In winter I wore my raincoat with the pixie-hood. Chérie Russell had Wellington boots as well. We walked down the back lane together, and she poked her finger in and out of the slit in her coat and pretended she was a boy.

The berries fell from the pepper-trees; we trod them into puddles and made rainbows. The oil twisted and coiled like the patterns when we did marbling for the Children’s Hour covers in the classroom tray.

Then it was the end of the year, and we marched across the yard for the final assembly. The band played, Mr. Hand spoke, and we all clapped. The sun was shining and I wanted a drink of water. Jennifer Toy looked down at the breasts that poked already through her dress and sniggered. I could see Ronny Morrison’s head by the flagpole. Then the duxes of the two Grade Seven classes went up to get their prizes; the microphone shrieked with static, as we sang ‘God Save the King’.

EIGHTEEN

When I was ten years old I was given a cocker-spaniel puppy. I came home from school for lunch and he was there.

He was black and white, with curly ears that waved in and out like sooty waterfalls. He had a moist nose like a pepper-pot; eyes that were as worried and brown as Reece’s. He was frightened, and slipped about the verandah on little paws. He cried for his mother and trembled in a corner.

When I came home from school in the afternoon he was still there. I realized that he was mine. I lifted him up and examined him carefully.

I saw the pink undersides of his ears, the pools of moisture that welled his eyes, the patch of prickly silver under his chin. I parted his legs and stroked the blunt stub with its feathery tuft; peered at the crêpiness beneath. I forced his jaws apart, and counted his teeth; examined his liver-coloured mouth, the sponginess of his raspberry tongue. He had a patch of whiteness on his chest and two back legs. He had a pedigree and a name: Kanarvah Laddie. I called him Tinker.

Tinker grew and became a dog.

His coat became ruffled and dishevelled; bantam-rooster feathers festooned his legs. The satin pincushions under his paws grew hard, but the little seams between stayed mushroom-soft and were pierced by three-cornered Jacks and rose thorns; I had to hurt him to get them out. His crinkled ears grew long and dragged in the grass — I probed for tufted thistles, and put in canker powder from the brown glass jar.

Billy, the Persian cat, disliked my dog. One day they fought, and Billy jumped on the table in the passage; froze hump-backed beside the urn. The balloon lady fell off, the table was scratched, my mother was angry. One day Billy, who was old already, became older still; pulled the hair from his coat, got thin. A man from the Council took him away — I never saw his green eyes, his tortoise-shell fur again.