I was the one who wandered in the garden and talked with the flowers; I was the one who raced with the others across the asphalt and limped home with bloodied knees.

And as I grew older I became adept at leaping quicksilver from one of my selves to the other. And as I grew older the split grew deeper, yet I forgot that it was there.

ELEVEN

Another summer came, bringing with it school holidays, roses in the gardens, sprinklers on the lawns, crackle of heat in the early-morning air, blue sky swallowing me up.

I clasped Nan’s hand as we walked down Rose Street. Floating above the trees I saw the cut-paper outline of the city — its spires and towers jostled by ugly shoe-box shapes. Behind it, like a cardboard stage-set, were the mauve hills of the Mount Lofty Ranges.

(Adelaide, built on the banks of the River Torrens, lies between these hills and the sea. It is a square city, girdled by a green belt of parklands that turns rusty in summer, and divides it from endless blocks of suburbs.)

So we hurried towards the hills, then turned from the grandfathers to the other end of Dew Street. We walked past the sinister lane that was no longer sinister with Nan beside me; came to the Henley Beach Road, where we sank onto the slatted seat outside Hook the bootmaker’s and waited for the tram.

Which one would it be? — open-ended fury with the striped blind that careered round the corner from Hilton; or the double one that swept up grandly from the beach, bringing with it whiffs of seaweed, and tired mothers and children trailing spades and drifts of sand?

Once when I clambered onto the platform of the tram from Henley its doors swung shut before I was properly on. My grandmother told me that I could have been killed if she had not pulled the cord. When it came, and we rose from the white seat, I was careful to hop on gingerly first, with Nan close behind like a thickly-padded bolster.

Off went the tram.

As it passed the grocery on the corner that smelt of cheese and string and biscuits, I saw the acned delivery boy, no longer clumsy, pirouetting on the pedal of his bicycle — a grey-flannel leg gracefully skimming the bar. I saw the butcher’s shop with the marbled joints stuck with plastic parsley where the stout butcher trod the sawdust floor in his apron flecked with blood, and grieved for his son who had become a priest. We passed the drapery with its limp winceyette night-dresses, where a lady-assistant in a sunray-pleated skirt sold doilies stamped with arching rose-trellises. I saw the greengrocer’s that marked the seasons, the Italian milk bar where I went on Sundays with the billy-can, the Greek fish and chip shop with its now frying notice in the window.

The conductor rattled his bag and took Nan’s shilling; gave me our tickets and the change. We flew over Bakewell Bridge, and I pressed against the window to see the trains I heard hooting in the night reduced to toys, and the cows nuzzling the parklands we crossed to reach the cemetery. We passed the High School, then veered towards Currie Street and the fumes of the Rosella Sauce factory; sped past the green handkerchief of Light Square, and the Iceworks I always shut my eyes at, where my mother threatened to leave me if I misbehaved. Then the tram stopped with a jerk, and we shuffled with all the others; clambered stiffly into the floating confetti of used tickets beside the bank with the wedding-cake façade.