I would love to turn away. I think we all would – and do – most of our lives. Whether it is from news of war in other countries, or from unpleasant scenes in playgrounds, we all do, we all turn away. For me, my shame was in failing a goat, which even now I catch in the corner of my eye. That might sound strange, to say that, but I do. I’ve checked my eyes a thousand times in mirrors, searched for a yellow fleck in the shape of the beast, and found nothing. Yet still it happens, still it goes on. I catch it again and again, a grey-white angora with dull green eyes. Yes, it is always there, hovering in the periphery of my vision.

    It wasn’t always so, of course. Perhaps I haven’t impressed that upon you enough, although I know I did talk of it always being there. That is because, I suppose, it has come to feel eternal to me. But there was a time, a time when I could look things in the eye, behold their aspect squarely, and not find my gaze lowering to the ground. That was the time on the farm; at least in the old days.

    Dad and I had been into town, he to buy some fencing wire, me to… well, to get off that dinosaur’s back for awhile. For that’s what our property resembled, with all its steep, rocky hills; the spiked hide of a prehistoric beast.

    We’d hopped in our ute, rouged a rust-coloured red, and clattered along the winding roads. Now, these roads weren’t graded to lean-in at corners or continue level through rises; they conformed to the topography at every bend and undulation, with nary a thought for the appropriate camber or inclination. And what made it worse were the gum trees, strategically planted at each corner. In the event of taking a bend too fast they would be sure to stop you in their tracks, quite suddenly, quite woodenly and quite fatally.

    Every paddock would have a gum tree, alone, isolated, its limbs slowly gathering at the base of its trunk. Their thin, pointing fingers would scratch at the sky. It was almost possible to hear the screech, to see the rent in the clouds.

    This lone gum would provide the only shelter for the sheep to stand under when hot or raining. In the heat, what light did penetrate the interstices of the branches would become attenuated and cooler. In the rain, the leaves and branches would take the force of the downpour, spreading it out among the limbs.

    On that particular day of our trip to town, the sky had been fleeced of cloud. Without any cover, the land shimmered in the heat. 

    I strained on my seatbelt, gripping the cool metal of the door. I unwound my window slightly, hearing it squeal against the worn rubber, and shoved my snout through as I had seen dogs do. Dad looked across before returning his focus to the road.

    Outside, the scenery had changed. Finally the paddocks had given way to the town, or at least to the country equivalent of suburbia, with its low fences, brown lawns, and straggling trees. Dad parked crookedly beside the hardware store, leaving the keys in the ignition. (In certain places in certain towns you can still do that.) I got out on my side, pulling away from the sticky leather of the seat, and approached, with him, the entrance.

    We made our way through the shop, passing the specials, the sales, the once-in-a-lifetime deals; the pitchforks, the lawnmowers, the angle grinders; the smell of the new and the colour of green and wood. We passed all by, coming out once more into the sunlight beyond.

    At the back of the hardware there was a goat tethered by a chain to a stake, one of those black stakes that are shaped like a star when seen from an end. The goat had gotten itself all tangled-up, and knocked over its yellow bucket of water. The dirt where it fell wasn’t even stained a darker tint of gold. Every drop had been sucked in, far below. Moisturiser for the dinosaur…

    ‘After a goat, Dean?’ said Harry, coming out after us.

    My father felt his whiskers. They grew out of his face in patches, white and grizzled.

    ‘What would I want a goat for, Harry?’ he asked.

    Harry raised that vegetable face of his, finished off with a red pepper for a nose.

    ‘Better than a lawn mower, Dean,’ said Harry. ‘Just move it to a different spot every couple of days.’

    Dad pushed his way to the “bargains,” getting to something he liked.

    ‘I’ve got sheep for that,’ he said, his back to us.

    ‘Yes, but goats are smarter.’

    Dad took up a scarifying rod and examined the price tag. Shaking his head, he waved it at me. I shook my head in return. Harry shot me a pained glance.

    ‘For round the house, Dean,’ said Harry, indicating the goat again. ‘You gotta keep the grass down round the house. Remember last summer?’

    Harry was referring to Ash Wednesday, the previous year, in ’83. My father was all too aware of the allusion but he simply stood there, noisily scratching his cheek. Dad had been in town when the fire came. He’d tried to get back along the highway but it was jammed as far back as Devil’s Elbow. Another treacherous bit of road, that, and a hazard to semi-trailers. The angle is so acute many jackknife. 

    ‘You’d like a goat, wouldn’t you, sonny?’ said Harry as he patted my head and then, under the guise of a general platitude, added, ‘You’ve gotta take care of ya kids.’

    Promptly my father bought the goat with the money intended for the fencing wire.

    I could’ve hit Harry but I was afraid his nose might burst.

 

    And that was how it began.

    I called him Timmy Livingstone, Livingstone being our surname. The plan had been that Timmy would eat the grass round the house but he kept pulling the stake out and eating mum’s garden instead. Thus, after six unsuccessful months, Dad gave in and he confined Timmy to an unchained existence in the paddock with the sheep. 

    Timmy had two long horns which curled over the back of his head in a V-shape. Often he would rise up on his back legs then fall forward, head lowered, and butt one with a force compounded by his weight. He came to play such a game with me, and no doubt it should not have been so awful as it sounds, had he performed this manoeuvre on one of his species. But as life had not given him a playmate, so death held no terror, and it was for this reason that I fancied he grew so incautious among the slopes.

    Did I tell you about those slopes? The sheep could scale them readily enough but even they blushed at the proficiency Timmy gained in traversing their sides. And they whitened at what daring he showed in doing so.  

    I went for walks with Timmy, up and down the corrugated landscape, but each outing was a trial for me, a trial of dread and bravery. And when we returned, it was with relief that I climbed the stile to his paddock and into my world again.

    Yes, to be free of Timmy was blissful, the more so after having been ushered to his bedrock and allowed to return. Timmy’s bedrock was a projecting spur of granite upon which he would retire at intervals and survey the empty valley over which he held reign, that creek into which the hills sunk, like two giant rolling pins in an old-fashioned clothes wringer.

     I don’t know how well I have impressed upon you the steepness of those hills. They weren’t exactly cliffs, though exceedingly sheer. But you’d only have to slip to start rolling, and you’d never stop. Not until you hit the bottom, and even then you’d travel outwards for a while.

    But still those sheep managed. They were a grade above me, and Timmy several grades above them, and yet, though only a level separated us, those sheep were far braver than I. After all, they were the tireless builders of those zig-zag pathways, till the hills resembled the little rice terraces you see in postcard pictures of China.    

    Timmy tried to join the sheep once or twice but whether he didn’t belong to the appropriate union or for some other more secretive reason, he was never inducted into their ranks. Besides, I think they were a little frightened of him, as were we all. He’d sit on that bedrock of his like a woollen sentinel or sphinx and then, with the turn of a head, there would only be rock; no Timmy. With a few nervous bleats, those balls of wool would trot onwards having, for a rare moment in their lives, imagined something.

    I would often climb over the stile to Timmy’s domain to visit him. He would round me up and take me across the hill to a tree whose foliage he loved to eat, forcing me there with butts of his horns. I fancied that Timmy resented his former life chained to a stake as well as his present solitary existence, and that he felt it was his right to so terrorise me. I would have loved to turn away from him, never to have stolen a look into the valley in which he haunted, to forever keep his scope of existence as a blind spot in my vision, and yet, invariably, I would climb the stile to be punished in that same terrible, traumatic way.

    One such ordeal began as always, only it escalated in terror as Timmy forced me onwards along the top of the valley in twilight. To my right the hill fell away. As I have said with a maddening insistence, it was not exactly a cliff but rather an incline, though exceedingly sheer and peppered with rocks. In dreams, if one was to trip or be pushed, one might roll to its bottom to the tune of the hypnotic, incessantly repeated, slow, rhythmic melody and long, drawn out crescendo of a demonic tune. At least in dreams, this is as I have fallen. On hitting the toothy creek below one would be physically extended in a carpet of gore, made up of the repeated motifs of bone, blood, muscle and tissue. Naturally, one’s eye would feature twice and be a point of focus.

    With Timmy on my left, and myself thinking nothing of our possible destination, always of the creek below, at last we halted. I had arrived at “Timmy’s Bedrock,” urged thereto by the demon goat. My house and my parents pottering in their garden were but specks in the far distance, the valley below too close. Once more I associated the hill I was on and the one parallel to it with giant rolling pins, through which I was to be wrung like a wet, ragged scarecrow.

    Timmy’s fur was interlaced with blackberry-bush brambles, twigs and dead yellow grass. The green variety stained his legs especially, but elsewhere too. His knees were like worn leather patches, the type some eccentrics still wear sown to their sports jackets. They were threadbare because goats’ legs fold up like collapsible chairs when they bow down to rest. These characteristics contrived, when viewed from a distance, to make Timmy resemble the rocks which abounded on our farm. These rocks were of whitish granite, though they were discoloured with age, and sported greenish-grey lichen. I had often frightened friends at twilight, or at night when the moon shone fully, by suggesting to them that Timmy was one of the many rocks at leisure on our farm. The fright came when he moved.

    Timmy pushed me onto his bedrock. It was the prow to a ship, his ship, and he was the pirate captain, edging me further along the gang plank. I looked at his horns which curled back over his head in a V-shape (have I said that?), and I marked his cloven hoofs. (How my mind circles the same ground, like a goat chained to a stake.) I would love to have turned away, only to turn from Timmy was to witness the precipitous drop to the creek below. And so I faced him, watching all the while as he pushed me to the very edge. Several eucalyptus trees grew a little way down from the rock I was on, and from the crown of one of these I tore some strips. I entreated Timmy to be nourished by the leaves of these branches, and by those alone lest he should hunger for my fall as well. Whilst Timmy munched away, I escaped, hopping from the base of the rock to the ground, and from thence fled across the sheep-made terraces.

    Timmy would often use me in this way to collect leaves he could not reach. He would also welcome the rubbing of my fingers between his horns and petting in general. At such pleasant times I wished it could always be so.

    I lingered at the stile, turning back to Timmy. But the hill and bedrock were in silhouette. The sky was stained red with sunset. The tree’s crowns were sparse, almost skeletal. I saw the shadow of their leafy ribcages lengthen across the ground, and my own shadow within them. Quickly I ran home.

 

    ‘Do you think he’s safe with that goat?’ Mum asked one day. She was in the kitchen with Dad, the sun no doubt aglow in the windows. I was a whole other room away, playing with my toys.

    Dropping He-man and Teela, I tuned my ears to their pitch. Two inches of pine and a space of several metres separated us.

    ‘Yes, it’s just a goat,’ I heard Dad say, and knew that he would be more concerned with oiling his boots.

    Mum resumed the chore of washing the potatoes. There were the sounds of water plashing in the sink, and a quiet hum so peculiar to her, acting as a soundtrack to everything, as if in replacement for the city noise she hailed from. Dad’s present occupation was also betrayed in his movements, although they were far fainter, less distinct. I could hear the quiet swish of a brush across leather, the dulled squeak of his wooden chair on slate, and that enemy to sound coming, or rather not coming, from his lips, that sodden, funereal silence.

    ‘I must say, he even gives me the willies at times,’ continued Mum, awakening the dead.

    Dad was drawn to speak, as breath from a drowned man.

    ‘Don’t be silly, Heather,’ he said.

    I heard Mum drop the potatoes with a splash. I pressed up against the door as though my ear were a glass, and listened all the harder.

    ‘Well, Dean, I’ve even seen you cross sides with him once or twice.’

    ‘Whaddya mean by that?’

    Dad made a similar gesture of dropping his work. His boots fell with a hard chink onto the slate floor, the steel-capped toes connecting first.

    ‘Only this, dear,’ said Mum, ‘I’ve seen you, when out walking with that goat, make sure you’re uphill of him.’

    There wasn’t any more conversation after that. It must have been finished with either a gesture or a look. At length I heard Dad take up his shoes again, and Mum her potatoes.

 

    In the morning the world tasted new. Dew was on the leaves. The dirt smelt freshly turned, as if a corpse were buried nightly. The grass sprang forth, flesh-fed and furrowed. The magpies and kookaburras contested to see who could chirp the loudest, and the hills rang with their applause.

    I wandered to the kitchen in my flannel pyjamas with spaceship patterning – humans and aliens at war for territory. Mum gave me the scraps from the cooking. Along with the potato peels, there were also scraps of carrots and leek – the leftover ingredients of her soup.

    ‘Here you go. For your goat.’

    I took the scraps from her. We kept them in a blue icecream holder. The container smelt rotten from former cargoes. When I reached the door, Mum called out.

    ‘Just throw it over the fence, dear.’

    ‘Alright, Mum.’

    I betook myself from the house and looked back upon its drabness – the red terracotta tiling, the aluminium guttering, and the red brick veneer. I wore no shoes – nothing except my pyjamas. The course roadway prickled under my feet. Already the morning sun had baked it to an immoderate degree. I contemplated returning for my sneakers, but instead made the journey with dancing, controlled steps. With the advantage of hindsight, I now wonder at that decision. If I’d had my eyes focused ahead, rather than down, I might have noticed the terrible fact earlier but, as it was, only when I arrived at the gate to Timmy’s paddock did I observe that it was open. An incredible weight had pressed itself against its iron frame, busting the metal chain connecting to the wooden post. For the distance of several metres to either side of the gate, the fence billowed forth, like an overblown sail. Something monstrous, or perhaps something less sizable but with a monstrous strength, had forced its way out. Dad had meant to mend the fence and gate, but had bought the goat instead. But even in its weakened state, such as it was, the gate should have provided fortification against even the strongest assault. I surveyed the damage once more, and realised that nothing could have kept out whatever it was that had escaped. I don’t know why I fooled myself in this way, by indirectly referring to the cause, the perpetrator. It was Timmy.

    Terror struck me. Before, the menace – Timmy – had been contained. No matter how frightening my walks with him, I could always flee. His original intended purpose was to eat the grass round the house (for the sheep took care of the grass in the paddocks) but he had eaten garden shrub and lawn alike. 

    I looked around: Timmy was nowhere in sight. It occurred to me that I would be safest in an elevated position. I remembered Mum saying that Dad always made sure he was never downhill of Timmy; certainly never when scaling those rice terraces. Take the higher-ground: that was the implicit advice. There was the gum tree, of course, the one that grew in the centre of the turning circle for the cars, but I had never climbed it before. I was calculating my chances when it also struck me that Mum was still unaware of the danger, that even now she might be contemplating venturing outside to water a plant or shake a rug.

    I looked back at the house. Nothing. My heart jarred within me, and an acidity swamped my throat. It was terror I was experiencing, ineffable and ill-defined. Timmy was free. Free to avenge himself for his incarceration and isolation. The house lay two hundred metres away, across open ground. I pirouetted slowly, scanning for the goat. There was nothing, nothing out of place. But there was something extra – a rock! There it was, distinctly, a rock I was sure had not been there before. It lay on a grassy rise to the left and beyond the house. I kept the rock in view as I inched forward and to my right, planning to make a beeline for the front door. The dolomite shards, with which the road was made, knifed at the soles of my feet. I tried to lift them as a moonwalker might, rather than drag them across the ground.

    I made good progress, at the same time ensuring that the “rock” did not get out of sight. I was a good hundred metres closer to the front door when the house itself began to intercede in my view of the suspicious boulder. I now had a decision to make. Either I let the rock become concealed by the corner of the house, or else I risked trying to enter from the back, where I could still keep my eye on it. So long as I had the creature sighted, I reasoned, it could not pop up in another spot, or else it would break its disguise. Yet entering from the back door would mean approaching uncomfortably near and, besides, the back door was often locked from infrequent use.

    My heart shook faster with the dilemma. My eyes cried out to blink. My legs grew stiff with standing. And I breathed in shorthand, but thought in long. I chided myself for my sluggishness, the winding down of reflexes, the cold incapacity of fear. The wind, that had been so quiet, hushed altogether. The birds grew silent in their trees. Soundlessness enveloped our hamlet on the hill with greater surety than anything tangible could ever have managed. And then I heard a door open, and I turned. Mum was on the front veranda, watering can in hand. The unthinkable had happened. I opened my mouth but my voice failed me. I took several steps, jerky, untrained. The rock moved out of view behind the house. I swung my head back to the left again.  Through the effect of parallax, the side of the house rushed to the right like a red curtain caught up in the machinery of the heavens; and, at the same time, the grassy rise raced to the left like an actor onto a stage. Except that it was an actor with an expression eloquent of nothing. The grassy rise was bare. Not a single rock could be seen.

    With that I screamed.

    A second later I hit the ground, the full force of a blow having stunned me. Mum screamed also, encouraging me through fear of further danger to roll onto my back. I looked up at the sun, and saw, rising up blackly into its circle, the silhouette of a goat poised on its hind legs. For that mere instant, with the sun resting like a disk on his crown, and his two horns bisecting it into thirds, Timmy assumed the munificence and invincibility of an Egyptian god. And then he fell forward to butt me, with a force compounded by his weight.

    ‘Run!’

    Shards ignited where Timmy’s horns struck the dolomite.

    ‘Run.’

    It was Mum again, screaming. I rolled to my side as the beast plunged its hoofs into the ground, forging sparks in the collision. At last my body was my own again, and I made it get to its feet. Crystalline pieces of rock were pressed into my palms like tiles into cement.

    ‘Run,’ screamed Mum again, and I ran, ignoring the stones as they sliced my feet. Timmy must have given me a head start, for he came galloping up behind me after the space of several seconds, but they added up to enough time for me to jump through the door, and for Mum to slam it shut behind us. The glass rocked in its frame, but that was the only sound from outside to reach us: Timmy was gone.

    Several men, and as many hours later, and Timmy was finally restrained. Dad had broken a finger for his part.   

 

    The next day I woke to the sound of Mum and Dad busily at work in our driveway. I could hear the clattering of metal, the chink of chains, and got up to investigate. Walking outside into the glare, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, and holding up my loose pajama bottoms in one hand, I shielded my eyes with the other. Timmy was standing in the caged trailer, and the trailer had been rigged up to the ute. Mum flashed me a look, then tugged on Dad’s shirt. Dad drew his eyes away from the lock on the cage, took a look at me, and silently cursed. Mum went to speak but, when Dad prodded her, bit her lip instead. 

    ‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked.

    Dad adjusted the splint on his left forefinger before answering.

    ‘We’re taking him to the knackers, son.’

    ‘Abattoir,’ put in Mum, accentuating the French.

    ‘Abattoir,’ echoed Dad, failing to make the word exotic. He looked across impatiently to the sun, observing that it had only just cleared the horizon.

    ‘Aren’t you up early?’ he said, and straightway regretted the bitterness in his tone. He stepped towards me a pace, then found his voice again, this time modulated into a quieter pitch.

    ‘I know Dan Morgan there, son, and he’ll make it quick.’

    Dad turned on his heel. The gravel gabbled in complaint. Dad walked to the front of the car and took the driver’s seat. The engine coughed to ignition. Mum stepped towards me, but I stepped back to the bars of the cage and, gripping them, turned around. Timmy pressed his head to my fingers, and I scratched that spot between his horns which he liked so much. The skull dipped like a saddle between the two horns and was impossibly located for Timmy to scratch it himself by rubbing up against a rock or a tree. Mum took another look at me and then, concealing her face, ran to the car. The passenger seat clanged shut, and car and trailer began edging away. Timmy looked me full in the eyes. I had always found his to be inexpressive, but now, with their pale green spheres dotted with amber, they seem eloquent of profound expression.

    Dad was pulling away slowly. It was so unlike him, and annoyed me now. I remembered the slowness of the procession at Aunt Judy’s funeral, and hated him for borrowing that touch. I hated the both of them, with an unreasoned, childish stubborness. I looked about me. I felt I should run. I saw an accacia bush Mum had growing in the garden, the only native in their patch, and tore off one of its branches. Timmy was now at the bend in our road, before it straightened and went uphill to the entrance gate. I ran across the dolomite, reopening the old cuts I had sustained in our previous encounter, and shoved the bouquet of gum leaves through the bars. As the trailer retreated round the corner, I saw Timmy munching on the leaves.

 

    I cannot remember what happened immediately after that. I think the world turned silent, as it had done on the previous day. I only recall that I felt a ridiculous impatience, an incredible need to do something, to busy myself, to placate or distract a growing turmoil in me. Of course, none of this I could phrase so adroitly at the time. I was only able to feel with a sort of dumb passion, not much more sophisticated that an animal’s. I hopped back and forth over the fence to Timmy’s paddock, although somehow this action did not induce the feeling I was seeking. While I stood on Timmy’s side, wondering what to do with myself, I picked out a rock on the other side of the valley that I was sure had not been there before. This in itself was remarkable, but even stranger, even more alarming to the mind, was the fact that the rock “bore” a painful stance. I was just corroborating in my own mind whether this was true, when a gunshot sounded. From the reverberations, I deduced it had been discharged several kilometres away. A farmer must have been shooting foxes. But the sound momentarily diverted my attention from the ‘tautly stretched’ rock so that, when I turned to find it again, it had vanished. Feverishly, I scanned the hill till I was certain, absolutely convinced, that it was nowhere else, in case it might have reappeared elsewhere. Once, twice I scanned then once again.

    Then I saw him. He was down the hill quite a distance, eating the greener grass that fringed the creek. Eucalyptus in greater numbers than were found elsewhere on the farm, likewise thickly bordered the creek and, as could be viewed from the top of the valley, circumscribed it in a greeny grey mantle as far as one could see. To get to him, I first needed to go down the hill then up a minor one, so that whilst between the two I lost sight of the goat. When I ascended the crest of the second hill, Timmy had vanished. Jollity, blissful jollity, vanished with him. How stupid of me to have fancied him still on our farm when even now I knew he was being transported ineluctably to the abattoir.

    Nevertheless, the strange, logically insupportable notion overcame me that if somehow I could see and grab hold of this vision of Timmy, his corporeal self would be saved, and that his phantom appearances were made in this hope. Hither and thither I ran, further and deeper into the valley, and farther from home. Here and there I would see a rock or a tree stump – dead and bone-white – that assumed in my eyes the likeness of Timmy; and even though none were found to be he on scrupulous inspection, I was nevertheless compelled to waste time in racing all the way to these poseurs and assure myself completely of their falsity. And each time I saw him he was farther off than the previous, with the result that I squandered invaluable minutes in covering ever greater ground. I was aware of each second passing in a countdown towards … – I knew not what end.

    At one point I ran to Timmy’s bedrock. On hands and knees, I edged out over its tip, and stretched forth, trying to snare one of the branches of the tree springing up from the slope below. But the branches had all been stripped on that side. I had given Timmy his last feed, and I risked calamity myself, should I have tried to stretch further.

    Giving up on that one hope, I pursued another. Frantically I rushed toward everything and anything that remotely suggested Timmy’s shape in its form. The two hills between which I scampered again appeared to metamorphose into giant rolling pins that revolved inwards, a fancy I entertain to this day. I sobbed, screamed and cursed as I hopped back and forth across the creek’s rocks to vainly claw for a purchase on the slopes at either side of the creek, but they were crumbling, crumbling at my touch. To dust the dirt gave way, airborne dust which agitated my eyes and invaded my nose with a smell sour and heavy, an aroma the thickness of lime and clay. The grass tufts which I gripped seemed voluntarily to uproot themselves, causing me to fling backward into the still and muddy waters of the creek. Through all this desperate time-wasting, Timmy, or Timmy’s ghost or perhaps his double, whilst still becoming further and further distant, occupied a place always in the very outer limits of my vision, and even when I whirled my head violently to espy him, there he would stay.

    Somehow, by some inexplicably favourable providence, or merely by luck, I ascended the slope to midway up the hill’s crest, and from there looked down into the valley. Contrary to my insane imagining of it being the point at which two immense rolling pins grinded together, I saw instead that it was merely an impression in the earth along which water stretched and yawned. And like the creek, I, too, felt sleepy – an overwhelming lassitude, what with today’s and the preceding day’s horror, overcame me. I leant backwards against a rock – a rock! It moved! It moved, it expanded restlessly against my back whereas I? I could not move.  ‘Rap-rap-rap!’ I heard, and then more imperatively, ‘rap-rap-rap!’ again. I wondered from what the sound issued, this new and frightful terror. I dared not breathe. I held my ribcage firm. And then I knew. It was my heart. It had clenched its red fist and was now beating against my ribcage, letting me know just how much this fright had unseated it. Yet I could not subdue it, for still the thing behind me rubbed pleadingly against my back and still my heart rap-rap-rapped loudly against my chest. I shivered fitfully, as though I had just been dunked in icy cold water and was now gasping for breath. All the while the rock imploringly pushed a V-shaped ridge painfully into my spine. Somehow I intuited that in sustaining such a close proximity to myself, a prodigious show of strength was being required of that Thing over my shoulder.

    An additional fear struck me. The hill was shaped like half a circle, whereon I perched midway to its crest, the very point at which the downward slope became steeper and steeper. If I were pushed, I would have rolled to its bottom as I had often done in dreams. On hitting the rocky creek below I would have splashed and settled as a carpet of gore, patterned with the nauseating motifs of bone, blood, muscle and tissue. From here I would look upwards with disembodied eyes. The rock was nudging me, now more urgently and hopelessly than before, towards such a fall. I felt the grass and dirt tear beneath me, as they had willingly done before. When I was just about to be flung down that sheer slope, the nudging stopped. Silence. I turned in a flash and for an instant saw Timmy twist in pain. When the vision fled I was left tearful.

    I would have loved to have turned away before the apparition’s dissolution or, better, never to have turned at all, but I had forced myself with what supply of courage I had remaining, a supply which, by that action, I depleted.

 

    For the rest of my childhood on that farm I still saw, or believed I saw, rocks which hadn’t existed, appear, and rocks which had, disappear or move places, and yet I never could pinpoint any inconsistencies in their arrangement on our farm, although they were too alike and too numerous to keep track of. But never, never did they again assume Timmy’s likeness nor did I mistake one of them for him.

 

    Mum and Dad arrived home from the abattoir. I turned from them but the tone of Mum’s voice was that of joy.

    ‘Guess what?’ she cried. ‘We’ve great news! You won’t believe what’s happened! But just as Timmy was about to be cut up for dog meat an abattoir worker said to us that he had built up a wonderful farm in his spare time full of lady goats (where they are only kept for their milk and die of natural causes) and that all he now needed was a male goat to breed with them. Timmy was the one!’

    Dad looked disapprovingly at Mum, Mum looked imploringly at Dad, but I, oh I cannot say how well I suddenly felt, how elated, how light! I slept snugly in bed that night, and though I missed Timmy already, I was happy for him.