I was happy in the dining-room.

I stood like a statue, my outspread arms garlanded with Reece’s wool. I covered my grandmother with doilies when she fell asleep; crawled behind the tapestry front of the wireless and sang falsetto, assumed a gentleman’s voice, hoping to trick someone into thinking it left on by mistake. I counted the buttons in the tin under the Singer sewing-machine decorated with gold scrolls and a silver medallion; stroked the leaves of the aspidistra beside the window.

My mother and I slept at the back in the sleepout. Bribed to bed with hot milk, stories, kisses, I waited for her. Our bed of enamel bars and brassy knobs was a cage for my animals: Koala and Camel, Pooh-Bear made from Nan’s old fur coat. They protected me — with the Guardian Angel, the Sandman, the roses on the wallpaper — from the Chinaman, the Skeleton who might fall from above, the Mouse that gnawed at the wall. The mug with the chipped rim I liked to catch my lip on stood empty by the handkerchief cut from a sheet.

When my mother came I was asleep; woke, to see the eye of her cigarette blinking, finally disappearing in the dark. Then I curved leech-like to her body, lost myself in the pillow of hens’ feathers.

And in the morning there is always the window and the verandah, the wall, the rockery and the bloody geraniums. Even though the girl with my name never comes, I still look. And see the girl with sausage curls and a brother who looks like a cocky and plays the flute go past.

Or I wander in the garden — popping fuchsia buds, pulling the lily-tongues (but I mustn’t suck them, because they’re poison). I paint my lips with rose-buds and look for fairies: see them in puddles when the water splashes, climbing down snapdragons, dancing in the broken glasshouse, staring back from the well.

I have a garden at the side of the house where nothing grows but mosses, maidenhair fern, and a mysterious plant that blooms every seven years. One night my grandmother calls me, and I go out to see it covered with bells.

One day Reece helps me dress up as a bride in my night-gown and the net curtain. I pose by the fowl-house and a frieze of speckled bantams and my mother takes my photograph. She does the same when I sit without my clothes in the pink tin bath.

Then I am older.

The pink bath disappears. I pretend to swim in the claw-foot enamel one, am frightened by the chip-heater, pee down the plug-hole, am disgraced when my mother finds a tiny stool floating beside the pumice. The brass bed disappears; I watch my mother dressing when she tells me to shut my eyes: see India-rubber nipple, frizz between her legs, arse-hole dot — and am surprised.

SIX

The Kindergarten was named after the Governor’s Lady. It was hidden in the back streets of Thebarton, coming dangerously close to the terraced houses of Hindmarsh and Brompton; dangerously near the maze that was Bowden — tucked behind the zigzag railway that separated it from the upper class homes of North Adelaide, with their sandstone walls topped by plumbago and grape-vines and broken glass.