Frightening himself he persisted. He dug into his drawers feeling underpants, singlets, shorts. He tipped his marbles on to his bedspread and rolled the palm of his hand over them. Pictures of them leapt into his mind. But what if he had never seen them, not ever. What then? Really afraid, he opened his eyes and rushed around his room looking at all the things he owned. ‘I know you!’ he shouted over and over, ‘I know you!’ And his eyes clutched at what was different about each of them.
Tonight there would be shadows in the garden, stringy shadows that stretched from trees along the path and stumpy shadows that clung to shrubs. He saw himself running in a frenzy down the long path to the outhouse. Gran said there was nothing in the night to hurt anyone. Why should there be? But he wished that he could see and know as he could in the daylight.
He put on his slippers, lifted the latch on the back door and stepped outside. It wasn’t as dark as he had expected. A moon hung like a tossed coin, whilst a few stars bright and cold and wary kept their distance. Day perfumes had been dispersed by wayward breezes and unexpected currents of air. Now night perfumes sank, heavily laden under their own weight.
Matthew began to hurry. A possum coughed, a dying, congested rattle as if Father had lain down outside to die or sent his ghost still coughing to hemorrhage in the gum tree. When daylight came the blood would run down the grey spikes of leaves and burst into wildly crimson blooms so heavy they could never stand upright on the tree. The shadows of the pittosporum were blacker than anywhere else in the garden. The creamy lanterns of flowers glimmered but threw no light. A moth with mock eyes on its wings flopped against Matthew’s shoulder. He screamed at its soft, sidling touch, brushing sharply with his hand and beginning to run.
He made it to the outhouse leaving the door open because inside was even darker than the night he feared outside. He lifted the toilet lid gingerly but no spider scuttled across his hand. A few moments later and he was finished. He would run even faster when he returned. The darkness seemed less dense now. In the shadow of the house he thought he saw a woman’s shape. It had no face, merely the lines of a gown faintly luminous. He stopped, half desiring to steal forward, to know, to identify, half wanting to fly inside, to deny what might be there. It might not be a gown. It might be a long white finger, pressed up through the earth, a distortion of some earthly form, changed horribly by death. Ghosts had to be distortions. They weren’t people as he knew them.
He crept a little closer. A hand emerged from the darkness and drew the figure forward. Matthew saw its paleness and the curve of the fingers. The arm, if there was one, was shrouded. Matthew crouched by the verandah steps. It might see him if he darted inside, might reach out that hand and grasp him. The white faceless figure stood still. Then in the quiet of the night Matthew heard a few whispered syllables of sound. The figure moved. It was a woman. The hand fell away from her back and a man’s figure, enlarged by the darker shadows stretching from the wall and surrounding him, loomed over her. She seemed to grow taller as if she reached up or stood on her toes.
He heard a couple of faint gasps which could have been fear or surprise or the end of a laugh. Who were they? As Matthew edged nearer, his foot slipped on a pebble and he scuffled to his knees on the gravel. In a moment the figures froze, melted and dissolved into the shadowy world from which they had so fleetingly emerged. The moonlight caught a flicker of whiteness at ground level as if a real foot might have disturbed a hemline. Then there was nothing. He strained his ears but heard only the erratic chirrups of night insects. They had disappeared. Matthew fled up the steps and through the kitchen door into his room.
He fell asleep almost at once. Sometime in the night he dreamed that a door opened and closed very softly in the house.
Gran was reading. She had been to the library and returned home with a basket of books. Margaret had scrummaged in the basket, turned the volumes so she could read the titles and grimaced. Now she lounged on the settee reading her Ladies’ Journal while Gran stood under the single electric bulb which dangled from the ceiling and lit part of the kitchen. It threw a sharp cone of brilliance on to the kitchen floor but beyond its perimeters shadow and light merged in frustrating fuzziness. Sometimes Margaret complained but she refused to move the settee from against the wall and made much of the necessity for looking at the pictures rather than reading the print.
Matthew had a wooden stool Edward had made him. He placed this in the circle of light near Gran and crouched over his own story book. Gran could stand for hours reading like this.
‘Are you reading an interesting story, Gran?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Gran, is your story interesting?’
‘What, Matthew?’
‘Is your story interesting?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Mother, Matthew is talking to you.’
‘What? Were you, darling? What was that?’
‘Is your story interesting, Gran?’
‘Yes, it’s a very good story.’
‘What happens in your book?’
‘It would be better for you to read yours, darling.’
‘But I know what happens in mine. I want to know what happens in yours.’
‘It’s a French book, Matthew. About a man called Candide. He has many adventures and gets into all kinds of trouble. It’s written by
