I was proud of my grandmother, oddly upright from the embrace of stays that fastened with spiteful teeth.

As soon as we got home she flung them off, having one of her hot flushes from the relief of it; calling out to Reece to put the kettle on. Then, as she blew on the tea in her saucer, rested her feet on Reece’s knees, swallowed C.P.S. cheese spread on slices of malt loaf, she was her familiar self: collapsed in her pink petticoat, the bruise of her navel quivering, one shoulder-strap fastened with a safety pin.

On the corner, sweating in navy tussore, hair tightly curled, mouth square with lipstick flaking at the corners, petal-hat pinned high, marcasite elephants trotting across her breast, pearls about her throat, she intimidated me. She kept peeping to see if her stocking seams were straight; remembered to tuck the lacy handkerchief up her sleeve, hitch the gold watch that kept falling down her wrist.

My mother came to claim us. She pounced, surprising us from our reverie — pulled Nan’s coat straight on her shoulders, fussed at her hair under the petal-hat, made clicking noises with her tongue as the handkerchief began its inevitable descent. She was a stranger from a land of Advertising Departments, block-makers, fashion board, jars of Process Black and Poster White. She smelt of Blue Grass mixed with pencil shavings.

Then we were off in a tight knot down Rundle Street, and I saw brooches shaped like bows, blouses with cross-stitch love-birds, rabbits with their legs apart — all bloody pink and blue tissue. I saw a wooden family sitting on wooden chairs and Noah and his ark and a fur coat small enough to fit me. My mother exclaimed over a dress of silk and velvet ribbons and there was a glass peacock and the lady behind the counter was old and wrinkled.

We entered Balfour’s Cake Shop, ignoring trays of éclairs and lamingtons; climbed the stairs to the Tea Rooms and the waitresses in butterfly caps; sat down to our fish dinner.

TWELVE

Carol was my friend. She lived next door but one in a house full of cats, with a mother and father, two sisters and a brother.

Carol’s mother had a romantic name: Ruby Rose. A photograph on the mantelpiece showed that she was once a romantic young lady with hair she could sit on. By the time she was Carol’s mother, the lady masqueraded as a woman with a creased red face, eyes fixed in a perpetual squint. A grey skull-cap was all that was left of the famous hair. She wore a fur toque shaped like a muff, ankle-socks, a much-stained apron. Her dentures clicked angrily when she talked, and echoed her words. Each night after tea her face turned monkeyish as she discarded her teeth to suck her gums.

Carol’s father looked like her grandfather. Once he was a young man who came to Australia with a London taxi. The young man became that other whom Mrs. O’Brien next door called ‘a dirty old man’. His nose was pitted and swollen like a monstrous strawberry. He had pale eyes embedded in tired flesh, hair in his nostrils, ears hung with pendulous lobes. Like his wife he assumed a comforting disguise: a shiny black suit, a waistcoat mottled with food and a watch-chain, slippers full of holes, a celluloid collar.