I slipped out the door to the gallery. It was very quiet, but also full of the currents of breathing air. Emma was lying on her back and was the loudest, but I could hear them all, the soft whisper of children's breath included. I went to the rail and looked up at the skylight. There was no moon and the stars were bright. I could make out the giddy powder of the Milky Way and I stood there, craning my neck, trying to make out the Southern Cross. I could not find it, of course (what Australian ever can?) but that is not the point at all and you will appreciate that a skylight full of stars is not a thing that a prisoner, even one from Rankin Downs, is used to. I began to incorporate a telescope in my plans. I would need to drop a concrete pier through four storeys, but it could be done elegantly, I knew it could, and you can imagine what it would be like to lie in bed with skin touching skin and the two of you looking, sighing, staring at the rings of Saturn.

My thoughts then, although occupied in the most sentimental way with copulation, were really more concerned with architecture, the placing of the concrete pier in such a way that I did not destroy the open space I loved so much.

I was, as they say, a million miles away, when Leah Goldstein put her lips one inch away from my ear.

"I'm a bit partial," she said.

We will forget the fright she gave me, the wild alarm of skipping rhythms she triggered in my heart so that, for a moment, it careered around like a car on a wet corner, and remember rather, that we kissed, most gently, and retired to the privacy of my room.

But here, I must confess it, I was as nervous as a boy. I had not been sorry to put off the moment I also wanted so much, and when Charles locked me away I did not complain because it suited me. Ten years in a prison does not engender confidence in these delicate matters which one, at the same time, has spent so many hours dwelling on, so in the end one has enough material to make a palace from the leftovers. I had not, as Goldstein imagined, come seeking her out. Had I known she was waiting for me I would have stayed alone on my mattress on the floor.

A prisoner's memory turns love-making into something at once sweet and coarse, as saccharine as a pin-up, as rough as his hands on his cock, all worried whether his semen will splash on to his clothes or go into the bucket and I had forgotten the tiny intimacies of that ache I had named a fuck, the small pinching fingers on my nipples and belly, the ripe musky honey beneath the sweet bush of shampooed hair, the way a face in the dark (in the light too) changes its meaning and how words you thought yourself too old to say, sentiments you imagined dead and drowned, bubble up from the muddy floor and burst in such explosions of light, of perfume, floral yeasts and uric acid, and my Leah's eyes were huge and shining (nebulae, supernovae) and as she arched her back and locked her legs around mine so we were held hard, tight in a rack, Herbert Badgery was caught by surprise to find himself awash with gratitude, a prisoner in a rocking-horse of sighs.

46

Herbert Badgery lay in Leah Goldstein's arms. She smelt the musty odours of Rankin Downs seeping from his skin, like old rags kept in a cleaner's bucket for too long a time. He was already asleep.

Down in Pitt Street a drunk was pouring forth an endless mantra of echoing abuse against the empty summer streets.

Herbert Badgery began to snore, quietly. She was sorry she had not told him what she meant, had not said it properly. She had belittled herself. It was a stupid habit. She had made light of her ability to earn ten quid a week, as if it had been bought lightly or maintained easily. She had told him that the stories were hack work, which was true, and that they were women's stories, which was true in that they were written for the demands of the editors of women's magazines. But she had not told him that this constant production was like walking, each day, through a field of thigh-high mud. The fiction editors were arrogant and stupid enough to think themselves superior to their readers. You could only supply them with what they wished by thinking badly of human beings.

And yet she had taught herself to do this work because it was work that could be done anywhere, in a cafe in Sydney or sitting by a roadside at Goondiwindi. It would provide enough, with Herbert's pension, to live free of Charles's charity – they would not need to be family pets like Mr Lo.

She dreamed of landscapes cut with raw red roads, hills sliced by deep crimson cuttings, yellow ochre rocks striated with the long straight stabs of jack-hammers. Her mind, perversely perhaps, found peace in pictures of wide khaki seas around small treeless towns with the paling fences so new you could smell the tree sap in them. In these landscapes, by these roads, she found a shrill, ragged, unaesthetic optimism. It was ignorant and guiltless, and she had not yet told him but it was what she craved.

She could tell him tomorrow, but tonight she could now tell herself something else – she could allow herself to feel the hate she had for the pet emporium. And, indeed, lying in the unventilated dark, on a mattress on the floor, with the grease of cosmetics still on her face, she allowed a ripple of hatred, an electric jolt to pass down her body.

"I hate this place," she said. She said it out loud just to make herself hear what she thought, so that she could no longer pretend to herself that she thought otherwise.

"Signed," she whispered, "signed, L. Goldstein."

Herbert rolled on to his back and she dragged her arm out from under him. She loved him, but she would rather go and sleep in her own bed by herself. It was a habit, probably a selfish one. It was this last thought that made her stay and, also, her wish not to hurt him. She put the sheet over him and sat, hunched, on the edge of the mattress.

She hated it. She wanted to leave so much that tomorrow would not be too soon. She would not waste another moment of her life, that river filled with jetsam which had once – it looked so sad and pitiful now -been so important to her.

No longer would she be understanding Leah. She liked and cared for Charles but her feelings for Emma and her children were false emotions and she tasted their taste in the cosmetics on her face. She had cooked their bland meals for them, wiped their noses, mended their socks, done all the simple things they all appeared to be incapable of doing. She had accepted the mindless ordinariness of their lives because she did not wish to live alone, perhaps, or because she could never explain to Charles why she might want to leave his custody.

But she was not a young girl any more. She was thirty-seven years old and had a crease beneath her bottom and a little roll of fat on her middle. She was thirty-seven and had, for the most part, wasted her life as if she hated it.

She started to make pictures in her closed eyes, a habit she had developed on her insomniac nights in Bondi. She could make perfect pictures: twisted white eucalypts at a corner of a white road near Cooma, bristling khaki banksias in the foot-burning sand at Coolum, Gymea lilies in the scrub around Dural, like burning weapons on long shafts placed defiantly to warn intruders. She saw the cliffs and waters of the Hawkesbury lying in the water like the scaly back of a partly-submerged reptilian hand.

"Cdwerther," said Herbert Badgery.

She turned her head. He also was sitting upright.

"What?" she asked.

"C-wder. Ah, strewth, I can't even say it." Then, laughing, he lay down again, still asleep.

Leah Goldstein started giggling.

Tonight, when he lost his temper with his naive son, she had been so pleased. She had been pleased, anyway, to see again her blue-eyed scoundrel and confidence man, but she was pleased, particularly, to see that he still could care about a thing like that, care enough to lose his temper.