She says there’s a lump of wax and then I have more to do — for I love all the little things best, and making dirty come clean. And she makes her chin go hard, and it looks like orange peel and my fingers come together and out comes the little dot. And the head came off the pimple and I saw blood — I really should have pricked it with a pin.

Sometimes we go out under the peach tree with Reece, and the lawn is wet from the hose and the seat is like a boat. I pluck her eyebrows where they meet by the frown and break my promise — nip along the lip. And her eyes come open and she swears, calls me bloody cow, and nearly hits me and Reece is upset — tells me to stop and her voice goes thick.

My grandmother loves her garden. She wears her hat and the shoes with the hole for her bunion. She stole a daphne cutting from a garden down the street — snipped it at night, put it in water to start a root but it wouldn’t take. The same with lilac. But her fingers are green: for the broom is all threaded with yellow, and in autumn there are dahlias and the Mother’s Day chrysanthemums, and fires full of leaves. And in spring the violets and hyacinths, but still she is sad about the daphne.

I waited for her to come home from town with the moist newspaper bundles that were snapdragons and marigolds and pansies. We planted them together, caught by the dusk and the moon; our fingers fumbling and touching in the mud, the smell of wetness, flies and moths zigzagging the air, lights along the street.

The sound of crickets from the ivy told us it was time to go in.

FIVE

The front bedroom, shadowed by the verandah, was the coolest place in the house. In summer I escaped to it in my petticoat — soothed myself amongst its chilly lino daisies, lost myself in its crocheted quilt, breathed in fluff and darkness from under the bed. It was a silent room, a repository for best clothes and half-forgotten dreams. It only came alive when someone was sick.

I had measles, mumps, whooping-cough, chicken-pox, and scarlet-fever there. I lay frightened in the bed, waiting for the doctor; calming the wild dance in my chest with thoughts of the importance of the quilt that looked like a bride’s veil, the candelabra with six fringed shades, the rug that could have been a sheepskin Polar bear.