‘When I say good, I mean clean, anyhow.’

  You slept on the information. When you woke, Frederic was on to marriage.

  ‘…no substitute for it in the end,’ he was saying, garrulous with concussion. ‘The right kind of girl, and you’d never want Westcott Street again. You got a girl?’

  ‘No one definite.’

  ‘No, that’s me all over. No one definite for me.’ But he went on praising the ancient virtues; and when you woke suddenly again, it may well have been because you sensed Frederic was nearing a preoccupation you shared with him.

  ‘You know the Beach Road? Out through Campbell’s Reach?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve…been out that way.’

  ‘There’s a girl out there off one of them God-awful farms. Dark. I don’t mean coloured, I mean dark-complexioned. Black hair. These big eyes. You know, they look like they’re saying “Right, mister, what are your credentials? I’ve been fucked around by experts”. You know the way they live out on some of them farms.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I don’t know. She drives this little blue Japanese truck. I’m driving back and forward to the refinery all day, and I suppose I only see her once or twice a fortnight. Those big eyes of hers. On high beam. You know. “Don’t you meddle with me, mister. I’ll break the lead in your pencil. I’ll have your balls.” And she’s so bloody lovely you could bloody weep.’

  You shivered at the strange experience of having Barbara’s harsh innocence judged as enamelled bitchery. It was as if Frederic had provoked fresh perceptions in you, so that you heard the scratching of chickens in the pub’s backyard as Adam might have heard the first bird peck in triumph at the first beetle on the day of creation.

  It was five o’clock. Barbara would be beginning to look for you in pubs and the town’s two depressed bookshops. But five more minutes and you would have heard the whole of Frederic’s rendering of the myth he had made of Barbara.

  ‘I reckoned she was bound to break down one day on that Beach Road and I’d pull up and fix that little Jap engine and be polite as hell, God, and restrained, you know, no chatting her up, wouldn’t even notice she was a woman, that’s the best way with man-eaters, they’re expecting you to jump in with everything and it puts them in their place when you don’t.’

  ‘She sounds ferocious,’ you said.

  ‘That’s how she seemed. You know. But the funny thing is I saw her in town here a few Fridays ago, and instead of being courteous and stand-offish as all get-out, I fronted her straight-off, like a lout. You know. I said, “You live out on the Beach Road, don’t you? I’m always passing you on the road.” I couldn’t help myself. And you know what? She was kind of remote and shy herself. Spoke perfect bloody English, I was expecting her to say, “Piss off, mister.” So she’s bloody sweet as all get-out. That makes me bloody worse about her. You know, she stuck in my brain. A girl like that could be the centre of every-bloody-thing, I mean you’d have a whole bloody new world, she’d make you see everything in a new light. You know.’

  Frederic merged into a silence as into a burgeoning of reverence. It was incredible: for him Barbara was the untouchable essence of all reality. Yet it was in you that the novel perceptions were occurring. You felt something new secreted in you, the work of some gland that had waited twenty years for this first ejection. Under its militancy you understood poor Mr Placer, bound by his deepest sap to his ugly woman; and were nearly coerced to explain, as bluntly as you could manage, how Frederic was disqualified on the basis that no one could possess Barbara who had not been slotted into her universe by the impact of the accident.

  ‘Perhaps she’s already married,’ you said.

  Frederic’s head shook. To deal with the objection, he turned onto his side; little-boyishly, his linked hands were held between his knees. His eyes were blank with a dark animal honesty.

  ‘No, you can tell these things, you’ve seen the child-bearers from these poor farms. God, you should have seen my mother—I mean, she had me when she was seventeen, and I was the second. That girl? No. And she’s no whore either, because a whore wouldn’t need to live on Campbell’s Reach, even if she did it for five cents a throw.’

  Then, the question of wife/whore/spinster so acutely solved, Frederic asked you to wake him at six, and closed his eyes.

  You lay still in great joy, aflame with hope. A different man’s desire had triggered your own.

  When you left at ten past five, you took Frederic’s boots with you. They rode uncomfortably, tucked under your arm.

  In the department store where Barbara had an account, the menswear man asked you were you starting up in a new line of work. If so, he assured you, there was three years’ wear in the overalls they had in stock.

  ‘Good,’ you said.

  Back at the truck, which Frederic had hoped would one day do a sump or big-end within reach of his benevolence, Barbara was simmering. Half an hour late for milking. Plangent cows. Plangent mama.

  ‘What have you got there?’ she asked, making that breathtaking, tentative line of her upper lip which was one of her most powerful effects.

  ‘Shirts,’ you said.

  ‘Shirts? And the boots?’

  You swung them onto the tray of the truck. ‘They were going for fifty cents at the Saint Vincent de Paul.’

  Yet for eight days afterwards, you kept the overalls wrapped in your cupboard. To arrive at her door by night in Frederic’s uniform was a joke that took planning: it could so easily go stale.

  At the end of eight days you were beginning to see that you must trust her to detect at the core of your fancy-dress whimsy a desire which she might be able to trick herself in contracting.

  It was Saturday night. The parents were in the barn watching a documentary on Nigeria and working up a conscience over starving Ibo children. In the kitchen, Barbara was ironing clothes at one end of the scoured table. And it was at the moment that her lips pouted a little and formed themselves along half-querulous, half-questing lines, that she seemed most lovable, and you knew the time had come to initiate the masque.

  You fetched the Mineral Deposits uniform and escaped with it through your window onto the veranda. In the dark your fingers trembled and you snorted at the sullenness of the press-studs. Then the unfamiliar boots, which flapped with every step yon took. Past the burn where tribal music could be faintly heard orchestrating the distant atrocities.

  There was moonlight, and you waited in the deep purple shadow of the house. If the hoax failed, if she was revolted from the start, extreme action would be necessary. You might have to leave the family, or even kill yourself. Moon-eyed Frederic had brought you to this impasse.

  Mounting the front stairs seemed an entirely new experience, as if the angle of your vision and the answers your emotions gave to the well-known timber were those of some stranger, some first-time visitor. Glomp, glomp, went Frederic’s gumboots. Glomp, glomp, you mad bastard.

  You stood in blackness, gazing at the unlit door, sniffing up the musk of the house.

  You knocked. You heard her call, ‘Damian, can you answer that? Damian? Damian!’ Then she herself was heard treading in the hallway, and pausing.

  ‘Anyone home?’ you called with a sudden confidence; and all the frogs began to thunder, as if the air had conveyed certitude from you to them.

  The door opened to the dark hall, where Barbara had chosen not to put a wasteful light. It was obvious that her eyes had not adjusted to the dark and that she had not seen who you were.

  You introduced yourself in broad Frederic.

  She stared at you while her eyes conformed to the relative brightness of the moonlight. Then she stared at your eyes to gauge their intent—ironic, picaresque, insane.

  ‘Well,’ you felt safe in saying. ‘Do I look the part?’

  ‘What part?’ she said. ‘You goat.’ But she was gazing at a meaningless point to your left now, and with a certain gaiety.

  You said, ‘You don’t know the half of it, Barbara.’ And, on the threshold, you told her of meeting Frederic who was delirious with her beauty, and took on Frederic’s voice again, but aggressively, and said the things Frederic had said: ‘Those big eyes of hers over the steering wheel, dark, you know, they say righto mister, what are your references? I’ve been meddled with by experts. Eyes on high beam, I’ll break the lead in your pencil, you know, and so bloody beautiful…’

  ‘Why don’t you come inside,’ she suggested with a must-get-back-to-work vigour.

  You took on gravity and your own voice again. ‘No, he’s crazed. You’re his dream. You’re heaven. Honestly. The guts of creation. You’re it.’ By the tone of these words you implied refusal to abandon the impersonation. ‘All right, she said. ‘I don’t mind having an admirer. But listen, please come inside.’

  In the kitchen you could see that her eyes shone with a new recognition of you. Were women, seemingly intricate ones, endowed with a new vision of you simply on the basis of your changed clothes and accent? He had read in novels that women fell in love with uniforms. Was it now simply a matter of letting fruit fall in season? Yet she was a Christian believer in her peculiar way, and looked at incest as the vice of the lowest of valley families. And if she was ripe for you, she had only just now come to a knowledge of it. It was a fact that begged a little time for assimilation.

  In any case, you regretted not having met oaf Frederic three years past; that three-years-past giant and jealous Placer had not felled the both of you.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt your ironing,’ you said—in your own voice, yet like a stranger.

  She actually became girlish. ‘Well, sit down then.’

  You obeyed, and made a quizzical mouth, as if saying, That’s right, just charades!

  What you did, in fact, was to incite her in blasphemies against the family, timid and childish blasphemies, which you then topped with boorish ones. You began to sweat in desire at her pitiful impishness. There seemed little resistance to your manipulation of her; you found and exacted from her a precise and liberating impiety. You tramped up and down like a dragoon made with victory and a sense of mission, and a great number of bad, laboured, bitter jokes, which had never before been spoken in the house, were now made—your mother’s butter-fat content, for example; your father’s stud value. You improvised, in the character of adult Frederic, the character of seven-year-old Damian in the night-watch prior to the accident (‘Put a Band Aid on it, sis’).

  Talk took a waspishly philosophic turn. ‘I mean, is it…you know…hereditary?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know. In my bones.’

  ‘That’s cosy. Doesn’t sound like gilt-edged security to me.’

  ‘There aren’t any gilt-edged securities in this life.’

  ‘Righto, righto!’ you cried out, warning her off metaphysics. ‘I mean, how do you know this thing hasn’t happened to other people too? I mean, the Prime Minister, Sophia Loren. They might be able to be fixed.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Oh well. As long as they’ve had their bovine TB shots.’

  ‘Huh!’ She put all her weight into a crease.

  ‘Well, what did it? The bomb?’

  ‘The bomb?’ she said unfamiliarly. ‘The bomb?’

  ‘The atom bloody bomb?’

  She shook her head, and behind her levity it was apparent that she had never seen the accident in those impersonal terms. The bomb falleth where it will, it raineth on the just and the unjust. Whereas the accident was somehow a particularly Glover eventuality.

  ‘Well, was it a sickness or somethink?’

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Or did you hypnotize them, like on television, when they tell some old bag she’s a duck and she tries to lay an egg?’

  ‘You can’t hypnotize people into being a…an animal. Any more than you could hypnotize your duck lady into having feathers or webbed feet.’

  ‘All right. So your mother checks herself over and finds she’s a prime milker. I mean, what happened then?’

  ‘They were angry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why.’ She frowned over that thirteen-year-old anger. ‘The cripple or the blind man or somebody who has cancer—these people aren’t angry. But they…they were very angry.’

  ‘What at? At you?’

  ‘Of course at me. Perhaps they thought that if I’d only had the good manners not to mention what I saw to them, they would have stayed normal.’

  ‘And there they were: one second, two legs and two feet, jogetty-jog, and the next, four hoofs etcetera. Moo!’

  ‘Mr Frederic,’ she said, ‘Don’t you think you’re being very familiar?’

  No doubt she had picked up the ‘very familiar’ from her mother. However hard it was to believe that anyone, even your father, had ever been very familiar with your mother.

  Nothing about this moment recommended it as the point of opportunity, but more quickly than your consciousness could take account of, you found yourself at her side, brought your hand down her hair and said, ‘Barbara, I’m so sick from wanting you.’

  She stood the iron upright and far to her left. ‘Damian, it isn’t allowed.’

  For perhaps the first time ever, you cupped your hand on the skull beneath the black hair. ‘Do you think I’m like some Campbell’s Reach oaf taking his sister while blind drunk?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ She was absolutely rigid. Desire kicked in your belly: its opportunity was the fact that she had even begun to debate. ‘But circumstances don’t alter cases.’

  ‘You bloody idiot mick,’ you whispered. ‘Circumstances make all the difference, and the circumstance is that you obsess me. I didn’t choose it.’

  You had no idea what sort of heaven or hell you were making, yet were very optimistic. In fact, vision came to you of a sweet, slack Barbara, smug with love, sprinting down to the surf some summer dawn when a delicate salmon haze lies over the eastern sea, rolling in breakers to wash her love-making off, rising with bubbles of foam in her hair.

  In the event, the two of you began to make love with the vehemence of people committing an ultimate crime; yet, a second before orgasm, she seemed to become maternal. In that instant of perception you would have retracted your seed, if that had been possible.

  The vision of an ample love affair vanished. She begged your pardon in unemotional terms. Then she did not speak until dinnertime on Sunday, when, as she basted the Sunday meat, you blustered at her.

  ‘Just let me know how much longer you’re going to get at me with silence?’

  ‘I don’t mean to get at you with silence, Damian. The two of us have put ourselves in debt, by our actions.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ you said.

  ‘No. There’s no doubt we’ve sinned against our ideas of good and evil.’

  ‘Not against my ideas we didn’t.’

  ‘Oh yes. That’s why we used each other that dreadful way.’

  You roared, ‘What are you talking about?’ That she should talk about using people in the face of the parents’ suspicions about her part in the accident was simply too perverse. ‘Of course people use each other on such occasions—that’s the idea! Use and more than use,’ you admitted more softly.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she said, and poured the fat of the Sabbath roast from its pan into a large and ancient fat-tin, ‘we’re going to have to be very careful in the future. Otherwise our lives will be impossible.’

  Behind your clenched jaw, you had to admit she was taking it very soundly.

  The elder Glover could feel through his hoofs the electric contact of truck on road. A tribute to the manufacturer, he thought. To whom he immediately penned a mental letter of commendation. Dear Sir, We have used your vehicle extensively for the transport of livestock, and my wife has never complained of her milk being turned by it—a tribute, of course, to your excellent suspension…

  The excellent suspension was shuddering over corduroy road towards the beach, and Mr Glover took the shocks in his four robust legs with gusto: all that veranda life, a chain of boredom on which were strung the spasms, flurries, medications of the day, had come close to convincing him that he should settle down to his decline. He had developed symptoms such as balled handkerchiefs, exhaustively read newspapers, catalogues of discomforts. His wife’s mastitis had been obtrusive enough to distract him from his own animal potency.

  My daughter does most of our driving, over roads frequently cut by floodwater…He could see Barbara’s beige elbow poking out from the window of the truck. A fallow arm, very firm, her long beige hand laid out along the dirty paintwork. Her hand in marriage…What a life she could have had. Mr Glover felt exhilarated that that limb was set aside for serving the irony which was known in the house as Our Accident.

  He shook the vile joy off, and was then at his ease again, leaning back on the supposition that she had somehow willed the accident and could not now un-will it. She had gained in power and lost in freedom; they had gained in peace of mind and lost in status. All parties could be well advised to call it quits. Not lacking in insight, Mr Glover knew that he would be a fool to pretend he could have coped as brilliantly as his exceptional daughter.

  It was the peace of animals that Mr Glover was most grateful for not having missed in his lifetime. Of course he had suffered exquisite despair at some notable stages of family history. But there were other times when his consciousness sank into veins, the fabric of his nerves, the organs of filtration, transmission, transformation and cell-manufacture. He became nothing more than a walking delight in the flow of his own blood, the grandeur of its passage, the exhilaration of its oxygen. So that he came to understand why animals could stand visionary all day, drunk on the magnificence of their own livers, the splendour of their kidneys.

  Into his human faculties he had no entree. Man was cursed with mind-your-own-business vitals; his organs took revenge for his bright-boy cleverness. But even pain was different in that four-square, shock-absorbing trunk. Pain surfaced in man with the suddenness of flotsam. But in the true animal, there was a sense of non-performance, ill-performance or over-performance in one or another function of the body. Pain came closer to being what the priests said of it: God’s plan for letting us know we are ill. Still it crushed, but your complaint was more soundly, broadly based than the frightened yelp that was man’s most frequent response.