‘I make her sound a shrew, a proper bitch,’ you admitted. ‘In fact she’s the quietest girl I’ve ever met. But she got her power at what was a dangerous age. Twelve. There she was…you know…pubescent. And taller overnight. Inches taller than my parents. I don’t have to tell you how violently powerful a twelve-year-old girl can be. I don’t blame her for any of it. She was incredibly fair. And my parents did become children in some senses, you know, transferring more and more authority to her. And not realizing that authority frightens her. Anyhow, power’s bad for a twelve-year-old, and she certainly developed methods of dealing with debate.’

  ‘You’re not making this up?’ Helen asked.

  ‘She was only a child and she had the responsibilities for imposing penalties. She must have been awfully lonely. The trouble is that a twelve-year-old can be terribly…sort of assertive. She still is in a quiet way. Not so much assertive as…well, she’s the focus of the house, as I was saying. The house morality…it’s all in terms of her. I’ve broken it by staying here.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said that carping, liberal, untested hostess of yours.

  ‘Yes. Listen, you can’t have parents like mine and lead a gay life on campus at the same time, unless there’s someone there, at home, doing well by them, keeping them safe, out of trouble.’

  ‘Keeping them safe? Are they cooperative?’

  ‘They suffer to some extent from…confinement.’

  ‘You don’t mean, locked up?’

  ‘To some extent. Enough to guarantee they remain people in their own right.’

  ‘But they are people in their own right. Without being locked away.’

  You shook your head at finding her so solemn over habeas corpus. ‘My parents are of a certain type of person…about whom you could say that…in the absence of clearheadedness in the rest of the community, they’re safer in jail. Nor are you exactly an average specimen of the type of people you find in this valley. They’re bored and stupid, too dense to have a very active sort of malice. Out of pure vacancy they chain up their children —’

  ‘Ah!’ she mocked. ‘That makes for a change.’

  ‘They interbreed,’ you gave her as a climax. ‘And you know what a northern rivers farmer is at heart. Gay insouciance. Gay insouciance means they’ll root a black gin just for experience, and if not a black gin, maybe a brood mare. And if not a brood mare…why not a midget?’ For a crazy second you roared as men do at the height of bravado in pubs! ‘Hey, did I tell yer about the night Clarrie rooted the midget? Christ! Funny? I nearly shit myself.’

  There was a certain thrill from hearing Helen making affirmative noises through closed lips. The inference was that she herself had seen gay insouciance, its paradoxes.

  ‘As long as you nearly shit yourself,’ you commented, ‘anything’s permissible.’ You held a silence. ‘Anyhow, I think I’ll always believe that given her social background, Barbara’s decision was amazing. Her ability to cope with it once she’d made it…that was pretty remarkable as well.’

  Watching Helen’s eyebrows arch quickly once, you thought there was a momentary jealousy in her face, that she wanted to show up the folly of Barbara’s primitive regimen.

  ‘Yes,’ you went on, ‘she freed them by hiding them away. She made a world for them by letting them vanish from the world’s memory.’

  ‘That sounds epigrammatical,’ the girl complained. ‘As if the two of you made it up as a salve for doubts. You must have doubts.’

  You denied it. You could only have doubts when there were two actions to choose between…

  But Helen raised the question of those memory cells of a bureaucracy reinforced with computers: electoral rolls, health department files, taxation records. Even on a literal backwater as Campbell’s Reach you could scarcely fail to kindle a response in some departmental file, to spark the electronic curiosity of a departmental IBM.

  For Helen’s sake you started on a history of the Glovers, from the days when your father bought four hundred and thirty acres of marsh behind a particular superb beach. You were seven at that time, and the very number, four hundred and thirty, resounded in your head like a definite promise. The promise had to do with the beach being so good that it would become a resort. Then the swamp would be reclaimed. When the day came, you Glovers would become a rich family. The day never came—it might have, it did for many another swamp-bound farmer milking his cows by the light of a kerosene lamp.

  That was the year in which Barbara took control. At the time you had envied her power. Now you were aware of how deep her terror must have been. Her terror in the night, with no one to call out to, because already she was the ultimate power against phantoms. You had her; she had no one.

  It was after a night alarm that Barbara had taken power.

  ‘Farm kids are supposed to know everything basic about physiology. It’s presumed that they take note of the goats and cows and so on. But the part Barbara knew nothing about was that one night when she was twelve she would begin to bleed.’

  She had got up from her bed urgently enough to wake you. There was no electric light, and she fumbled at lighting a candle. When light sprang up, you could both stare—totally uninformed — at the ooze of blood on her nightdress. Before your eyes, she twitched when a new gush came.

  She told you that she was dying. You thought so much of her in those days that you believed all her panic had risen because she could scarcely imagine how the three of you could survive without her.

  You begin to howl, while Barbara paced up and down in the hope that people didn’t die in mid-stride.

  No one came to help you. The candle burned out, and when it did, the dawn threatened greyly outside, cockerels could be heard, and three early hornbills creaked seaward over the house. Best of all, she announced, the blood on her dress had dried. Then she packed the caked fork of the garment over what she must have thought of as her wound, and you both went back to sleep; the last sleep of both your infancies.

  ‘Why?’ Helen asked. ‘Why do you say it was the last sleep of your infancy?’

  ‘Because I pity myself,’ you said flippantly, and neatly passed on to the tea parties.

  Barbara held tea parties from the time of your parents’ accident until you were about ten. That always made her seem very fallible to you: you weren’t considered bona-fide dairy farmers, you weren’t in the Cooperative (you added to your earnings by selling bait), and a large piggery north of the town bought your whole milk production. And Barbara was stung by your lack of status as a family. So she invited children to Saturday afternoon teas, to prove you had quality.

  (‘People are so vulnerable,’ Helen muttered, intolerably pat.)

  Your parents stayed in the barn, your father prohibited from smoking, his aromatic mixture while visitors were with you. And visitors (girls from school, that is) patently envied Barbara, the way she was dominant in a house that had pots and crockery and a fuel stove. So, at the table, they would tend towards boasting, to being too talkative, too amply smiling. Then they turned home through the gate, their heads in a huddle, whispering like a nascent League of Decency. And Barbara would seem gratified.

  ‘But surely the schoolteacher at Campbell’s Reach…?’ Helen suggested.

  ‘Oh yes, our guests told the teacher we had no parents, and he visited us as a duty. But our parents were in town, Barbara told him. And she could always bring a letter to school signed by my father. See, the teacher couldn’t give a damn if Barbara was mistress in her own kitchen. All he wanted was not to have to write long letters to the Child Welfare.’

  Not that there had been many afternoon teas; Barbara soon worked her way through all the possible guests. There had been perhaps four such salons, but the last one had given them the status of an institution. Retrospectively, in your mind. A girl, a shallow fat girl, a genuine mudflats sow, was teased for her fatness by one of the other guests. She answered by repeating some half-rumour she’d heard about your parents. You, in your tight pants at table, watched Barbara, who seemed herself to remain passive, but from the jug in whose hand water, just off the boil, seemed to leap out at the fat girl. The skin on the girl’s arms reddened and shrank, even in the second it took her to rise up and shriek. Her friends watched her convulse, then began to pull her party dress off her.

  It was characteristic of Barbara, her seemingly passive way of inflicting torment, as if she herself were a primary victim of the hot water, as much as the fat girl. Which was not far from the truth, because the girl’s mother, as big and vicious as you would expect her to be, called on your mother and, finding she wasn’t (of course) in, beat Barbara up with a lump of red-box from the fireplace.

  The startling aspect of Barbara’s judgments was that she had never chosen wrongly when the question was either to admit or deny their existence. She kept them registered for voting, but did not let them cast postal votes. For this involved mail addressed to them. Willingly she paid the statutory fine levied on non-voters. Yet, in the case of compulsory tuberculosis X-rays, she contrived to find half-castes to take the treatment for them. There were many reasons for the difference: the fine was higher for X-ray evasion; doctors as well as public servants were involved in correspondence between health department and the X-rayee. There was danger in that those who were willing to take an X-ray under another person’s name had often startling pulmonary histories of their own. You had to find some healthy vagrant or fringe-dweller who needed the price of a drink. It seemed incredible to you, as you sat in Helen’s lounge-room telling her of Barbara, that periodically your cautiously strenuous sister managed to recruit such people.

  In the same way, she never pretended that they were dead or gone away. She and your father between them devised a perfectly legal document giving ownership of the farm to Barbara, in trust to an uncle who lived in another state.

  Throughout the recital, the image recurred of a tall girl, more concisely boned than yourself, wearing eyes that have a convent privacy about them, and a secret, firm mouth. Standing on the street side of this or that bar, she parts the fug of tobacco smoke and country obscenity and squints a little, to spy out you, her big-boned, edible brother.

  You must have seemed so pitiable then that Helen rose and approached you, taking your head against her stomach. Your arms hung inert against her hips. How guilty you felt for doubting that you loved her. But did a person lie to someone he loved? Did he take two uninterested handfuls of her hips?

  You muttered, ‘They’ll both be dressed in their best and full of excitement. I should have gone. They’d know already I’m not coming. But secretly, not saying anything to each other. They’ll get tired—it happens in an instant. They wake at dawn, you see, and there’s a point in the afternoon, you know, a certain angle of the sun, when they simply turn themselves off. It isn’t such a bad life they live.’

  Once again you could feel tears on both cheeks. What bathos!

  ‘It’s a matter of their battening onto you, picking over your experiences. My mother’s the worst—she doesn’t even think in real terms. They suck on a person’s experience. Barbara’s good with them. She can convey experience very… atmospherically. She saves them every detail of her Friday trips to town. Town being this town. The big cultural watershed, God help us!’

  They had red wine at table to honour Helen and yourself, but it was easy to feel unwelcome, for the goodwill so signified seemed brittle and token. It took four glasses to convince you that you were not making a convenience of Helen. And a fifth to make you secretly formulate plans for Helen. Her father was pleasant, harried by success, her mother ferociously pleasant. Her throat was coired in pearls, and she wore her breasts like a brunt, no haven for men or babies. You would save Helen from her, free her to become something more than her mother’s negative.

  You were forced to tend this way by your overall policy: to fall in love before you saw Barbara again.

  ‘There’s a clean towel for you, Damian,’ said Helen’s mother, with a standard hostess smile. You could sense the resistance in her—you do not dress well, and she worried about leaving you to a room which has been made sacred by Helen’s successful brother. Belching politely, you sat on the bed. To your left was an intimidatingly large map of the United States with what might have been isohyets marked in red, yellow, green, blue, pink and violet wool. To your front, on pegboard, were a series of reproductions labelled Impressionist, Expressionist, Fauvist, Dadaist, Cubist.

  Obviously a boy who didn’t want to be caught after dark in a country town not knowing his Dadaists from his Fauvists, you muttered in mockery; in fact you were made conscious of your alien slovenry by such thoroughness, and by the chronologies and valency tables that were pegged above and below the paintings.

  You turned the light out as soon as you could. But the moon spilt over the map, even when rain started, and you began to see the lines of wool as lines of morality, linking cities of equal malice, areas of comparable level of…to use a phrase from your childhood…mortal sin. Everyone knew now—even theologians—that it was a far worse thing to use a person than to fumble with yourself in a country crapper at fourteen.

  In your last corner of consciousness, you admitted to yourself: I do not love Helen, nor is it foreseeable that I will.

  When you woke and turned on your side, Helen was in the room, waiting beside Cubist as if she had been there, like a handmaid, for perhaps an hour.

  Suddenly you were afraid of such gentleness, and fled into a totally predictable lust. It’s her look-out, you formulated; she’s fair game, you blasphemed. Beneath the nightdress the skin was very cool, suggesting she had stood a long time at an open window, debating with herself. She knows what she’s doing and I certainly do, you moralized. A night for bursting ramhood and kingship. You might crack her spine or crush in her rib-cage, if that added anything.

  When you had finished with her, you were very gentle and attentive; and struggled to avoid offering yourself as a reparation. Even though you yearned to punish yourself, you knew she did not deserve the final insult of compensation. In her, you feared by her silence, there was a parallel struggle not to make any further demands. You felt petulant even. Hadn’t you broken in her arms? Wasn’t she the winning athlete?

  At last she asked you. ‘What was that about my nipples weeping milk?’

  ‘What?’ you said.

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing,’ she seemed to complain. ‘You said my nipples would weep milk.’

  ‘It was a figure of speech.’ Why had you said such a stupid thing? Was it from the Song of Songs?

  There was a silence during which you could sense how she grappled with her principles and tried not to ask the same questions women in love had always asked.

  ‘I thought it might have arisen’ she told you jovially, ‘from your wide experience as a lover.’

  ‘I haven’t had a wide experience,’ you told her. And certainly it was the truth.

  ‘Damian, did you ever know anyone whose nipples bled milk? When they were with a man, I mean?’

  You said humourlessly, ‘I didn’t know I’d be taken so literally.’ You had begun to fear a lovers’ quarrel, for which—after the day’s moral crises—you had no reserves.

  Helen said, ‘I don’t believe in the way I’m behaving.’

  You relented then, and kissed her breasts. You never knew: even this late you might work the trick and find yourself healthy and in love.

  ‘Who’s that?’ called your father. He had heard the gate twang shut.

  ‘What?’ said Barbara.

  He gave up. ‘Oh hurry up with that stuff. Are you bloody manufacturing it?’

  But Barbara had quietly disposed herself for your arrival. You knocked softly at the front, in the hope of not being heard. Coming in, you could not see at first—she waited on your right flank, arms folded, one hip propped on the draining-board, like a dry woman who had suffered conventionally from some guest’s lateness.

  The moment you saw her she surprisingly extended her hand, commanding yours. You instantly grabbed the hand with both of yours, as if you needed rescue. Yet gestures of physical affection had become an embarrassment to both of you, and after two or three seconds you returned the hand to her side. Not that the accustomed fright and exhilaration failed to arise: it was made more complex by your guilt over Helen.

  ‘I was lucky,’ you said, ‘I got a ride the whole way from town.’

  ‘On a Saturday? You were lucky.’

  The father yelled. ‘Is that Damian? Barbara. Will you answer?’

  Gesturing silence, she tiptoed to the partly opened top leaf of the verandah door and pulled it fully shut.

  ‘Hey, what in God’s name are you doing?’

  Another prayer from the mother. Every time he used God’s name in an unfit context the mother said a short prayer, a Glover counterweight to the Glover blasphemy. This, you knew, was a psychologically sound reaction: all signs pointed to the Glovers’ destiny as corporate; they could best hope for a joint redemption.

  Barbara, it seemed, felt entitled to shut them out and stand with her soft, private smile which inhabited principally her eyes and the utmost corners of her mouth. It was imperial. You had, in argument, sometimes called her the Empress Barbara. You never knew what she was smiling at and whether you were sharing a joy or being mocked.

  She told you now, ‘They expected you last night. They were terribly hard to settle down.’

  ‘They’re out there? The verandah?’

  ‘The barn’s got so musty. All this rain. Your mother nearly sat down on a black snake out there. It went whipping off down the side of the stall. Crack, crack, crack.’

  ‘They aren’t cold out there?’

  ‘I’ve let down the canvas blinds.’ She displayed her remote strength and her almost-sweetness, saying, ‘You should have done your best to be here last night. You see how it leaves them.’