And so we painted horizontal borders and sewed aprons and dissected nasturtiums and debated the ethics of infecting rabbits with myxomatosis. I made a beach-bag in Needlework and queen cakes in Cookery; I ran in the relay at the Sports Day and memorized ‘To Autumn’. Winter came (the leaves turn yellow and flutter away); I unpicked a blue and gold band from still-new straw and stitched it to navy felt.

I was glad that winter had come (… and walk in a crocodile to the Railway Oval; up the Beach Road — delivery boy still on pedal, butcher treading sawdust, drapery winceyette; climb Bakewell Bridge and see trains — Brighton, Seacliff, Marino — and leave the bridge and go through a gate and no more crocodile; run — grass, willows, olives, figs — to play softball, vigaro, basketball, tennis); when it rained we couldn’t do sport.

In summer it was awful (… get back to Rose Street and frightened to look in the glass — so red it’s really not; face like traffic lights; Catherine wheels and Roman candles; ears hurt); I rubbed at redness with ice.

Sometimes I walked up the bridge with my friend. I thought she was different from the others, but one day she had to go early (girls we watch in Grade Seven); it had happened to her as well.

(After school, when the rooms are deserted and chairs stand like trees upon the desks, when the corridors echo with cleaners’ buckets and the swish of brooms, we play — and cling to the last remnants of childhood. We play as if possessed — hiding in cloakrooms, racing down aisles, peering in cupboards. I seize my friend’s spectacles, and she is at my mercy — she cannot see. Her face is naked and screwed; there are circles about her eyes. She crawls up steps and stumbles between desks, knocking at chairs as she seeks. We play a strange Blindman’s-buff. We whip ourselves on, whooping with terror, consumed with frenzy. I feel my friend’s body as we wrestle on the floor. I force her head into the rubbish; papers and pencil shavings wreathe her hair. My heart leaps to her cries. The cleaner at the door tears us apart.)

When winter became spring (the trees are green) my friend told me she was going to be a veterinary surgeon; to be one she must go to the High School. I did not believe she would leave, but in February she was not there. When it was autumn (the green leaves turn yellow, the chrysanthemums are picked, the Easter daisies bloom) she came to see me. She looked different in the new uniform. We stood on the verandah; I tested her verbs (shorthand cannot compensate for a nonchalant: ‘Voilà un livre: c’est mon livre, à moi.’