someone else, a woman who was capable of having those thoughts and doing those things.
Smoke curled up like long planed wood shavings; the air became sweet and particulate. She sprinkled the little bits of torn photograph onto the fire and they burned a cold greeny blue. While everything disappeared she swept the early autumn leaves into a pile. Please list any membership you have had with any political, social, fraternal or religious organisation or private club including any type of tax-exempt organisation over the past ten years. Please include dates of membership and any positions you may have held with the organisation. What would Daniel look like now, nearly ten years on, how much had he changed? Would the decade that had made her a woman have made him a man? On the other side of the high, vine-covered fence two of her neighbours stopped and talked invisibly about the cost of keeping their dogs.
‘Is that you, Evelyn?’ one of them called. ‘Having an early bonfire?’
‘Just making my spells.’
‘Should we be worried?’
‘Should Nathan be worried?’
‘Ha ha,’ she called back. ‘Watch out.’
Another neighbour, after years off the cigarettes, had lately started smoking again, standing on his front step after dinner because he wasn’t meant to do it in the house. Eve got it now. A need could resurface. Cinders rose from the small fire in a cloud, catching in the rough, unsanded wood-grain of the fence. While the handwriting burned Evelyn went into the house to find the questionnaire. A gust of wind blew ash across the patio in front of her. She came back and added the questionnaire to the flames, watching it scroll and brown at the edges, its thick-paged whiteness threatening to smother the fire altogether. She imagined time reversing, smoke sucked down from where it clung to the vine leaves into the burning photograph. Nathan, she thought. Nathan cares.
Tell us about your political philosophy. There are different groups of Liberals, for example, Progressive Liberal, Socialist Liberal, Free Market Liberal. Evelyn made Louisa’s supper, the stir-fried rice dish that was fun to do because it was so occupying, chopping the onion and garlic and celery and mushrooms and peppers, and because of the challenge of getting Louisa to eat it. Evelyn was picking grains of rice out from between the floorboards beneath the table all night but she didn’t mind. She bathed Lou and combed her hair, checking for head lice because so many of the school parents couldn’t be bothered, or were too busy working, to do it. At first she had felt horror on seeing the clinging white eggs in the fine web of Louisa’s hair, the black shadows crawling along her scalp. And now head lice were normal, part of life.
When Lou was in her pyjamas Evelyn read her a story, supervised brushing her teeth and took her to bed, where she listened to what her daughter had to say, finally, about the day, able to reveal her fights and victories now that she was cosily tucked up and it was all nearly over. In this way the hours between five and seven disappeared magically into the child’s existence, and Evelyn was able to lose herself, just as in those preschool years of newsprint and glue for papier mâché and rolling sheets of beeswax into candles and cutting out strings of paper dolls, which were meant to be identical but the ones at the back of the folded paper, where the scissor blades had further to reach, were always a little bit fuzzy around the edges. These years in the house had erased something, too, holes worn through the paper with all that rubbing. She emerged into the hallway and blinked in the hollow light.
Small groups of parents huddled in conversation across the quad. A woman Eve had fought with at the quiz-night fundraiser a week earlier was holding Tania hostage. Grown-ups, hunched over the papers just like students, had scribbled furiously on the answer sheets in the school hall, and for a minute the scene could have been an examination room, all of them fifteen again, sitting their School C. ‘Name four famous Belgians,’ said the quizmaster, a local radio host with a voice that loved itself. After that there were gaps in her memory of the evening, leading up to the moment when the trestle tables were being folded away and the woman – Brenda – came over and started trying to be friendly. Everyone knew Brenda and one of the school dads,