Fictions are memories no one had. I am Isabelle, and reality made me sick. This is how I re-imagine my life…

   The setting is a beautiful, beautiful valley! Breasts, men would liken the hills to, but what breasts sit like those at rest? Therefore I say buttocks! Of a beast felled, and happy to be so.

   – 1 –

When I drove over that hill, how I anticipated that longed-for vista. That lush, rolling meadow of grass, the wind brushing it one way, then another, now going with the grain, now against. And there, in the midst of that painting from my past: Branwell.

   Just as Branwell presently stood before me in the long grass, he had stood before me then, on the shorter grass of the school oval where I first saw him… Thirty years ago.

   We were ten, on the cusp of adulthood. It was the mid-80’s; South Australia.

   After recess, he was admitted to my class.

   I should confess: I am extraordinarily beautiful. Now I know on that point I should be modest, humble, indebted, but for the sake of an honest memoir I cannot. I can only say for all but one incident I affected those attitudes. The exception is when I told a girl in my class… but never mind. I did so because I saw how beauty would advantage me in life, and its absence disadvantage her. And I’ve always wanted those advantages! I see men and women stealing looks at me, some openly, some in snatches they suppose stealthy. Some of those looks are because they want to be like me, others because they want me. And don’t suppose I haven’t stolen similar looks at other people, choices that would surprise you. Attractiveness of an ugly kind can be very appealing.

   And so, yes, at that delicate age, I already knew my beauty was a boon to me. Even if I had not put it into words, I could hear it in the words of adults, their cooing, and most especially in their gestures, their coddling caresses, which is why the beautiful Mrs Holt asked me, me alone among the many, ‘Exquisite Isabelle, make sure our new student is cared for, Branwell.’

   He sat at the desk beside me. Though we used biro, our wooden desks still had ink-wells. Time had moved on, but not our little school or its furnishings. Such quaint—queer!—surroundings. How the past dawdles, yet how the future shunts us on!

   Mick, my stepfather, would make any visiting friend help in all the chores—feeding the chooks, shifting the sheep from one paddock to the next. It annoyed me with a vehemence I felt I conveyed in my eyes.

   ‘I don’t mind, Isabelle,’ murmured Branwell. ‘It… it feels normal.’

   Mick loomed over us, the tufted outcrops above each ear joined by an arch of hair.

   ‘And when you’re done, help your mother.’

   ‘Yes, Mick,’ I answered demurely, yet my charms, my attributes, which worked so well on nearly everyone else, failed on him. He needn’t have made that directive; it diminished him.

   Yes, even at that diminutive age, I felt myself above others. 

   While Branwell—dear Branwell—had come to our small town to stay with his grandmother in the only historic mansion our municipal had left, a mansion with all the charm and mystery only age can bring—I lived with my mother and step-father in a new house, a house of the eighties, unimaginative, as low-ceilinged as our townsfolk were low-brow, as unadorned as they were unsophisticated, as resistant to magic as a bright, lurid day. 

   Later, with Branwell and I herding the sheep from a stubbly paddock to the verdure of the next, my dear—my own!—asked, ‘Why don’t you call him Dad?’

   ‘Because he’s not my dad.’

   ‘But your mum’s your mum.’

   ‘Unmistakably,’ I answered with a coquettish tilt to my head that long hours in the mirror had convinced me conveyed my beauty in its most scorching aspect. A beauty which aped and improved on my mother’s, coupled with an intelligence all my own. The changeless changeling!

   Branwell regaled me with those doleful eyes. Pretending to ignore him for the present, I picked apples from our tortured and overgrown apple tree.

   ‘Come, let’s feed Bessy.’

   We surprised Bessy at the stable, but not Mick, who did not see us, he being in the glare of day, us being in the dark of the shed. He was with the twins, the children he’d sired with my mother, his own. The twin girls with their dark and coarse hair, their goggles for glasses.

   He crouched down to hug them on his knees.

   ‘Daddy!’

   ‘Daddy!’

   ‘My dears, my dears!’ And then, as if answering someone he believed wasn’t there: ‘They’re beautiful! They’re just as beautiful.’

   ‘Ha!’

   – 2 –

‘Isabelle,’ Branwell whispered to me reproachfully. But what was there to reproach? Besides, Mick could not hear. He could not hear over his own, and his daughters’, idiotic laughter.

   Some people have a pulse, may even be quite fit, hold ‘respectable positions’, go to the opera, sit on boards, but still barely be alive. Young, young though I was, I already knew I was better than this world.

   This ‘exceptional quality’ I had recently found in only one other soul in that country town and I imparted as much in a word I was fond of.

   ‘We, Branwell, are remarkable,’ and reached for his hand. It fitted in mine like a hair clasp. It was the first time we touched.

   Oh, the electricity of that moment! When young, what ecstasy in merely pressing together, clothed at that, under a blanket in the hot sun! When old, what strenuous efforts, gymnastics and invasions rarely as deep?

   And now? Certain men with their fumbling hope for breasts that beat. But my bosom has only ever heaved for one.

   Everything is new when we are kids. We see, but never again. With each part of the world we discover, it is as if a new brick has been laid in a wall, till you can’t see what is behind it—at all!

   ‘You must believe me, Isabelle.’

   Indeed, his grandmother did wear a bun, unfashionable even then. Did it truly hide this…?

   ‘Tick. It’s like a tick,’ he would say impatiently. 

   His belief was that it had limbs stretching through his grandmother’s body, animating her. It applied curatives to her leather skin, to keep it supple. She rarely ventured into the sun, sat removed from light sources and seemed to have a waxen, artificial lustre.

   We were reclined on a grey wooden seat in a lovely glade by the back gardens of his Grandmother’s retreat, his impossibly long lashes, lashes I would have died for, fanning the sweet unrefined sugar of his eyes.

   ‘It’s waiting,’ said Branwell, ‘for when it’s picked up.’

   ‘By whom?’

   He became sullen on this point—the tenor of scepticism in my voice. 

   He once drew m­e a picture of the creature as he’d seen it lying over his ragdoll grandmother. (It apparently disengaged itself from her body at night). The picture looked like nothing more than a mad scribble, the biro having made so many swirls the paper was wet and torn like a bullet hole in a cotton shirt. But looked at more closely, there was an oxymoronic ‘formless shape’ to it, but a form which made me shiver.

   ‘It’s waiting for when I’m fully-grown,’ he lamented. ‘I suppose it’s like one of those sea crabs that has to find the right-sized shell.’

   ‘Why doesn’t your Grandmother fight?’ I asked. ‘Escape at night when it’s crawled from her?’

   He directed those oily wells at me, catching the merest glint of light.

   ‘You haven’t understood me at all,’ he pouted. ‘You see, my grandmother has been dead five years.’

   Oh, how he corralled me into transports of wild imagining!

   One day, draped on an overfed tear of a beanbag in the school library, I heard a teacher remark of his grandmother and her excessive makeup: ‘It’s sad when they can’t accept their age.’

   The librarian turned to me through the shelves, her face bookended, and quickly moved the teacher away.

   Did his grandmother indeed walk as if long tendrils, spidery, many-jointed limbs intravenously worked her sinews and limbs? Were her expressions a little too practiced? I can only say that these questions vexed me as one is vexed by a great mystery or the mechanics of an exciting adventure. I did not, as fully, appreciate the horror it induced in my little man, the fear he lived with daily.

   I held her hand once—the first time we met I shook it. Branwell had prepped me to take note. It was exceedingly cold, but the cold of death?

   Other teachers made other remarks. Snippets of conversation that float back to me.

   ‘The story is remarkably consistent.’

   ‘Does he read science fiction?’

   ‘He’d contradict himself by now if it were made up.’

   Silence after that observation!

   ‘You believe?’

   More silence.

   ‘It’s creepy. The kid seems genuinely afraid.’

   Garden statues flanked the slope leading up to the rear, but equally grand, entrance of Branwell’s abode. The front was rarely used. Unclipped yew formed high lightless chambers, vaulted with branches. Mottled copper statues rose from the goldfish speckled pools. Some bore a grotesque aspect while others verged on lewd. We giggled at them, at an age when the word ‘bottom’ could induce fits of laughter and shock in equal measure.

   Branwell had a dusky complexion, a palette foreign to our backward town, and therefore unpopular through mere difference. It was the more shocking and scandalous when compared to his grandmother’s glary whiteness. But for me, this difference was incendiary. His was a countenance in strong contrast to my fiery, freckled brilliance. The redheaded Elizabeth Taylor, as our baker coined me. 

   Branwell was always dressed in exceptionally old-fashioned attire. Collared shirts when all the other kids wore T-shirts; trousers, when they wore jeans; leather shoes, instead of sneakers. It was a dress code I adored and mimicked in my turn, donning dresses, weaving ribbons in my hair, bower-birding whatever I could find in the one interesting store in town, the op-shop. How it was filled with all these treasures people did not know the worth of! Mother was pleased to see me so pretty; Mick unimaginatively saw it as affectation but nonetheless tried to prettify his own daughters’ hair with bows and the like till I laughed at them.

   – 3 –

 

Branwell’s grandmother dressed most marvellously of us all. Grand dark lace dresses with patterns like complicated webbing, coming down and half over her hands. Many and varied jewellery, thick and ostentatious, but far more redolent of charm and colour than the plastic accessories and bangles favoured by the other women in town, none who would want to appear remarkable or ordinary or ‘above’ their station. In short, of being in any way demonstrably alive.

   But if one is remarkable, shouldn’t this fact be advertised with pride?

   She walked out to us under the shade of a great conifer, dressed in a high pleated shirt, a strange velvet hat upon her head like a misshapen pillow, two magnificent peacock feathers sprouting from one side, resplendent in their incandescent green and blue. I wondered if it was meant for distraction, since her head seemed rather too large for her body. A brow prominent and Neanderthal. A nose prodigious and beaklike with what I thought was a drip underneath, about to pool and fall, but which I discovered with a start of eager revulsion was a fleshy protuberance.

   I admit I scanned from her to Branwell several times. What relation was there between this monster and my elfin charge? What congenital connection?

   None I could see.

   She watched me shrewdly, her dark eyes screwed up close. If there was any resemblance it was in the eyes, yet hers were rather more cavernous, Branwell’s still dewy and bright.

   ‘She’s exceedingly handsome, boy,’ she remarked, pointing at me.

   Branwell blushed very prettily, and I had the fleeting thought that it should have been me who blushed. His grandmother laughed uncharitably, which made him all the redder.

   ‘Here, take my hand,’ and the creature extended her brocaded arms to me. I took them. Used as I was to the hearty shakes of our country folk, I tried to raise and lower them, but she held them stiffly a long moment before letting go, their iciness leaving my hands numb. 

   ‘I suppose you will be playing now?’

   I took Branwell’s shy warm hand, which seemed to please her. We walked under the yews, their leaves shadowing our faces in laurels. She walked in an odd gliding gait beside us, looking down the length of her not inconsiderable nose.

   ‘It isn’t easy inheriting a child at my age,’ she intoned in a voice brittle but still marvellously husky and deep. ‘I have already raised children, and to have to raise a child again when most would be settling into well-earned rest… The saddest thing is he suspects me.’

   ‘Suspects you?’ I asked with as innocent an air as I could concoct, though I knew full well of what.

   The satirical squint in her eye conveyed she knew my ruse. 

   ‘Of being an imposter?’ I relinquished.

   I felt Branwell stiffen beside me.

   She smiled at my admission of the game.

   ‘Do you concur, my dear?’

   I beamed warmly, and gave a response which I could tell immediately enamoured her to me. ‘In this town, I think we all three are.’

   Months passed, Winter succeeding Autumn. With it came great barricades of rain to any outdoor adventure. The long brown grass was flattened to matting, and greener growth shot up between. Branwell and I spent as much time as I could engineer at his house—mansion, rather. I loved it for the reasons he seemed to hate it: the rooms upon rooms, the junk, the pilings, the fabulously old antiques and exotic statues and oddments. How out of place it was among the cheap and insipid housing that was popping up in a plague to sully the once haunting bush landscape.

   He, rather, preferred the small, unimaginatively white plaster walls and blonde pine architraves of my home. The sort of house where nothing can hide, not even a thought, without the starkness of the walls catching it out. He even seemed to enjoy the chores Mick made us do.

   But oh his mansion!

   Mick insisted we alternate. It wasn’t fair otherwise to make Branwell’s guardian—an old woman at that!—host each time.

   At home, Branwell would be given my room while I had to doss with my step-sisters. At Branwell’s, we shared a fabulously large bed, like the one with the pea under the mattress that annoys the princess. Mick once asked Branwell’s grandmother what the sleeping arrangements were at her house and she laughed with an exhilarating sharpness.

   ‘Oh, do you think they even know what sex is?’

   The rest of Mick’s face acquired the same colour as his clown nose.

   She did not seem to care whether we retired late, went to bed early, slept in till all hours or were up at the crack of dawn. She had no interest in what we were taught at school but taught us a great many things of her own in a way that never felt like lessons. Indeed, I don’t think she conveyed her knowledge with the aim of instructing us, but more in a strange, sardonic flippancy of facts. A television was unheard of—‘Oh, they know nothing on there’—but books lined many a shelf and were stacked high on every flat surface. We played cards, mostly, and sometimes charades. She was exceedingly good at mimicry.

   One day Branwell seemed particularly keen we go to my place when I turned up at his on my pretty green bike. Oh, youth! When we did exercise without thinking. Now, acrid gyms with their static treadmills.

   ‘But it’s your turn,’ I remonstrated.

   He turned pale for his colour.

   ‘What is it?’

   ‘If I tell you, you’ll only egg her on.’

   – 4 –

 

That night, she introduced me to her telescope. The fear Branwell had of it, as though it were an instrument of death, the eyepiece the muzzle of a cannon—it made me wonder! 

   She pointed out Sirius B, a white dwarf star, and explained that it was known to the African tribe of the Dogon. What a brilliant name, so evocative, I thought, as I squinted at the star’s tiny lustre. The Dogon lived in the Homburi Mountains near a place called Timbuktu which, until then, I had thought was here in Australia due to that colloquialism: ‘out past Timbuktu.’

   Branwell’s grandmother pointed her beak at me when I had removed my eye from the scope. She clapped the telescope between her large hands, covering both ends.

   ‘Can you see the star now, my dear, without aid of this contraption?’

   I owned I could not. Branwell shrank as if he knew the game, and was horrified by where it would lead.

   His grandmother grinned, revealing cramped teeth.

   ‘Indeed, no. The star was not photographed until fifteen years ago, in ’71, and only then with powerful lenses. How then did the Dogon, a so-called primitive African tribe, know of it for centuries beforehand?’

   I beamed at the paradox. Her tales were often more exciting than the most gripping book!

   Branwell grimaced. ‘She’s going to say frogs told them about it.’

   She shared a smile with me. ‘Nommos—amphibious creatures from another star. Branwell’s “frogs!”,’ she roarded.

   This was all so frightfully romantic. An ancient earth culture in contact with an extraterrestrial race of towering frog-like beings! Evidently, Branwell had inherited his obsession with science fiction from his grandmother.

   I could feel my man shiver next to me. His grandmother sat down heavily in a sagging couch and muttered: ‘Sending records into space!’

   When she did not explain her seemingly unconnected remark, Branwell looked meaningfully at me like this was the subject that troubled him most.

   His grandmother explained that nearly a decade ago an irresponsible and mad scientist named Carl Sagan had designed a golden record they’d put on the Voyager spacecraft that told anyone who might pick it up about where the human race lived, our biology, our technological level, and a great many other imprudent facts.

   My denseness meant I still could not understand the point she was making. Branwell squirmed while she read my confusion and elucidated further.

   ‘The point I’m making is this, my dear. If they knew what was out there, these so-called genius scientists, would they have allowed Sagan to send it?’

   Her scalp twitched. 

   I became immediately entranced with the notion of space. Its vastness, its scale, but most of all that it doesn’t need us. People, I have noticed, the vast bulk of people, ache to be necessary. They desire others to bear witness to their lives, no matter how meaningless. I, however, am in love with nothingness.

   Branwell’s grandmother proceeded to paint a picture of stars as dim unshaded lightbulbs barely casting their light in vast rooms concealing who-knew-what creatures. She detailed planets circling as moths, moons and asteroids as so much mere dust. Monsters of diabolical shape huddled in the dark corners who have only left us alone because we are too insignificant to bother with. How she painted that picture, with words in which she wasn’t trying, made Branwell and I hug together on that couch.

   ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘what spin an ant would put on a child’s motive that set it alight in that millisecond before it’s non-existence…?’ And then a sharp laugh: ‘None!’

   At other times she complained of being abandoned. Left alone on this island earth. She cried out at night sometimes in words of frightful gibberish, issuing names that shouldn’t have been said, like alien blasphemies. Branwell would shiver and nod at me in bed, wanting assent to his fears.

   Indeed, like her space metaphor, the mansion had the sour atmosphere of a large dwelling stingily tenanted. There was, however, the odd visitor, not including myself. One day her lawyer came, having had a long drive from Adelaide, his face thin, almost to asceticism.

   ‘Everything to the boy?’ he queried. ‘No matter what age he is when you pass? The… legalities of that, madam…’

   She looked angry, and pulled her shawl about her. ‘This housing won’t hold me forever, Mr Tibbett. Already, it creaks at the seams. He’ll know what to do, even if I die tomorrow.’

   ‘See, it talks about my grandmother,’ whispered Branwell, his face on the pillow beside me. ‘How her body’s falling apart on it.’

   My interest piqued, I snuck away to watch the scene through a crack in the door, Branwell hovering over my shoulder. 

   ‘He is still many years off eighteen …’ the lawyer ventured.

   She threw back her large head in a frightful, economic titter. ‘You would hold it in trust for him, no doubt? Bleeding away the annuity through your fee?’

   ‘My lady,’ he objected (she insisted she was a dame), ‘you really must—’

   She waved away his protest. ‘If his parents hadn’t died so prematurely…’

   The lawyer immediately looked ill.

   ‘And oh, how they died,’ she threw off, and the lawyer spluttered into his hand as his brow glistened.

   Branwell’s grandmother laughed. ‘I see you wouldn’t have made much of a doctor.’

   – 5 –

At this point, let me relate another incident, one involving my stepfather. I mention it because it was one of the few dramas with my own ‘family’ that stood out for me.

   Mick was driving me to school because I had ‘taken too long getting ready’ to join my sisters in catching the bus.

   Mick was hunched over the wheel of our old Ford, his brow especially furrowed with theatrics of anger. We came to the ‘crossways’, two roads bisecting each other at the highest point of a hill, on the outskirts of town. There had been five fatalities at that very spot in the last ten years alone. It was not abundantly clear which route gave way to the other, although from our direction a rusted sign, posted twenty metres from the crossing, indicated to the driver to ‘give way’. The surrounding paddocks had crops of wheat, at this point especially high, blocking eyesight to sideways traffic.

   Mick was driving very fast.

   We hurtled past the Give Way sign.

   I saw the corner of a vehicle loom above the ears of wheat. 

   Mick turned and also spied it.

   I screamed.

   He braked so hard our car spun sideways.

   The two-tonne truck veered, momentarily going up on two wheels.

   The rear of our Ford came within inches of swiping the back of the truck, as we planed across the intersection.

   We ended up on the verge on the other side of the road, unscathed.

   It had been entirely Mick’s fault.

   The truck was stopped. It waited ominously a good minute, like the driver was deciding whether to get out and give Mick a serving with his wrench. All we could see of the driver was a dim patch of red in his tall but thin side mirror. When the truck took off, Mick also sped away.

   I smiled at him. My smile told Mick he had put his wife’s favourite daughter in danger and he had best behave from now on.

   He did not look at me again for the rest of the drive.   

   The weeks, as I said before, accumulated with a tiresome inevitability mirrored in our human calendar. School terms alternating with holidays. Queen’s birthday, Labour Day, and that mundane excuse for jingoistic displays of small-mindedness: Australia Day. Our entrée into our various classes was usually greeted with an observation centred on twinning Branwell and I in ways varying from pleasant to snide, depending on the cranial proportions of the particular teacher.

   Moustachioed Mr Sloane was a slope-browed pedagogue whose remarks tended towards the derogatory. ‘Here’s double trouble.’

   We had a time apportioned in the day to reading. He only read to us from one book, or four according to many. They were the one book to me, roughly described as the prologue, called The Hobbit, followed by the tale interminable, called The Lord of the Rings. Branwell rather liked it. I can admit it now, though I would never have countenanced the conjecture then, that we were not as one in all things.

   We of course didn’t get through it all, or even very little. That would have required considerably more time than the space allotted. Rather, we were regaled with Mr Sloane’s ‘favourite bits’.

   When not reading to us in this appointed hour, this homeroom teacher would tell us about flying. Not flying in the abstract, or the general, not the history of aviation, but his flying. The type of planes he’d flown, the number of hours he’d clocked, the praise (verbatim) from his instructor, exciting scenic flights he’d undertaken, hairy moments he’d overcome with his skill, quick-thinking manoeuvres under pressure. How the planes today compared to the planes of yesteryear. The advance of the single-wing over the bi-wing… Am I boring you as he bored me?

   Even at the time, the spectacle of a grown man bundling up a captive audience of school children to make comatose with his twin obsessions of Tolkien and aviation struck me as pathetic and unworthy of the tag of human.

   ‘Yawning again, Isabelle?’ he would say. ‘Your classmates are wrapt, aren’t you?’

   ‘Yes, Mr Sloane,’ answered the sheep.

   Mr Sloane was one of the few adults who did not make direct reference to my looks.

   ‘Keep yawning like that and your face will end up like a cabbage.’

   But he was painfully aware of them.

   ‘Wouldn’t you like to kill all the stupid people?’ I said to Branwell that afternoon as we threw rotten apples into the dam.

   ‘I’ve been reading a book on trick photography,’ he answered in a non sequitur before braving a bite from one such apple and tossing it.

   Plop.

   I turned to regard him; he spat out the brownish mouthful.

   ‘Perhaps we could try some trick photography ourselves.’

   That evening, as we prepared our subterfuge, his grandmother looked on with an approving upward turn of her alternately cruel or bland mouth.

   ‘You appreciate, my dears, oh how you appreciate my excruciating pain at being marooned with Neanderthal!’

   I had confided to her my darker purpose, but when I explained to Branwell the twist I had imagined for his trick photography, he was not pleased.

   ‘These are things you don’t joke about, if you know like I do.’

   Nonetheless, I made him comply with my plan.

   – 6 –

Mr Sloane beheld our Polaroids with amazement the next day. 

   ‘So… so… my friends, how far away were they?’

   We looked up at him smilingly.

   ‘These… these UFOs…’ he stuttered; ‘how far were you from them when you took these photos?’

   We were no longer the dual fools, the terrible twins, or even the dynamic duo, but his ‘friends’.

   I smiled my most winsome smile. ‘A hundred metres, Mr Sloane, in that one. Fifty in that. Branwell didn’t waste a second. He snapped off the Polaroids in no time.’

   ‘Quick thinking, my friend,’ said Mr Sloane, even progressing matters to touch through a pat on Branwell’s back.

   On Branwell, I detected a growing regret and shame in his face, given how well—instantaneously, in fact—we had duped Mr Sloane.

   ‘So… how big would you say?’

   ‘A bus?’ I deflected to Branwell.

   ‘About that,’ he murmured.

   Mr Sloane examined the two Polaroids, his brow furrowing.

   ‘Hmm, but if this is only fifty metres away, it seems it would have to be car-size. That seems too small.’ 

   Branwell’s features were revivifying, Mr Sloane’s doubt making my man respect him at last.

   ‘So it’s a good thing, my friends, you brought these to me! I know better than you what you captured here. From where it intersects that line of trees, it was at least three hundred metres away. Know what the upshot of that is, my boy? What you’ve got here, by jingo? Photos of a field-sized intergalactic mothership, and no doubt about it!’

   Branwell’s face crashed. 

   ‘I’m taking these to the aeronautical society. See if they don’t welcome me in now.’

   Sloane ever sported a Biggles style moustache, and it twitched rather excessively at just that moment.

   Branwell fretted all the weekend. His Grandmother pointed a knitting needle (which Branwell said she inserted into her ear much as a person does into a cast to get at an itch) at him.

   ‘See how he pines for the creature’s oncoming embarrassment. It’s worried him sick to the stomach.’ She next pointed her knitting needle at me. ‘I don’t imagine for a moment you’ve lost any sleep over it.’

   I smiled, catching myself in a mirror, gasping at my own beauty, such was its especial resplendence at just that moment in the firelight. A qualification: not beauty alone, but crafty knowing beauty, all the more troubling and enviable.

   When I turned back to the present company, I knew instantly from his Grandmother’s expression that we had both formulated the same thoughts in that momentary pose of mine.

   ‘What I could do with your body!’ she uttered, quite as if by accident.

   Branwell turned white.

   ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t come here,’ he said to me later, his voice wafting up from the bottom bunk. He kicked at the lump my body made when I wouldn’t answer.

   (We were at my place, in the separate rumpus room, Mick condescending to allow us to kip in together, provided we used the bunk. The near accident at the crossroads had had its benefits.)

   ‘You know what I’m worried about, don’t you?’ Branwell asked.

   I laughed and leant my head over, my luxuriant hair cascading down on his eyes, the sudden rush of blood only making me the more shockingly fiery, no doubt. Blood in the white cheeks. And lips, red—red!

   ‘It’s you she’s got her eyes on,’ I said when he had the temerity to blow my hair from his face.

   ‘Yes,’ he said, looking petulant. ‘But the way people look at you, watch you! They look away from her. She sees what she could be. How she could…’ and he searched for a word not yet in his vocabulary, but still managing to land on a big phrase, no doubt copied from her ‘… manipulate events.’

   I laughed and rolled onto my back. These ‘great events’ of hers. These ‘plans’. These ‘evil designs’. It was all so frightfully romantic.

   I heard a sob. My head was over the bunk in a second.

   ‘It’s just I’m frightened for you, Isabelle. Let her take me. But I’d die doubly if she ever got you.’

   I felt my first rush of unaffected emotion. It was all madness of course, but so deeply, deliciously sweet.

   I relate all this, from the distance of thirty years. Branwell, a very different Branwell, middle-aged now as I am myself, regards me across the grass and I get a shock of another moment, four years after the last I related.

   ‘You won’t leave me here, will you, Isabelle? Isabelle, you can’t leave me to reach the age where I stop growing. That will be when she takes me.’

   Mick was most upset.

   ‘Making fun of a teacher like that!’

   But I know what most upset him. It was the keen, though no doubt unconscious, realisation that he would have been duped just as thoroughly as Mr Sloane. His limited awareness allowed itself only to be indignant about the general affront to age’s false respect.

   Mum was mildly scolding but could see the humour in it.

   ‘The twins don’t do this,’ he said. ‘They just get good marks. Respect their teachers. Etcetera, etcetera.’ (He loved The King and I).

   ‘You could say, though,’ said Mum, ‘that the prank shows intelligence and ingenuity.’

   Mick looked at her hard. ‘I charitably attributed the less salutary aspects of her character to the father; I now see I was blinkered in my opinion. Some blame must be apportioned to the mother!’

   He didn’t say it like that of course. That would have required him to speak English.

   Mum’s answering stare was as elegant, however, as my rewrite, and something I won’t forget.

   She gave a look like she’d just been slapped by a pet.

   – 7 –

When we went into class the next day, Sloane watched us from the door to our seats, his face a livid smear of seething. I could feel Branwell shrinking beside me but I? Walking with back straight and chin high, I was rather touched that an animal should be able to communicate so feelingly, so theatrically, a sense of wounded pride.

   See, we had simply drawn UFOS on paper, cut them out and pasted them on the front window overlooking the paddocks, then taken our Polaroids.

   Over ensuing months, leading to December, Branwell’s repeated concern was how this ‘remarkable’ quality I had isolated in each other might manifest itself. What bored me with his response to the problem was how he wanted to constrict its outlet to a profession. Not even the possibility of ‘a calling’ was entertained by him. Such a dire list he’d trot out: Banker, Engineer, Prime Minister…

   On this last suggestion, I gave ground. I conceded I was certainly remarkable enough to become Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Holding the highest office in our wide brown land would no doubt prove the least of my achievements. But damn it, this manifestation was a cheapening, a coarsening of the will, of something so sweet, wonderful and also scary, as inviolate to outside eyes, as the mere sense of our remarkableness.

   ‘Isn’t it enough that we know it ourselves?’ I would say.

   ‘But… but…’ These prevarications of his! ‘Shouldn’t we show it somehow?’

   ‘I’m remarkable,’ I told Mick one day. Mum was out and it was just me, him and the stepsisters sitting in the lounge room.

   ‘Remarkable? How are you remarkable?’

   I smirked at his blindness. If Branwell could see his doubt echoed in an ape, he would be ashamed in a second. How I wished he were witness to this.

   Mick stood up. ‘Riz is very good at hockey. Raz gets good marks at maths. Anyone can see how they’re remarkable.’

   ‘They’re remarkable according to the petty rules society’s invented that raise mediocrity of spirit to a pedestal. Branwell and I, we are remarkable in the cosmos.’

   ‘What is this? What is this rubbish? You think you’re better than us? You think you’re better than your mum?’

   I shook my head. ‘If she’d had my experiences…’

   ‘Your sisters? I can see from your grin you do. Me?’

   My stepsisters ran crying from the room.

   They’d been preparing paper cut-out decorations for Melbourne cup. Even though we lived in South Australia, a big to-do was made of Melbourne Cup, a horse race in a whole other state. As if horses running in a circle were quite the most fascinating thing! I suppose they are, to hamsters.

   Mick retired from the room also.

   One night, chatting late, Branwell and I discovered we were more than merely remarkable: we both possessed something far more exciting: ‘promise’, and that in abundance, too. We arrived—or, I should say, I arrived—at that word because it was frequently bandied around with reference to myself at school. ‘She has such promise,’ the teachers would say before becoming distracted with side issues such as application or commitment. Like the dull cud-chewing cattle they resembled, unable to hold a thought and follow it through, they had still managed, in a blind, mole-like way, to stumble upon the right and apt word. Promise. We had promise aplenty.

   Mick was predictably annoyed we’d duped Mr Sloane. The furore had not ended with the fool’s touching expression of rebuke. A call had been made to Mick. Mick rang Branwell’s grandmother, once Sloane admitted to Mick she had hung up on him with a bored laugh. I picked up the receiver in his and mum’s bedroom. The trick was to pick it up just after he’d taken it off the cradle but before it was at his ear. Earlier, and the number wouldn’t have connected, and later and Mick would have heard the click and been onto me.

   Branwell’s Grandmother was predictably smooth. ‘But surely the custom here is that your teachers must have been to school before they themselves can teach?’

   When he rung off, he complained to mum.

   Mum sighed. ‘Mick, they’re using their imaginations. If Mr Sloane isn’t impressed with her, Miss Smith is. You must admit that’s one subject she excels in.’

   Miss Smith was our English teacher and she was most delighted with my stories. Stories, I must admit, I loosely adapted from Branwell’s grandmother.

   Miss Smith had gathered up all my essays, mumbling that she needed to show them to the ‘right authorities’. Her words loosed such hope in me: I might be afforded a scholarship and escape that circumscribed town at last.

   Riz and Raz, the twins… I see one of them in my mind’s eye now: Riz, how—how she hasn’t grown beautiful, not a heart-stopper—but I admit a certain freshness, a life-force, permeates her face. Perhaps her rosiness is due to her job, as a marine biologist in Queensland. Her work gives her tone and colour. The joy and excitement it brings creates in her laugh a beauty. Raz, her job among wildlife. Odd how they should have kept close to the elements, the sea in the former, the land in the latter. When I think back, they were always rescuing ‘things’, skinks, spiders and the like. How I thought it was horrid, symptomatic of creatures without mine and Branwell’s refinement, our elevated tastes. Although Branwell never joined me in my censure of them.

   Actually, I believe Riz and Raz quite liked him. Perhaps were smitten… If I had allowed them any time with him, what might have been sown?

   – 8 –

I, of course, was too obsessed with Branwell and his grandmother to give much consideration to my stepsisters. Branwell and his grandmother were so cut off from country social life. Even their home, secluded in a valley, seemed like a kingdom of its own. It should have been their protection from the world; instead it became their prison. His Grandmother would talk about the possibility of ghosts in such a place. Radioactive with energies, they lived their half-lives.

   That little delve smothered me in it insouciance. To enter it was to lower oneself into a bath where you might fall asleep in its steam and drown, or wake with a start to find it, and yourself, icy cold.

   In all the long, magical vista of that peerless terrain, nothing could prevent the oncoming tragedy.

   Do you believe that things add up? And I don’t just mean numbers? Mr Doring, picking at lint on his speckled satin coat; further up the road, outside Mrs Horsett’s house, a clothesline with one single sheet on the line rolled up like a flag? A battalion’s sails after being shot through with cannon fire.

   Oh, and those hills that surrounded them. Such high hills, stepping off into the sky. Clouds: doormats into other living rooms, where giants live giant lives. Must we die? Must we die? Dying is only bearable because we don’t live. But if you’ve lived even briefly, breathlessly, that immanent passing seems such disaster. Oh, and the ever after.

   Where do we go when we die? I was told we go into coffins and sprout wings and become angels the way grubs crawl into cocoons and sprout wings and become butterflies. But if we are angels in death, does that not make us grubs in life?

   And such grubs.

   Such grubs are we.

   Such grubs as we!

   I have had my fare share of men fall in love with me. No, I lie; more than my fare share. In this I reprimand myself. I have an acquaintance whose entire being, his total disinterest, almost material state of mind, is so evident there is very little room to romanticise and wonder. Because I truly believe that you cannot fall in love with someone you know.

   Why do I feel like this now? Why can I not keep at bay the doubts and only remember the romanticism of those years?

   Because of Branwell now, Branwell at forty, standing across the grass from me, a shattered visage of his former self…

   I have talked little of my life now, my life in the city. Mostly, I have realised, it consists of searching. Searching for something I never owned but still feel is missing. In a train going to dull work, that glimpse through buildings of a highway underpass with a teenage boy, graffiting with an aerosol can, his other arm round a blue-haired girl. Wondering what it would be like to autograph that memory, know that language. Seeing yourself with your arm around that girl’s neck, visiting another’s body as intimately for the first time. When teenagers know everything. And adults nothing at all!

   Something is missing.

   And now you’re that adult and cannot remember what you knew. We don’t change; we are replaced.

   Changelings!

   Nothing matters but it matters to someone, nothing is known but is known incompletely.

   What could I read in the forty-year-old eyes of Branwell? He had stayed in that mansion, in that town. What life had he led? Were there any successes?

   Had there been any triumphs in mine, the one who supposedly ‘escaped’?

   Of course there were long chaise lounges in low-lit cavernous boudoirs with long, wide billiards tables and people sitting, people standing, people playing. Lights placed low on side tables, or hanging low, and fringed and tattered. Women with skin creamy, lustrous, or brown and rich, highlights of sweat shaping their thighs, their breasts, their necks tilted ever so slightly in imitation of interest, of listening. Men without their jackets on, shadows under their armpits, rain on their stubble. And music, self-distorting in the expanse of space and darkness falling from the roof like a summer cloud, hot and close, but never breaking.

   And me, hips swaying in a cat-walk satire, treading down the middle, a slow-motion commotion for all to see and stare. What magic has the night but the magic we invest it with, what atmosphere is produced of this boudoir and what is given?

   That is just one memory that comes back of my recent life. Of that seventies-style club, curtains with a chain-mail weave, rings of diaphanous orange, what happened? Demolished now, to make way for ‘progress’.

   Yes, I had ‘escaped’ that small country town in the Adelaide Hills, but in truth had not got very far. Only hopping one state, where I became a resident of the city of Melbourne.

   When you have lived in a city for as long as I have, certain streets, certain parks and pubs and nightclubs bring back episodes in your life. You become your own walking tour guide, your autobiographical footnote, as if you mattered, as if you were someone a guide would say of, ‘She was here. This is where she was known to have the odd drink’ or some such matter, and people would shiver. The myriad messy people I have known! In aging, one retreats to a select company. But the familiarity of the people you meet at a party, your familiarity with the setting which, as the years reel by, is more often a friend’s home than a venue, can become its own estrangement, and you look for that new person, that man you’ve never met before and want to know more about, the person with whom you might enter the night and know the stars for the first time, not as distant suns but eyes watching, willing.  

   Reality made Isabel sick. I am Isabelle. This is my reality. 

   – 9 –

‘There is another world,’ said his grandmother one time, ‘another world so much more wondrous than ours, so much less exacting, pedantic. This is your only chance to escape into it, my charges. The more steeped in the real you are, the less chance you have of entering this brighter realm.’

   How my heart now breaks for such tutelage!

   Branwell, the Branwell of thirty years later, gestured to me without a word, and I followed. As we walked, the sky suffered under a sultriness, panting for rain. When the clouds broke, it flooded down on us like sobs. With the sun setting, the impromptu lakes were splashes of lava dropped from a smelter. The blossoms starred the water. We passed through remote and lonely meadows, now and then ducking through fences. Rabbits scampered into stands of blackberry bush. We entered the hushed woods that surrounded the mansion. The life that once suffused and enveloped my little man—now very much grown—where was it? He walked as if a corpse, in that strange high hat.

   We emerged from the wood to an uncommitted purple sky, sick with lowering black clouds. Branwell’s face, blanched (from fear?), beckoned me continue.

   The mansion and its surrounds were much changed. Although always in a state of disrepair, its decline was now terminal. The formerly clipped box trees now struggled at their own will. The neglected fruit trees looked like they hadn’t borne a crop in at least the past ten years. The paths, once gravelled, were overgrown with weed and covered in leaves. We passed the wreck of an arbour where we once played. Under it lay the table we would play chess on; not altogether destroyed by time, yet still very much in a sorry state.

   We arrived at the mansion. A sundial on its south wall, graced with some homily I could no longer recall, was now too rusted to be legible. Pigeons nested in the balustrades of the balconies. The grey slate roof was almost black with lichen. The mortar between the stones had cracked and crumbled, and now virulent grasses made up the interstices. Warped boards, peeled paint, rusted ironwork. We entered the mansion. Cats, rats and mice could be heard scampering under furniture and could occasionally be seen going over furniture as well. As we walked through the rooms and halls, in our funereal atmosphere, Branwell was mute beside me. He merely watched me take in the property’s dissolution. His silence was his comment on my neglect.

   And yet… there was an hourglass enchantment about it still! As though at any minute all time might run out and was destined to. There were hunched abodes of darkness in every room, glades of shadow, debaucheries of imagination. As though the entire house and its grounds might instantly be shut forever from human sight, as if it existed only in the pages of a mouldy old book one had too long delved into, till the blurred imprint of the words challenged reality, indeed sanity, itself.

   Such an equivocating subtlety of tones, of colours, of textures!

   Tawny frogmouths perched on the furniture, creating indigenous indoor weathercocks.

   We entered his grandmother’s room.

   It remained as it was while she was alive, although even dustier. There was the great bed. A high tester flung with satin chintz. A small table by the bed with ivory inlay. A paper lamp. A deep armchair. The room itself was enormous, with heavy cornices. A vast room, unlovely, papered in deep red.

   I remembered when Branwell took me into her room one night while she lay asleep.

   The glimmer of her lamp fell on her pillows and one side of her face. In the dimness beyond the light’s domain, her hands could be discerned, folded. Her skin was yellow as wax and her eyes were half open. The white of them had the colour of a bullfrog’s throat, and much of its translucency. Her abundant hair, which would have smothered the pillows if untamed, was drawn under a lace cap. A bony ridge above her eyes. Her lips, which were a very pale pink, were the only part of her that appeared to move, and they quickened with a kind of insect chatter.

   Of course, what I then could not conceive of for lack of experience, but can countenance now, is that far from a corpse still twitching to the nightmare strings of its alien puppeteer, that this was instead a lady, advanced in years, all alone in a large, crumbling mansion, except for a grandson whom she would not see to twenty-one, and an interloper in myself.

   At last she raised her right hand, which feebly clutched at the curtain around her bed, before her pupils rolled forward.

   ‘Defenceless… defenceless as a babe, you see me. Oh, but what is within, what youthful creature still resides? At a certain age, the heart stops ageing, but the body! The body ages till death.’

   She would often talk about her will, and a codicil to the will, and how it was vitally necessary to ensure the estate went directly from her to Branwell, without any intermediary parties. She must live—she must!—till he at least reached the age of eighteen and stopped growing.

   Otherwise, the vultures would separate them from the inheritance.

   His inheritance of her properties or hers of his living vessel?

   She called Branwell a ‘hail fellow’ with his coppery complexion, and me a deadly, flaming siren… bloodless. Had she really used that word?

   One particular night, I remember her saying we are God. We are his neurones, only a few of us really firing. And some, the rare, making synaptic connections. At such times in her oratory, she conjured existences I barely knew then and have certainly never comprehended since. Those days pull away from me, like a boat one has fallen from in the tugging current of an unfathomable ocean, the toe-line irreparably severed.

   – 10 –

One night her accountant came. Mr Crab stood in the dingy half-light of her office, and it was only after some time that I realised his defensiveness was fear. The man was in abject terror. While we sat with only candles to see by, he stayed by the door with the moon-light from the corridor windows to frame his bulky carriage.

   She, meanwhile, was doing everything she could to exact every ounce from her property and to whom she leased it. While lapse in many things, the upkeep, cleanliness and so forth, she was fanatical in the management of the extended properties. Just where her money went was a mystery. Into a great inheritance for Branwell?

   Branwell’s grandmother was just as particular in other aspects of her life.

   Many remarked on her tastes in food, her peculiar tastes. Penchants for culinary oddities.

   ‘Quite as if she were pregnant,’ the greengrocer laughed queerly.

   I was with my mother and stepfather in town, and realised immediately what was done with my stories, of the meals we ate, the things we got up to, and resolved henceforth to be as tight-lipped as possible around my mother and stepfather. Those degraded souls!

   Among the oddities she craved, was a great deal of a particular tinned crabmeat. When the manufacturer discontinued the line, she petitioned it for months with calls and letters till her calls went unanswered and her letters were returned unopened. She eventually chanced upon a satisfactory alternative, which had to be shipped in from Auckland: tinned baby octopus.

   These are facts I barely registered at the time for being too domestic, too ordinary, too abstruse to enter the rarefied atmosphere Branwell and I floated in. Too removed, even, to be connected with his grandmother herself. But they come back to me now with an ardent lucidity.

   Unlike my stepfather, Mick, Branwell’s grandmother never involved us in disagreeable duties, preferring to relegate these to a trickle of tradesmen, gardeners and cleaners. She was aristocratic in everything, especially her decadence.

   Branwell insisted we try again to glimpse his grandmother. The previous time, her hair was in a bun, so he said the insect still controlled her. The probability next time was that we would find her hair untethered and the creature separated from her. And we might, he imagined, be able to kill it. To this end, he wielded a rather heavy poker.

   We snuck into his grandmother’s room. There we discovered that her hair, far from still being tightly wound in the bun, concealing the ‘tic’ in Branwell’s vision, was instead abundantly spread out on the pillow.

   She moved not a millimetre.

   With Branwell’s guidance, I saw, or thought I saw, for it may have been the shadow of the branches of the leafless elm outside dialling across the walls, the shape almost of a spider, stretching its legs to every corner and recess. It leaned down from the canopy over the bed.

   Suffice to say, we ran, suppressing screams.

   That was my first real taste of fear in that house. Before then, it had been by proxy.

   She asked us once if we would like to see her ‘remove her face’, the startling descriptive for washing off makeup, that even then struck me as satirical.

   All the while, she gave us her thoughts. ‘The young resent the old for showing them their future in our faces. But what else should they search for in our Dorian Gray bargains? Is there not a greater legacy? The idea of leaving a beautiful corpse was always a stupid one.’

   That I should retrieve these recollections verbatim, with an acuteness and clarity missing in my life since, amazes me still. We are most attentive to the finer details in life when young because new to it. 

   ‘Strive to find your grace; 

   The mask moulds the face.’

   It was one of her odd lines of poetry.  

   She asked her accountant, Mr Crab, who shuddered in the doorway, ‘Are you possessed of the finer feelings?’ to which he gave an answer whose revealing concision he could not have been aware of: ‘Uh?’

   Mr Crab promised he would faithfully carry out her directives regarding her will.

   She crimped out the flame of the candle with thumb and forefinger. And made a hoarse, wheezing, sibilant sound. Her head lolled grotesquely and, trembling, Mr Crab was forced to fumble his way outside and to his car in the dark, our laugher pursuing him.

   Except… of the three of us, Branwell did not laugh.

   Branwell, the forty-year-old Branwell, went to his late grandmother’s window and opened the casement to discover the night was bright and clear. Night already! How many hours had we wandered in silence? The window fastening was quite rusted and no use. He drew in a long breath then, slamming the casement, it latched itself shut.

   Branwell led me to the one room left in the house with any kind of warmth, the sun room. I saw the morning sun come through the broken windows. Morning now? Time was both expanding and constricting. We sat down together. I could no longer avoid thinking of his story of the alien tic that he believed lived in his grandmother’s hair and felt fear. That hair piled upon his head and the ridiculously old-fashioned bowler on top of it… could it hide…?

   ‘Look at you, my dear,’ he snarled, and my heart froze in recognition of the voice. That husky voice! He was speaking as his grandmother spoke. In her very tones! ‘Such a specimen, you were,’ he continued. ‘And didn’t you know it! But now look at you. You’ve let yourself go. And your skin? Too much sun and cigarettes. Who were you going to have? Anyone you desired! Who were you going to be? Anything you wanted! That you became…’

   He looked me up and down. I winced and he crumbled. ‘Sorry, that was my grandmother speaking.’

   I swallowed. He’d articulated my very fear. But was his meaning merely rhetorical?

   Branwell escorted me to the road and my waiting car.

   As we bid goodbye, I got my first glimpse of that boy I had left so far behind.

   ‘You promised you would never leave me to my fate, Isabelle. And you to yours… What we might have been together.’

   The plaintiveness in his tone tore at my febrile heart.

   – 11 –

As I drove away, I came upon that horrid crossroads. The one all those decades back where Mick nearly collided with the truck.

   This time I was alone, and the one behind the wheel. I nearly hit a motorcyclist, the g-force from my braking slamming my head on the dash. The biker fishtailed before wresting control of his vehicle and turning and giving me the finger. Pulling over on the siding, I must have sat half a minute collecting myself, because I did not notice the old farmer till he was at the window.

   ‘I saw someone once didn’t stop in time,’ he said, tapping on the window.

   ‘What?’ I asked, winding it down.

   ‘Oh, a long time ago now. The queer thing was, turned out the offender didn’t just know who she’d crashed into in passing; it touched her more intimately than that. It was her own son and daughter-in-law.’

   I said nothing.

   ‘A terrible thing. The son and daughter-in-law’s kid was in the back of the grandmother’s car, unscathed. He’d seen it all.’

   ‘A kid?’ I mumbled. ‘A boy?’

   ‘That’s right.’

   ‘His parents… did they die instantly?’ I managed to utter.

   The man shook his head. ‘If only. There he was, that poor boy, trying to stick their limbs back onto their screaming torsos. And then she, the grandmother, had to raise him in that mansion yonder.’

   I could not speak.

   ‘I suppose he was never going to turn out all right after that, without some lass should come along and save him.’