That I had a horror of this burial

When we sorted out the pieces of clothing in the bag we were putting into the charity bin -- it was too late to sort them properly -- too late to do more than check the inevitable, as I'd said -- I saw that our daughter was dumping the gray skirt with the bright red lining that I had worn for my grade three ballet exam -- that and the muslin apron, with its three or four rows of zigzag applique -- two pieces of clothing, or at least dress ups, that our daughter couldn't have fitted into for so many years -- and you said to me, then, as soon as I described what they were, that I could take them out of the bag if I wanted to. But I said no.

As we walked away from the bin, I told you that years ago I had realised, too late, that she had dumped a couple of tiny rubber dolls that my mother had played with before the second world war, and how distressed I had been to realise this -- how it still distresses me -- even now as I write, and for no reason that I can fathom -- but still, all the same, that I had known I should send the skirt and the apron into the chute -- what else was I to do with them? -- that if this part of me had its way, I would be buried under the profusion, under the mountain of useless objects that connected me to my past -- so completely buried I would not be able to move -- that I had a horror of this burial, even as I had a horror of the loss, of the gaping wound from the place where each of these objects had been torn from me, these wounds that will never heal, no matter than it has been years since, unknowingly, I had cast those small rubber dolls into a similar bin.

But, as you had seen, I said, when I had come across the piece of crushed blue velvet that my mother's childless and wheezing childhood friend had given me at the door of my grandmother's place, when they had both been alive -- this piece of useless velvet that I have never known what to do with and that was squeaky to touch, not even very nice -- I had removed it from the bag -- the red lined ballet skirt and apron going into the bin but the velvet staying out and having to be carried home. There being no sense to any of this, I told you -- will I even be glad about what I have done today? -- and you: as you usually do, you said it was up to me.

Sweet and innocent, childish colours

As we walked past the colourful coke ad at the bus stop -- the one with the cans ranged in sweet and innocent rows, as she called them -- in sweet and innocent, childish colours -- my friend told me about the woman who had called out for help with the coke can that was stuck in the side of her pram -- this coke can that the woman was having trouble getting out because she had no hands or wrists, and in place of ankles, a metal bar in each of her shoes -- and how it had been the metal bars that my friend had first noticed as she passed the woman who was worrying at the sides of her pram, the dark metal bars of her legs at an angle -- this woman who in that furred way of someone who might have been drunk but perhaps only helpless and annoyed at the allotment of words she'd been given at birth had called out for help in retrieving what turned out to be a half-empty can of coke, and whose baby all the while was lying on its back in the pram, apparently happy. My friend then told me that for the whole day after this she had been unable to forget that she had helped the woman get her can of coke -- her standard coloured can of coke -- and that it had made her sick, for some reason, to think that she had done this -- why should it make her sick -- why on earth? And the only thing my friend had been able to say to the woman at the time, she said, was about the baby: something about it being beautiful. Which it was.

To find the rabbit waiting

She told me to tie the long, grey towelling rabbit by its ears to the sapling, because this way, should the child who had lost it return, she or he would find the rabbit waiting and what joy would ensue, so now I tell her that when I go down the path from Govetts Leap I manage to forget what I'd done -- about my abject obedience I almost say -- until I come to the bend where the thing is dangling, and each time I'm struck not so much by the body that's now hard to distinguish from the bark but the way the once brown stitches of the rabbit's eyes have become drained, as I've been trying to call it -- it's hard to describe -- of all that is friendly -- not dead of course, since it's always been dead.

Dainties on King Street

At the corner of the first block: a single arum lily left upright against a tree, its bulb bare and fringed with pale roots; in the middle of the third: broken chunks of white polystyrene in a pot of plastic restaurant flowers (it is not yet night); in the second block: a green padded jacket with its arms spread wide, loose, generous even, over the back of a wooden bus seat -- so pleased, as if it's conducted this whole thing for us -- these dainties on King Street -- but one of the arms is twisted unnaturally -- is it dead? -- and most of what we can see is only the lining.

For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open

A view, coming around the corner of the university library, of someone on the phone who, leaning forwards over the cobblestones on one tiptoed foot, is noiselessly leaking from his open mouth one long white pendulous gobbet before pivoting and huddling over his handset to say that he'd been just about to spit when someone had come around the corner.

Gathering Evidence

Since she had last seen Newtown, she told me, King Street had gone downhill, what with the homeless people lying open-mouthed and snoring on blankets on the footpath -- and on the north side of the street too, which meant that they were vulnerable to the squalls from the south -- and so many shops closed, the windows smeared and empty, which was due to the rents that the owners were charging -- ten thousand dollars for a single week, she'd heard, and these weren't the original owners but the sons and daughters of those original owners who had worked out that, even if their shops stayed empty, no rent coming in, they would save thousands and thousands of dollars in tax from their many other investments and so, in the end, would be far better off.

To a girl in one of the closing down shops who, since she was suffering from pleurisy, was unable to keep still -- the pleurisy making her want to iron all the pieces that my friend wanted to try on or to dash from one side of the shop to the other to find a pure wool jacket that she could make a very good price, with the pile of clothing the owners had brought in that morning still heaped, unsorted, on the counter and the girl's still feverish hand pressing to the cornered edge of her forehead as she described how she had recently had to give up her doctorate on Elizabeth Gyring but that now, if my friend could believe it, she was far better off -- to this particular girl my friend had recommended a book she thought the girl should read for no other reason than that there was pleurisy and anger in it -- a bit of pleurisy and a lot of anger.

The gorge of the darkened kitchen

Isn't it always when walking along a street in the dark that you pass close by a lit up window where a white Maltese terrier has climbed onto the back of a sofa to touch its tongue to the glass whereupon you recall, suddenly, that for at least half an hour that morning you were convinced that you were going to be hospitalised with a disease as corrosively gruesome as osteomyelitis -- the lit up window with the laughing dog and the gorge of the darkened kitchen behind it making you feel as if the light at the front of that house was turned on you?