Free Nine Days by Toni Jordan

tin held down by lumps of rock and brick and jerry cans. A poor man’s paddock, an endless field of patchwork. Palings missing from every other fence, taken for fuel last winter or the one before and never replaced. Advertising hoardings on every corner so a man can’t even think his own thoughts without interruption. The barrenness, the ugliness, the sad crushed spaces.
    For the life of me, I cannot see why people stay here. Do they not know what’s beyond the city? A few hours on the train and their chests would fill with pure air, their shoulders would settle, their hearts would open.
    The neighbourhood is stirring. A handful of trees struggle against the grey bitumen, limp in the shimmering heat.
    Across the lane, in the tiny yard next door, I see a girl. She is wearing an apron, weeding the vegetable garden. She kneels, first leaning forward to pluck something from the soil, now leaning back, weight resting in the hollow of her joinedfeet. She stands and picks up the watering can, stretches to reach the runner beans on the far fence. She is dark-haired, slender and pale, a sapling bent with the weight of the water. She lifts it. The water arcs out and her body straightens. When the watering is done, she begins digging up potatoes with a garden fork. It’s a miracle anything grows in this mean soil, heavy with factory smoke and flecked with rubbish. She rubs each potato between her palms as if she’s spinning wool or making fire with a stick. When it’s cleaned to her satisfaction she slips the potato in the pocket of her apron.
    The girl is Connie Westaway. We used to play together before I went away to school. Her brothers are too young to sign up and Kip is day labour for Dad, an act of charity on my parents’ part. I hardly remember Connie Westaway at all.
    Now she is brushing her hands on the apron. Now she has picked up the broom leaning on the back wall of the house and she is sweeping the path that leads to the incinerator. I have finished dressing. I should go downstairs. Mum will have breakfast ready, or worse: she’ll be standing beside the stove waiting for my order, as though there was a typed menu on the kitchen table. But here I am, hands on the sill, watching the neighbours’ backyard. Connie moves her feet as she sweeps: a one-two sideways swish.
    Now she stops. Is she talking to the broom? She holds it loosely between her looped thumb and forefinger while the other hand flutters at her chest. From this angle I can just make it out: she smiles. She curtsies. Honest to God, the girl just curtsied to a broom, as though she’s at a ball or in the pages of an old novel. I wish I had a telescope. I cup my eyeswith my hands to see her better. Now she places her other hand near the top of the broom handle and raises her eyes to the tip.
    Bugger me dead. She is dancing.
    One foot forward, then the other. Foot to the side, then the other, skipping to the fence, then back to the vegetable patch, one hand on the broom, the other holding her skirt. Now she twirls, skirt splaying out, a breeze of her own making. Around the post of the clothes line, back the other way. There is a young lilly pilly a few feet from the fence in the corner closest to our place: she is dancing around it and running her hands against the smooth trunk. Standing here in my bedroom, palms flat against the pane, I can somehow feel the bark on my skin. She dances back and I can see her feet, alive in small black boots. I can almost hear the music from the way she moves, as though there was a twelve-piece orchestra behind the fence. The piano cadenza as she bends at the waist, now a rising chorus of strings. The music is in my veins as I watch her dance, the rocking of her body, the turn of her white neck.
    Then I notice: I am also swaying. If I had more than six inches of clearance I’d break into a jig. She has the joy of the morning in her, as if she’s the only person in Melbourne who even knows it’s a new day. Hours could pass