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When their crates of books arrived, later than expected, Stella and Perdita sorted through them to decide what could be sold. It was all the property they had, said Stella, so they must choose wisely. Perdita sat on the floor, cross-legged,
setting up her piles of yes, no and maybe. Stella's yes, no and maybe were also establishing. They compared the piles and in the end kept more books than they were prepared to sell. Both were comforted. The room felt less empty. Perdita discovered
The Life of Captain Cook
and thought of Mary; she discovered
The Golden Bough
, annotated in the margins, and thought of her father.

‘When,' she asked her mother, ‘will we v-v-v-visit M-M-Mary?'

‘We'll see,' said Stella, non-committally.

That was it. No more talk. No concession or offer.

Perdita resented the secrecy and agency of adults. She resolved to find her own way to visit Mary. In the meantime, she tried to meet her new life with courage. She grew tough at school, fighting the boys with her fists. Once she bloodied a nose and felt, for a guilty instant, a searing surge of gratification. Soldiers must be like this, she reasoned, callous and stern, excited by a small channel of blood and an enemy cowered. She ignored the girls, as they mostly ignored her.

Perdita missed Billy. She missed Mary and Horatio and all that she had known. She remembered Billy rolling in the dirt, scratching Horatio's speckled belly, and the look of both of them there, reclined and happy as they came to rest with their faces exposed to the sun. Mary was nearby, laughing. She filled a tin mug from the water tank and with a wide swing of her arm splashed it over both of them. Horatio leaped up and shook his fur; Billy performed mock fury and a chase and then settled to a fond giggle. It was such a lucid moment, returned, bright and complete. Perdita missed them all. How was it possible, she often wondered, to continue with so much missing?

When, at the end of the year, their charity term in the rented room expired, Stella and Perdita moved into an old semi-detached house in the inner city, in East Perth. It was a narrow brick building, with a fanlight above the front door and long rectangular side panels of milky rippled glass. Something about the sturdiness of the entrance appealed to both Stella and Perdita. With their donated furniture and boxes of books, they took possession of the house in a spirit of triumph: at last, it seemed, they had a place of their own.

The rent was modest, in part because the house backed onto a railway line, so that at all times of the day and night they heard the restless toing and froing of the trains, a comforting rumble, an appealing clack-clack, a soothing rising and falling of sound as the trains approached, passed, then faded evenly into the distance. With each train the glass windows in the house shivered and rattled, responsively energised, bestowing on the building an almost tremulous quality.

Nearby stood a power station, a concrete works, and a modest bakery, and beyond them an Aboriginal encampment, mostly hidden from view, on the bank of the Swan River. Perdita could see a small group of people sitting around a fire; the shape of the gathering was one that she recognised. If it had not been for her stutter, she would have approached and
befriended these people. Perdita believed they would understand her; she would be accepted, even welcomed, as a stranger from the country. She believed she would be invited to sit down at their fire. She would tell them about Mary, about all that had happened.

In the long summer school holidays, Stella continued her work at the florist, and Perdita was often home alone, with the house to herself. She created a garden, went for walks to the river, and with precocious fervour began reading more of the volumes that had been unpacked anew from the boxes. Some of the books bore her father's signature – ‘Nicholas Keene' – and again, as with ‘NK', Perdita felt the vague presence of something unthinkable. She read her father's books carefully, mindful of Mary's superstitious opinion that mysterious and unwonted communions occur between readers. There were three novels by Joseph Conrad, which she avidly read, wondering at each turn of the page what her father had thought, and whether, from the reticent no-place of death, he was somehow nevertheless present, penetrating an eerie membrane to visit his daughter, here reading. At the beginning of
Heart of Darkness
she came across a passage:

Although, in truth, she did not understand the novel at all, Perdita loved this paragraph. It gave her such dreamy pleasure
that she put the book face down, keeping the page, and allowed herself slowly to absorb the words. This was one of the moments in which, with mild-mannered poise, she wondered if her father was nearby, metaphysically hovering.

She was alert to phantom interventions and spooky symptoms, willed them, waited. She now believed in ghosts, even though she had never seen one. She believed, at least, that there are no cessations, that what is
missing
continues on, persisting, somewhere else. Mary had taught her this, the principle of invisible presence, that one must always reckon on more than one sees.

Perdita Keene was by then just twelve years old. She had an entire philosophy of life, cobbled together, ingeniously, from all she had met, and believed she was like no other girl her age in her degree of eccentricity. That she was so exceptionally isolated was no surprise but, like most of the afflicted, the vexed and the miserable, she had her own resources of resilience and power.

There was a thumbprint visible on page 46 of
Heart of Darkness
, the faintest of whorls, a delicate stamp of identity. It jolted Perdita as a sign that Nicholas had been indisputably
here
.

The more Perdita thought about Mary's proposition, the more difficult it became. Since the first reader is the author, might there be a channel, somehow, between author and reader, an indefinable intimacy, a secret pact? There are always moments, reading a novel, in which one recognises oneself, or comes across a described detail especially and personally redolent; might there be in this covert world, yet another zone of connection?

It hurt Perdita's head to have to think of such matters. When she was a grown-up, yes, she would know for sure. She would understand what reading is. Outside, a train passed by with the usual rattle. Her window responded. There was this world too, of machines and objects and other people, carrying on
regardless, with their separate lives. At this moment, in her own bedroom, with Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
open before her and a lovely perforated light falling through the threadbare curtains, she could not see how these elements would ever fit together. She wondered if this was one of the big questions that Shakespeare had asked: how does the life-in-words fit with all these other lives?

By this stage Perdita was almost mute. She spoke as little as possible, simply to avoid publicising the curse of her stutter. She was furled, inward. She thought of herself as an ammonite. When she was with her mother it was taken for granted that Stella would do all the talking. They had never discussed this; it had simply evolved as their social mode. They understood each other, wary and calculating. At school, almost from the beginning, teachers had learned not to ask her questions, and other children, apart from their teasing, began to consider her inconsequential. Perdita realised that the speechless, the accursed, gradually vanish. She noticed with a kind of fear how frequently she was overlooked, how she was becoming dim and disregarded in the estimations of others. Less than a character in a book. Less than a fiction.

After weeks of solitude, of mooching, of reading, of distended days, Perdita resolved at last to seek out Mary. To do so she needed adult advice, but she knew better than to consult her mother or tell her of her plan. One afternoon, decisively, she walked to the encampment by the riverbank. She watched her own feet proceed, left-right, left-right. There was only a small group this time, of four adults and two small children, and as she approached she felt her heart nervously begin to pound and her mouth to fill up with clotted impediments. It was a family, perhaps. They sat together in the navy
shade of a Moreton Bay fig tree and had, as she had seen before from a distance, a small fire on the ground and swags of belongings tucked away in the roots of the tree. A billy of tea was brewing over an aromatic fire. Perdita walked directly towards the group and a man with grey hair and a creased face hailed her at once with a friendly wave.

‘Eh! Cousin! Eh!'

Perdita relaxed.

‘We seen you before,' he announced. ‘Lotsa times, walken by the river. How come you never came up and said hallo?'

The man, Joey his name was, winked at Perdita in an exaggerated fashion. The others all introduced themselves – Em, the wife, Jack and Rose, Joey's son and daughter-in-law. The two sleepy grandchildren were Liz and Mac. Joey was a leech-gatherer for the Royal Perth Hospital. He had a permit, he said, a ‘gub'ment dog-tag', which gave him permission to camp by the river.

‘White city,' he said wryly.

Em smiled and passed Perdita a mug of tea.

Other Aboriginal people, too, were excluded from the inner city. Joey's family had no permission, so they came and went.

‘Mostly the p'licemen look the other way. But better we stay hidden, y'know?'

Perdita took her time telling them her story. Her audience thoughtfully ignored the stutter, did not finish her sentences, and patiently attended as she told them of her home in the north and her black sister, Mary. She told them that her father attacked Mary, that he had been killed with a knife, that Mary confessed and was taken away, down south. As her story progressed Perdita found it more and more difficult to speak; her mind was clouding over as if it was impossible to reach the details of what had occurred. So her version was spare and increasingly vague.

At its conclusion she blurted out – in a complete, unstuttered sentence – ‘Where would they be keeping her, do you think?'

Joey thought he knew. ‘Lotsa blackfellas,' he said, ‘in trouble with the law. And them whitefella p'licemen just love to stick us all in gaol.'

He gave Perdita the name of a reformatory for delinquent girls, where a cousin of Rose's had once been held. It was just the information Perdita needed.

Perdita drank her tea and talked with the family for an hour or so. They were Nyoongar people, Joey said; this was their country.

‘All roun heres,' he gestured widely, waving his arm across the river.

It was her first experience of community in the city. Here, in a thin margin of wasteland between the power station and the river, concealed, sheltering, enclosed coolly by shade, she had at least recovered a sort of voice. She was moved by Joey's instinctive magnanimity, she was reminded that there was more than the pitiless school and the anonymous streets and the sense – how it had assailed her – that everything now was defined by forlorn depletion.

For the first time, too, she truly saw the river. By late afternoon there was a purplish bloom on the water, and for all her disappointments she had to admit that it was remarkable in its beauty. As she listened to the family speak, she watched its slow, unregulated, confluent passing. Clouds flowered on its surface, darkened, then dissolved. There were movements below, small sparky transmissions, and something bountiful, unseen. And when she returned to her home she was newly self-possessed. There was a calm to her demeanour and even a fleeting cheerfulness.

Perdita waited for her mother to leave for work, then took the tram to the city and then a bus to the suburbs south of the river. The driver promised he would tell her where to get off, and said she should ask at the shops on the main street for directions thereafter. Perdita was clutching a pearl shell and
The Lives of the Saints
wrapped together in orange tissue paper tied with one of her hair ribbons. She was beside herself with excitement. Outside flowed pink brick houses, drearily uniform; there were ropes of roses and decorative letter boxes. No doubt about it; it was an ugly city.

After fifteen minutes Perdita became anxious that the driver had forgotten her, and that she would end up who knew where, lost in these empty suburbs. She made her way to the front of the jolting bus and tapped the driver on the shoulder.

‘Next one, luv,' he said, anticipating her question.

She was deposited by the side of the highway. Still unused to cars speeding on concrete roads, Perdita crossed gingerly to the small strip of stores ahead and asked at the first one where ‘Greensleeves' was. The lady behind the counter didn't know, but told her to ask at the newsagency. There she received precise directions. She thought her stuttering made her sound imbecilic. The newsagent looked at her suspiciously, as if she may have been an inmate, or a little slow. Billy must have felt like this all the time, Perdita reflected.

As she turned the corner – fourth on the left – she saw what she took to be the detention centre called Greensleeves, an imposing red-brick building, austere and institutional. In the front garden worked an old man in ordinary clothes; it did not, Pedita thought hopefully, seem at all like a prison.

The visit was a crushing disappointment. When she was met in the front room she was told that ‘under-age' visitors needed to be accompanied by an adult; she would not be admitted; and in any case, there were visiting hours. Perdita tried to argue
but her stutter entangled her, and so, frustrated, she began to cry. She was so accustomed to suppressing her tears that they surprised and humiliated her. The woman in charge said that she would see that Mary received her gift. With reluctance Perdita handed over the orange parcel. She turned away and slowly began her woeful journey back.