Free Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley

flood-waters lapped the bottom step and the whole backyard and every other backyard was a shining lake whose level rose foot by foot till even the fence lines vanished, and at nights in bed you could hear the wavelets sucking at the tin ant-caps on top of the house piers. Some of the houses did not have lattice, but stood precariously on their long poles like swamp-birds. They were painted biscuit and chocolate, and somewere even ice-cream colour, but mostly they were drab, lacking in windows and roofed with iron on which the rain drummed frenziedly from December to February.
    Elsie remembered how those storms had been preluded by heavy round drops that fell singly into the dust and bent the leaves, then, without warning, the rain had fallen like a thick curtain. All through that first week she tramped home under the javelin thrust of water, bare-foot like the children, with her rain-cape soaked right through to the rubber and her umbrella a pulp, hardly able to find her way, so alike were the flat, flooded streets and the box-like houses. During the day, whenever a gasp of watery blue edged its way into the sky, the whole class would point and laugh, and the men standing in their mud-splashed sports trousers along the verandas would light votive cigarettes and breathe the smoke in reverently in the first sunshine for nine days. But by two o’clock the gigantic cumulus would have rolled up from the horizon, heavily white and woolly with edges and underside dark-blue, and by three the whole sky would be black again with nimbus and the wind, springing up without warning as it did in these latitudes, would be on them with the first drops of the next storm.
    She recalled the patterns of eight months as she walked up Denham Street, up the slight hill past shops and hotel, recalling at the left-hand fork the open-aircinema where so often she had sat with Jon or Harry or others, palm resting moistly genial with palm on the canvas seats; seeing, too, the classrooms grow darker with the onset of rain, both pupils’ faces and teacher’s ghastly in the fading light, blackboard writing an impossibility and the beating din so deafening it was useless even to shout. Discipline reduced to bare essentials gave the children what was popularly known as “silent study”, while the teacher, disconsolate, stared into a playground where the crusts and paper bags of another lunch-break floated beneath the pepper-trees.
    Two Chinese women passed her, rapidly communicating, their words bright hoops of sound bucketing and rolling in the lazy air down towards the main street; the milk-bar gutting the quiet with strident juke-box gave ulcers as it cured; and then came the crest of the hill whence she never failed to turn to this sudden blue of sea and great gibbous island with pleasure; below, the school. From its scrambled rickety halls, half hidden by hedge-thick camphor-laurels, tinned the three-o’clock bell, and unwilling to go down into the seething hordes now pouring with barbaric ferocity from every door she lingered for ten minutes or so below Melton Hill, watching the streets fill with children, then gradually empty once again.
    Chromatics of stones, rocks, brought her feet towards the feet of Mr Duffecy who, most unusually for him at this hour, was crossing towards the school-house,rolling slightly with obesity and self-importance. Customarily against his name in the time-book were noted incredible figures in arrival and departure columns for the delectation of gobemouche inspectors—seven fifteen in the mornings, and for departure frequently eight, nine, and even ten o’clock were noted down—allow a tea-hour, of course. The men on the staff swore that it was domestic incompatibility that lay behind this industry, and circulated the scandalous rumour that even in the wet season he took to his bed, or hammock, beneath the house. No staff member but one had ever laid eyes on this formidable wife; and Jack