The minute front garden was choked with roses. Coral suckers hooped above mildewed leaves, neglected petals quivered with sap-green aphides. Nan’s pink Lorraine Lees looked vulgar and over-blown beside the tissue-paper frailty of queerer red and white.

We sat on the verandah on summer evenings, behind the swaying screen of bridesmaid’s fern and a hedge of rosemary; crooning sentimental songs from Boomerang Songsters, and telling secrets. And Carol told me that she would become a spangled lady in a circus; would swing from the high trapeze, and stand on one leg on the back of a coal-black stallion. And I believed her.

(How are we to know that already Carol’s future has claimed her? — that she will live out her life in Rose Street: in the house with the silent piano, the patchwork quilt, and the cats; in the yard with the rusting taxi, the witchetty grubs, and the moss? — that her future will lead no farther than the Cowandilla Road, where she will tread five days a week to wear out her nails at a battered Remington? — that she will sit on alone at night, shorn of all the secret radiance that slumbered in her pigtails; imprisoned by a television screen and the fern and the red and white roses and her family? How are we to know that she is closer now — dreaming on the verandah of the spangled circus life — than she ever will be, to reality?)

Anything seemed possible on the verandah, and so we parted easily, waiting impatiently for the next day to come.

When it does, we will awake and escape to our backyards; and I will climb the apricot, and Carol will climb the peach; and we will wave and coo-ee to each other, and be Tarzans.

THIRTEEN

I am a city child. At night I am lulled to sleep by the owl-hoot of last trains; see the cold lights of planes stub the stars. By day I am bound by the fickle winks of amber, green, and red at corners; walk to school over earth I cannot see beneath a concrete crust.

I see the earth spinning like an aniseed ball in space — covered with a brittle casing of mortar; hammered by a ceaseless rain of cigarette packets, sweet papers, chewing-gum, dog shit, and gobs of yellow phlegm. This is my nightmare — when the noise of cars crowds out the nightjar; when I am strangled by telegraph wires, smothered by the gas-works’ stench.

Yet there are rainbow patches in my concrete quilt. And at night in my sleepout, perched between the cement verandah and the chocolate earth, I hear the train whistles blend with the cries of cats; and sleep to the scent of stocks and lilies nurtured by the moon. I wake to a chorus of roosters, and the derisive hoot of an unlikely kookaburra; and the eye of the sun mocks the tinsel memory of the traffic lights.

I am a city child. I am bound by a tram-line to the city minutes away; to the parklands and clock-towers, the chimneys and flagpoles; to the Beehive Corner and Balfour’s.