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‘It's your own fault,' said Stella, curtly.

Perdita wanted to see Mary. It was all she wanted. She slung her body into the car, already gritty with their travel, and almost demanded information.

‘She's in Perth,' Stella said. ‘At a reformatory school. When she's a bit older, she'll be moved to the prison.'

It was enough for now. Mary was away, unreachable. She was no longer in Broome. Perdita looked down at her crimson arms, which had become papery and spotted and itched unbearably. She began softly to cry.

‘Cut it out,' said her mother, sounding Australian.

On the front of the newspaper between them was balloon-headed Mussolini, saluting the sky. He looked more statue than man; he had a granite angularity. Stella said it was good to see the Italians getting more attention. They were, she claimed, more interesting than Nazis, much more cultured. Cathedrals. Artworks.

‘
Duomo
,' said Stella emphatically, offering no translation.

When they returned to England, she said, they would have a holiday in Italy, and see Venice, Verona, Mantua and Rome, the ‘Shakespearean cities'. She was back in the hard world now, of dictators and deeds to perform, and drove leaning forward over the steering wheel, as if urging the car onward into history.

‘Much more interesting.'

Perdita longed not for Italy but to move to town. There were pearling luggers floating in the sunlit bay, and a stripe of narrow jetty stretching to meet them. On the shore, close by, were sorting sheds, in which could be glimpsed slender men dressed in sarongs and batik head dresses, sitting cross-legged on piles of shell, examining them, and tossing them into yet new piles. Jewellery, buttons, mother-of-pearl watch faces and ornaments for rich houses: that the town was founded on pearls and pearl shell seemed to Perdita almost impossibly glamorous.

She loved too the people she saw in the streets, Malay,
Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Aboriginal families who lived in houses and were not consigned to stations or missions; they were all much more beautiful than the people she knew. All had black liquid eyes and open faces; they spoke to her with gentleness; they were exotically kind. Perdita also loved the tin-walled stores owned by Chinese merchants, which were full of red-papered objects covered in fancy writing, stamped images of fishes, dragons, circles, cranes. There were noodles in nest shapes and huge sacks of rice; there were cans of mushrooms and fishpaste and cracker-strings of dried chillies. The objects and smells in the stores – Wings, Tangs – were inexplicably seductive.

Stella bought two Gouldian finches in a temple-shaped bamboo cage. Perdita was not sure, since the sky was full of them, why Stella should want two for herself, but was pleased to witness what was almost frivolity. Stella held them high: Dromio and Antipholus, she called them. They bounced on their perches, full of quivering life.

Much of Perdita's knowledge of Broome was derived from Mary. In town children went to school, and had friends and played games. There was a Buddhist school for Japanese children (she had seen them sitting outside playing an unfamiliar board game), a government school for kids like her and for non-Buddhist Asians, and a Catholic school that had Mass – whatever that was – where the children, Mary said, learned stories and mysteries, like those contained in
The Lives of the Saints
. There was a cinema, and a bakery. Perdita had never been to the cinema, a small shed, with outdoor seats arrayed in front of it, and a screen of patched canvas, but she knew that it must be something marvellous. She knew that the baker had a drinking problem, that the policeman had a girlfriend as well as a wife, that there was a woman spirit in the town, a woman in a red dress, who appeared and disappeared, without
reason or warning. Mary had also told her, somewhat imprecisely, of the astonishing things men and women got up to together and Perdita knew there were women who traded their bodies to men. She wished to see for herself, to stand beside Mary as they peeped at private moments, to learn truly about the lives that other people led. The isolation of her destroyed speech made Perdita aware of the larger isolation in her life; somehow she had not known or realised it before; somehow it had been simply the unexamined condition of things.

They drove first to the stores and the bakery, and then to the convent. Everywhere people turned to look – the English widow, driving a car, bringing her daughter to town; she was a novelty here, and a source of story. Perdita felt particularly conspicuous. She could not reply when addressed and so received pitying looks and insincere pats on the head. It seemed to her that everyone was sorry for her mother (they enquired about her health, made harmless small talk, avoiding mention of the death, as if Nicholas had never existed), but she had the impression they considered her an idiot.

‘Terrible business. Terrible,' they murmured in collusion.

More condescension awaited at the convent. Perdita was left alone in the foyer where she had first met Mary. A pop-eyed nun with a ruddy complexion gave her a glass of lime cordial, touched her hand lightly and slipped away – not even attempting conversation with the girl whom everyone knew would falter in reply. She was left sitting in a wooden chair so large that it hurt the backs of her bare legs, which dangled like bell ropes without touching the ground. Above her the old-fashioned crucifix still hung; Perdita craned her neck and saw how ugly it now looked. She hated its glossy wood and painted features, the stretched thin body, its ribs apparent, the ludicrous, unbelievable story.

Perdita remembered Mary's body, taller than she, and how
she held her arms outstretched, proud of her hunting triumphs, how she slept with her knees drawn up, folded into her own dreaming. It was in this room that Mary had first held her hand. Here, where brazen light showed up the emptiness to things, the apathetic God, the way lives fell apart, the destructive possibilities of any love.

Stella returned with Sister Immaculata and said that there was no further news of Mary but what they had already gleaned. Sister Immaculata stretched forward and took Perdita's chin with one hand. With the other she prised and stretched back the top and lower lids of the eye that had once been infected.

‘Fully healed,' she declared.

The nun released Perdita's face. Adults had such preemption, took such liberties. Perdita hated the way a hand could reach forward and claim the face; how her mother spat on a handkerchief then held her head tilted and wiped her face clean, dabbing roughly, imperatively. How adults, without asking, made all the decisions. How they claimed to possess all the
big questions
. She was miserable, sullen. Perhaps now, with her newly ruined speech, she would always be someone, a kind of object, whose face was grabbed, who was assumed to have nothing important to say.

Perdita and Stella drove back to the shack in silence, with the finches chirping in the back seat and Mussolini's fat head shuddering between them. Perdita remembered for no reason the stray word
duomo
. Without a clue what it meant, she stored it away in herself, like a buried treasure, its echoic deep sound and its unknown meaning.

At 8 a.m. on 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. The newspaper carried a spectacular photograph: the sinking of the USS
Arizona
. Direct hits had sparked its magazine, and the ship exploded in a fireball and sank in five minutes, taking 1300 lives down through a bubbling cauldron of oil. In the photograph the
Arizona
was a ship shape tilted heavenward, covered by smoke and flames. Perdita scanned closely to see the bodies floating in the water, but found none; the image was taken from too far away, from on board, the caption said, the USS
Solace
. It was grainy and imprecise, as befits the dissolving of lives, but too impressively disastrous not to print in the daily paper. There must be many war photographs like this, she thought, too big in scale to include the suffering human, the little man, savagely anointed, his skin blistered with burns, flailing in choppy waters, on the point of drowning. Life was like that. Some deaths were witnessed, some were not; some sobbing victim was going unnoticed, some murdered man fell forward, crumpling onto the floor in an opulent pool of blood, and no one could say what had really happened. This oppressive understanding inhabited Perdita for years; she carried it inside her chest like a brick. The word
Arizona
settled alongside
Kiev
. You could name things, at least. In the absence of a testimonial face, there might at least be a category.

To fill what was missing, or to control her bleak sense of intolerable alteration, Perdita took hours-long excursions with Horatio. He was an easy companion; his leaping, sniffing doggy life was a relief from her mother's immobility, gloomy and loquacious. She liked the way he led her with his nose down and his ears pricked and alert, the way his route was never straight but zigzagged by nimble, sudden choices of direction. He was alert to other creatures and driven by inner forces that knew the world in minute and purposeful ways. Every now and then he chased a lizard, leaving her behind, or took off, racing, towards some invisible attraction; but he always returned and he always led her home.

Without Mary there was less of the world to divine. Perdita dawdled and traipsed as Horatio skipped and rushed; she was walking out her grief for her lost friend and feeling sorry for herself. She wanted above all to kill a snake, not one in the house, which was easy and visible, but to find one here, to drag it from its hiding place, break its back with a flick and crush its head against a rock, just as Mary had done. Though she searched, she found nothing. She was just a stuttering girl in a faded cotton frock, a girl with plaits and with too much time on her hands. She noticed that the world, not just her knowledge, was turning to stone. There was a mica sky and a marble hardness to things; mammal becoming mineral, a weight pressing down. The world was transforming.

There are forms of loneliness children endure that adults have no inkling of: stern seclusions, lives of quiet desperation. Now that her childhood was a spoiled thing, compounded by an inefficient tongue and garbled speech, Perdita entered the dreary territory of the truly alone. She found one of the old boabs that had a hollow bottle belly and squeezed herself inside, pleased to be enclosed, imagining for a moment that she might stay there, never to be found, never-ever, never-ever. She
would become as skinny as Christ and simply fade away, a relic of herself, stretched and holy. In the tree belly there was a stench of wood-rot and old animal droppings; it was not the fading haven she had imagined. In such darkness she would be obliged to confront her own thoughts, to remember and to feel again all that had happened. Perdita squeezed out of the trunk, maturely extracting herself from the fantasies of self-annihilation that even young children may entertain. Horatio bounded towards her with excitement, his sticky mouth wide open, his thin tail waving, as if she had just performed a trick or invented a new game. She clasped him with both hands and pressed her face against his fur.

As she approached her home, returning one afternoon from her exhausting wandering, Perdita heard Stella's voice engaged in recitation. In town she had overheard ‘crazy Mrs Keene' and immediately knew that this was so; someone outside was required to name it and the name had been casually flung as they left the bakers, not to hurt but simply to identify: ‘That's crazy Mrs Keene, the one whose hubby got it in the neck, you know, out bush.' It was like a brain-wave sparking – yes, it was true. Even isolated as she was, with few acquaintances, Perdita knew that other mothers did not behave like this, seething with words from four centuries ago.

Perdita had not heard this one before – a sonnet, apparently – but knew that Stella's madness had method in it. She almost pitied her expertise with such descriptive resources. Stella was doomed, she realised, to emotional aggrandisement and the
lunatic exaggeration of the otherwise everyday. Her redescription of life in Shakespearean terms meant that she was always strung in a poignant register; she was always unbearably, ponderously,
poetic
. When Perdita opened the screen door, she saw her mother staring at the bamboo cage, purchased in town less than two weeks ago, which she had removed from its hanging hook and placed on the table. In the cage was a tiger snake, nestled in a coil. It had within its long yellowish body two quivering lumps – the twin finches digesting – and these prevented it moving back between the bars through which it had come. Stella looked up and fell silent as Perdita entered the shack. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying. She might have been a child, with this posture of brooding disappointment over the loss of pets.

‘Can you do something about this?' she asked in a low voice.

Perdita had just turned eleven, but felt she was being addressed as an adult. She paused, considering. Then she went to her father's meagre toolbox and fetched a hammer. When she slid open the door to the cage the snake cautiously poked its head out, and she crushed it, then and there, on the kitchen table, with not one, but three, heavily pounding blows. The thin skull was flattened, the inner exposed.

‘Christ,' said Stella. She grimaced at the mess and leaned closer as if to check that the snake was really dead. ‘Well done …'

It was not a hunt, or the congratulations of a whole community who would roast the snake over the coals of a slow-burning fire; it was not Mary, seeing how brave and grown-up she had become; but it was her mother, moved by odd circumstance to offer two spontaneous words of praise. Perdita felt an unaccustomed pride. If she had been sure of her voice she would have said something in response, but deciding it was best not to disturb the moment with a possible stutter, she simply smiled at her mother and removed the battered snake,
its head no more now than wet bloody mush. She flung it wastefully into the bush, for the ants and crows, whipping it upwards through the sky as a tennis player might serve.

Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Stella decided, along with other families, that they would move down south, to Perth. Broome was emptying out; Japanese families were being relocated for internment; even Sis and her children, Perdita discovered, had been arrested and sent away, as if being the family of a Japanese pearl diver somehow threatened national security. Fear includes these churlish and punitive measures. It creates internal enemies, monstrous figures in newspapers. Aboriginal families were sent to outstations and missions; the north-west was depopulated in anticipation of an invasion. Word was that the Government was prepared to lose the north to the Japanese, in order properly to defend the south.

It was a period of interregnum, rumour, alarmist speculation and downright lies. Stella became agitated, speaking almost daily of the ‘Nips' or the ‘Japs' and their gruesome natures. She no longer attended to her map of Europe, but became increasingly preoccupied with the arrows in the newspaper that showed the projected route of the Japanese as they spread their Rising Suns across the northern half of Australia.

A letter from Margaret arrived – belatedly – to tell of her family's deaths long, long ago in December 1940. Stella stood holding the letter with shaking hands, remembering not her father and mother, not her sister Iris, but old Mrs Whiticombe, her hands like sticks, her voice expiring, her skull pushing through transparent skin as her soul stretched to leave. She sighed, crumpled the letter, and flung it aside.

When Perdita retrieved it later on, smoothing open the
paper to find Margaret's words, she realised only in a formless way that she had lost her grandparents and an aunt. That her mother was orphaned.

She should have understood by then the signs of her mother's decline: a kind of dithering incomprehension, neglect of her own cleanliness, paranoia, slowed movement. But turmoil was general; there was packing to do, arrangements to be made. Mrs Trevor, seeing, perhaps, Stella's precarious condition, enlisted her station staff to assist them; and she and Billy would travel with them first to Broome, then on the state ship assigned to evacuees. The whole world was moving; why not they? In the heaving of populations, in the confiscation of homes, this relocation of two families was a minor thing.

When Singapore fell, in February 1942, the proposed shift gained a sudden sense of urgency. Mr Trevor, who was either oblivious to Stella's vulnerability or wanted with crude malice simply to shock, regaled her with tales of horrible tortures, beheadings in the street and the rape of English women. He would not be travelling with them; he had chosen to stay and Defend the Nation – another man, Perdita realised later, who did not or could not enlist, but wanted nevertheless to prove his own life worthwhile.

Stella listened transfixed to Mr Trevor's stories. There had been such torpor in the month since Nicholas's death and Mary's departure; now, all of a sudden, there was busyness and organisation and the world war impinging. Ragged warnings flew everywhere, tearing the sky. Disturbance registered on the skin, and in the tone of rackety voices.

Perdita was thrilled by the prospect of a move to the city; she would visit Mary, ride on a bus and finally, like other girls her age, go to school. Yet she imagined her destination with almost farcical error. Since her vision was derived from a collage of images, mostly nineteenth-century etchings, in her parents'
books, she believed The City to be stony, monumental and grand, a place of avenues, statues and spouting fountains, a place dignified, wealthy, bathed in leaden light. But when at last she saw Perth she burst into tears: it was such a disappointment. There were trams in the streets and some imposing hotels, but overall it was boring and unmonumental.

For now, however, there was this new upheaval. Billy was enjoined to help with the packing of books and he proved a willing worker and even-tempered company. It was clear to Perdita that he enjoyed piling the books, binding same-sized volumes with lengths of string, arranging them geometrically in old tea-chests lined with tea-scented tinfoil. Perdita saw the world that she had known all her life disassemble; the book stacks gradually diminished, the furniture, spare as it was, disappeared in one day, the kitchen items, the worn linen, these were all packed away quickly. This was not a home that had ever been decorated or cared for. Utility had governed its furnishings and now made for a swift disposal. When it came to clothes, Stella insisted they should take with them only what fitted into two old suitcases – leather with straps, one of them monogrammed ‘NK' – that she and Nicholas had brought with them, in another time, another time now unimaginable, all the way from England.

Perdita saw the initials as an obscure accusation. She could not look at ‘NK'. She could not bear it, somehow. She could not contemplate what was left from what had been a living person.