rain, the mosquitoes come. You need something to keep them away. There is only one thing in your world that is a length of fine netting, and you know exactly what room to find it in.
Lesson 27
Never expect in the child a degree of perfection which one rarely finds even in a grown person
You never enter your father’s bedroom anymore. He no longer brushes your hair on a Sunday night, no one does. And the room is not his now, in any way; it’s been prettied up. It feels alien, forbidden, scrubbed; sanctified by something unknowable. But in it, now, is the only thing of hers you will ever want.
She is away, visiting her mother. When she is gone it is as if the house breathes out, with a sigh—your whole world unfurls and you can move freely in it. You won’t have long. You scrabble through her cupboard and rigidly ordered drawers; God, an entire life spent making things neat, what a waste. You find what you’re looking for in a leather suitcase under the bed.
A carefully folded veil, under a circle of dried roses.
Your mosquito net lasts through storms and winds and possums rampaging and the time you jumped away from a red-bellied black snake and crashed through it; lasts through days of you returning later and later until finally, one morning, she follows you; to work out where you are disappearing to all these God forsaken days, to work out what on earth is going on. And with a scream of rage she flurries upon your hidden place and dragsdown her precious veil, now ingrained with grubbiness and torn beyond repair.
She gets you home by the hair, your long golden hair, and knees you in the back and now finally you see the strength of this hefty country lass, and you’re so slight; she knees you like she would a calf and grabs your mother’s old dressmaking scissors and hacks off all your hair, in great ragged clumps—as if this will be the only veil you will ever have in your life and she will destroy it, oh yes, and may it never grow back. So much hate in her, so much frustration at this stain in her life. Then she gets a bottle of black ink that your father uses for writing cheques and she tips it over your head so it runs down your face like black blood in huge streaks and screams, ‘Get out, get out, get out of my life,’ her voice naked, now, finally, with the one thing she has wanted ever since she came into this place.
That night, you gallop your hurt and your howl into your Snoopy diary, the only voice you have. Because you are becoming a woman in this claustrophobic place—you are learning not to let slip the roar of your true self, and your father, of course, will not be told any of this, what goes on between his two women. You are learning how it is to be female in this life.
Lesson 28
Follow openly and fearlessly that same law which makes spring pass into summer, summer into autumn, and autumn into winter
Suddenly, boarding school. Just like that.
Cast adrift. Unwanted. Emotionally whipped.
But curious. About a new life, a new chance.
Curious as to how to expose your aching, open wound to the light; the wound that can only be sutured by one thing, the simplest thing of all. Love. The necessary verb: to rescue, bloom, protect. Aching for something, anything, to heal you and perhaps here in this new life you will find it.
Your convent school is in the city’s centre, its honey sandstone shadowed by buildings taller than it. Your father’s lucrative night shifts are paying for it—eleven and three-quarter hours, from 8 p.m., triple time. In the Big Smoke you’re still the kid from the bush, like a horse in a box kicking out, strong, if you are too long in it. City-logged. Every so often you can smell the bush when the breeze blows in from the south and you hold your head high to it. Above the pollution and the cram of the noise and the crush of the people you want to feel the dirt between your toes and in yourhair, you want to be strong with your land again, want silence and