Free Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley Page B

assembled school on the use of garbage bins, playground roistering, the straightening of lines, while in temperatures of over ninety children dropped like flies. He had never heard of
John O’London’s Weekly
, and once when she asked if he had ever read the
New Yorker
said that neither he nor his wife liked suggestive literature. After the last blunder each was puzzled as to how the other held the job.
    Poincianas and acalyphas yet unflowering fretted sky and convent walls across Mitchell Street. Thick-fruited the acalyphas would soon be with their strange single-seeded nutlets prolific amongst the ornamental foliage; she had taken home armfuls of it when she first saw it, or thrust branches into glass bottles for the classroom. The sarmentose fringes of date-palms along the Strand were just visible above the roofs.
Les cimes
 . . .
Le ciel est pardessus le toit si bleu si calme
. Poetry like a swelling wave crescendo of green water swept compellingly through her mind as she paused at the foot of the stairs watching this well-known view for the last time.
La mer est infinie, je ne veux que la mer, je ne veux que le vent pour me bercer
 . . . How did thoselines of Mirmont go? “Beyond the port now nothing more than a smudged image, the tears of departure no longer burn my eyes” . . .
ne brûlent plus mes yeux. O ces beaux adieux!
These beautiful departures. Merely to say,
“Car j’ai de grands départs inassouvis en moi”
—“For I have great unassuaged departures in myself”—made her cheeks tingle.
    Into her mind she tried to paint unforgettably this minute of branches, buildings, and sky so that later the inner eye might feed upon it when the four walls and the silence of hotel rooms pressed in upon the single figure on the bed. There is a certain permanence of beauty and truth to be extracted from natural scenery. We all have those moments of crystalline perception when the flesh, divinely prompted, seems to melt into nothingness, leaving the mind nervously aware, apprehending, cut off from was or will be, swung from there to here: those times when pausing at night beside the weatherboard house, starved for real music, a piano cuts the stillness with melodic scimitars, boomerangs of tune; or being a new-comer to the stunning plainsong of mountain and valley sweeping down into green sunlight, the breath is held unaware. But these truths take place on smaller canvases—the lady with simian face hirsute and deformedly ashamed responds to your unasked and therefore wonderful smile, so that you feel a touch of godhead within your very person; or, lying beneath pandanus patterning the ants’ world umber,zebra-striped with shadow, you see the shivery grass terrified by your orange-scented breath.
    The stairs, weathered and splintered, received her step, the classroom, trestle blackboards and empty desks—where is there a desolation as complete as that of the emptied school?—the walls made of perpendicular louvred boards to combat the heat lay open to her. Old battleground. On the unused press in the corner were her rain-cape and books, white with chalk dust. The pigeons which lived in dozens in the eaves just above this room spoke murmurously, and she dragged a form across to a chair, and sitting down rested her leg. There seemed to be no one left within the building except where an irregular thumping betrayed the presence of a cleaner working in Desmond’s room in the far wing. She thought that before she tackled once more the walk back to the hotel she would sit for a few moments and absorb these last unpleasant stage props.
    The pain within the leg, the pain within the mind, and the silence of the room all became one splendid thing.
    July
    They had brought the girl to her while the high jumps were still being held on the far side of the grounds. She was a tall bony creature from sixth grade, long, lachrymose of countenance with hair