I slipped my phone back in my pocket and turned to the girl, who had filled the bowl up again from the tap and was washing her face.

"I'm going to get you out of here. I know you probably have mixed feelings about that, but it's time to get you somewhere you can be safe and looked after. "

She wiped her mouth and looked up at me. "With your mother? I'm going to move in with the two of you?" She was smiling slightly.

"Well, that's one of the possibilities." I was uncertain but thought my voice remained relaxed.

She sighed, then stood up and pulled at the door of the shed, which opened awkwardly on a last unbroken hinge. It was dark inside, and a powerful animal smell rolled out of the darkness. "There's something in there,"she said. "Rats, or a civet." She stood as though trying to decide whether to shut the door again. "John's been bugging me to get in there with the gun. I didn't want to, so he made me stand."

I reached over her and pushed the door to. "We don't have to deal with that now. We should get out onto the road. The cops are coming. They will deal with John, and make sure that everything is okay. There's some paperwork, then we can go. How are your hands?"

She held them up.

"And though  I find it difficult writing about her now, when I was a student my admiration for her work was direct and easy. I had not then spent 20 years disappointed with my own books. Having done precisely nothing, I felt myself to be, in all the ways that mattered most, her equal, and I neither worshipped her nor wanted to do her harm."

"The shift from feeling into fiction was a shift from being into an image of being, from inside to outside. 'To break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt,' Lacan wrote - and at the time I understood this completely - 'generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.' I think he meant you fall apart a bit, when, as an infant, you see or construct your image in a mirror. It is also possible that you have to fall apart a bit in order to make fiction; that making an image from yourself is a kind of falling apart. And that the image is always too coherent and rigid - what Lacan termed 'orthopaedic'."

Anne Enright, "Diary". London Review of Books 17/2/2011 38-39

Quadrature — historical mathematical term which means calculating of the area. 

quadrature,  in astronomy, that aspect of a heavenly body in which its direction as seen from the Earth makes a right angle with the direction of the Sun. The Moon at First or Last Quarter is said to be at east or west quadrature, respectively. A superior planet (outside the Earth’s orbit) is at west quadrature when its position is 90° west of the Sun. It rises around midnight, reaches the meridian (a great circle on the celestial sphere, passing through the north and south poles and the zenith) near sunrise and sets near noon. At east quadrature the planet is near the meridian at sunset and sets near midnight. At both quadratures the planet is at gibbous phase (more than half but not all of the disk illuminated), but only Mars shows up conspicuously gibbous.

Well, I took her away from the pergola and the old garden house - not far, just far enough so that if her father returned he would probably not find us immediately. There was an old tool shed with a tap at one wall. I laid my jacket for her to sit on, then cleaned a saucer and filled it with water for her . I called Officer Klein on my cell phone, and spoke quietly as I could.

She's not dead, she's here with me. At the back of the orchard. You need to come find us, get her away. Her father will come back, I think he needs to be arrested. And there's the certificate - it's wrong. Did you know it was wrong? You must bring it, so that we can correct it.

when I came out of there I was soaked in sweat, and the light was at its earliest and dimmest, and I was a man - white shirt, casual suit jacket. It took me a while to find my bearings but after pressing through the gaps in a couple of rough hedges I was there again, in the garden by the pergola, and there was the child. I was shocked that she was still holding up those paint cans - had I really left her there all night? She was damp too, with dew and with sweat patched over her stretched-out singlet dress. Her arms were shaking hard and her hair was stuck to her temples. I walked to her. Her eyes didn't shift. I took the paint cans from her and set them down. Don't move your arms too fast, I said as I did this, thinking she would drop them to her sides or hug herself, but she kept them out, her hands loose as though dead, and the arms slowly rose, jerking sporadically, like she was a bird coming in for tight landing.

Where's your father? I asked.

She whispered something, and I had to lean close to hear it. He's gone to town, she said again, dry as a leaf.

I grabbed the hand closest to me and took the weight of the rubbery fingers across my palm. And then I touched her elbow, held it, shifted so that her whole forearm rested on mine, and placed my other hand across her shoulder blade, cupped it. She tilted in to me, her face against my solar plexus, and gasped. But I had forgotten the other arm, and as it convulsed I could only catch it roughly, and hold her there like I was trying to keep a scarecrow from collapse.

in the aviary chattering, whiteness of many birds and such heat, and the acrid guano, and the slipping away of whoever was at my hands. dirty feathers ground in and tiny ones floating. a sneeze a sneeze a sneeze a sneezing convulsion that lifts the netting above, that great polyhedron, into a sigh, and the birds into a catastrophe, more than a minute long.

I watched the pen moving swiftly back and forth before my eyes. He stopped.

Make sure you follow it completely to the right hand side, he said. I'm worried you won't get full integration on that side if you don't.

So I did, and when I did I saw what was right there - the outline of his shoulder, neck and head. Then it was the same as in moving in to the embrace to dance. Outline of the shoulder, neck and head. And then I remembered the professional dancer, her calves stretched, achilles strong, secure in her harness, bouncing on her toes against the rock wall. The set ended. I curled into blackness like a leaf. Don't get off the train, he said. Let it keep moving, keep watching. I pulled myself away from the coffin. I wanted to go home. I reached for my glasses. I said... I feel like I want to stop... I feel a bit like I want to stop... but I think I am okay, I can keep going.

dr corkondill sitting on his pontoon working looked very hungry and in need of his lunch. so miss felt in her bag for her apple, took a big bite for her own hole then sent it flying. a big teardrop of juice and spit, filled with the hormones of longing, dropped down into the pits and sent the croak&dills crazy, a frenzy that churned up the milky swamp. in all the shivering of the boards that came next she misstepped, just as a croak snapped up and onto her leg, like a clothes peg.

save me dr cloaca! and he did. he caught the apple in one hand and placed it carefully at his desk, then ran across the boards to pull her away from the cockindill lips. her leg was stripped of its flesh but he was so quick moving that he saved the bone, and she was happy to go for all the years with the skeleton leg clattering toe-tapping teeth-chattering songs for a dance. She thought sometimes that she'd like to have the teeth removed, but dr clock liked to run his hands lightly round the leg and set them going - why turn back? he'd say. there's nothing like this back there.

and what about the apple? the apple they liked so much that they simply couldn't eat it. It shrivelled itself up and squeezed out its own juices, and the juices oiled the desk on the old pontoon, and they oiled up the bones in miss felt's leg, and they slipped on occasion into the jaws of a sickly young crock, who'd come alive and chase them round the good old days for fun.

and the flesh of the apple went hard and soft as leather, and this they sometimes slipped into miss felt's hip joint, just so they could love each other quietly.

and the seeds of the apple did what seeds do, and more of that and more....

She had heard something. A hammering on the wooden doors downstairs. Silence. And then her mother’s voice calling to her, croaking and anxious. She wrapped herself in her dressing gown, and as she ran down the stairs called back to her mother to be patient. Where were Josephine and Rommel? Why was she being pulled out of sleep by this? The hammering was far louder than necessary – no wonder her mother sounded frightened.

She opened the door and saw Officers Long and Klein, both very tall and broad-shouldered, filling the light of the doorway and with their hats pressed to their chests. Sorry Ma’am, it’s the wind, said the larger man, gesturing with his hat - a brief gust lifted a lock of his humid hair. 

What can I do for you? asked Laurel. I hope everything is all right?

Yes ma’am, everything is fine. Although we have some difficult news.

He gently turned his brown eyes to Laurel’s, while Officer Klein handed her a leaflet. Victim Responses.

I'm afraid we'll be needing your mother’s assistance. Can we speak to her please?

No, said Laurel, pulling the door closer to her. She's unwell. I will be happy to help you.

Of course Ma’am, they agreed, so Laurel slipped the leaflet onto the console table and walked out between them, finding her legs becoming leaden and her breath becoming faint. The officers took her arms to support her and the three walked together into the whispering stillness. Sunlight played on the draping willows and on the garden pond, empty through to its floor since the heron'd made off with the koi. They crossed the soft grass to the gravel driveway, where a dark, shining car was waiting - 

Would you like us to drive, Ma’am? 


She was surprised - were they not going to walk through the orchard to find the child?

It happened at the cutting, said Long. By your fenceline with the Amblins. 

But on our property?

Yes, on your side. Clearly on your side. She was just a little girl. You’ll need to sign confirming death.

She'd rather walk. She closed her eyes and let her steps follow along with the steps of the officers, as though she were wheeling the pedals of a bicycle as it moved quickly downhill. The sound of their trudging in the gravel was thick, a crowded aviary, and as they passed the gates she entered into it, as she entered into the heat of their dark twill suits. Nothing seemed to pass them on the gravel road. The dust barely stirred.

he. me. woe, myopia, Doctor Corkondile.  just a moment's movement on the far side of the pond. I only wore a hat for shade. shade in a hat, misfelt, Miss Felt. & her arrows of felt, & fat & feeble, dropping flatly into the pond. easy corkondilly, no need to startle. just a leaf dropping by your ear. not a meal, but a nut, sinking sweetly to flavor up the broth. Eat it, crock. What do I care.

for example a despicably criminal act in a beautiful garden. long-tongued topiary dragons guard the entry, three metres tall, and then there are many rows of new year citrus, each shrub trimmed into roundness, & each coming into their fullest colour now. and then, further beyond, many more rows of squat animals - frogs, bears, rabbits, all carved out of leaves.


at some point in the garden - beyond the sheltered rows - the animals lose their shape. she's taking her mother to see - her mother with the saddled waist and the ruined hips, who rolls along on her walking sticks, huffing, complaining - it isn't a lack of fitness, she says, I'm simply more tired than you know.


over here, mother, you see the pots are sinking into the ground, they've let the grass seed in the pots and they're getting all overgrown.


it's true. plainly no one comes to these rows to trim the grass around the pots, or even to ensure the pots can be lifted from the ground. some are sunk so deep that just the ruined rims surface here and there, roots cracking their sanctity and ploughing into the unbound earth beyond.


you should just tell me what you want me to see, says the mother. I'm not interested in walking further and there's a bench just here. she sits  - a painful bending at the knees followed by a quick, heavy collapse onto the stone bench. the daughter stays standing, picking bark from a scarred trunk. it seems the argument for evening air, for a stretching of the legs, will take them no further.


There's this kid. There's a man who lives in a shed, and a really old pergola, and there's this kid. I came and I looked from behind the pergola and saw the kid - she was standing with her arms out, holding two cans of paint out like this - and she stood there for as long as I did, with her arms trembling and sweat running down. the man was crouching under the pergola, transplanting these seedlings and - not watching her exactly, just now and then looking up.


The mother is breathing heavily, has been since she sat down. Well, she says, people live here. They always have. I never thought it was necessary to send them away. And I can't control what people do. You like to meddle. You think everyone should be like you, walk if you like to walk, no matter if they are tired or not. But it's evening now. The air's damp. It was after four when we left.


The daughter brought her mother a clementine to refresh her and they began to walk home.  That night, the daughter dreamed. There was the young girl holding the paint cans out, perpendicular to her body, and paint was spilling over their edges in a steady stream, as though the cans were filling and filling from within. The liquid had no colour, it was an emptiness, but it reflected the shapes and the dark green of the trees in the night as it pooled around her feet. Where was the man, the father? Laurel could not see him anywhere around the girl, under the pergola or in the shed, and yet the young girl held the paint cans out, just as though his eyes were only inches away from hers.

A wind was blowing up. The tops of the palms swayed giddily, so bare and far away, while in the mass of lower trees even thick branches shuddered. Creepers were picked up and held parallel to the earth, just like the child’s arms. The pergola groaned, and soon in a gust a spattering of heavy fruit fell. Laurel, on the verge of speaking, woke up.