reports as to the sharpness of the girl’s tongue and the readiness of her fists); thus far, however, I have seen no evidence of her rumoured physicality, nor has she uttered more than five words, sharp or otherwise, in my hearing. Disobedient, she is certainly; ill mannered, there is no doubt; and yet somehow, in one of the inexplicable kinks of human personality, the child is oddly likable. She draws me to her; even when she is doing nothing more than sitting on the deck and watching the passing sea; it is not mere physical beauty, although there is undoubtedly much that is pleasing in her dark fea- tures—it is an aspect of herself that comes from deep within and communicates itself quite unwittingly so that one cannot help but watch.
I should add that there is an uncanny quiet about her. She chooses, when other children might be running and larking about the decks, to hide herself away and sit almost entirely still. It is an unnatural stillness, and one for which I had not been prepared.
Apparently Vivien Longmeyer continued to intrigue Katy Ellis, for along with further comments about the journey and notes for lesson plans she intended to use when she arrived in England, the journal entries over the next few weeks contained similar reports. Katy Ellis watched Vivien from a distance, interacting only insofar as it was necessary for the two of them in their shared travels, until finally, in an entry dated July 5th, 1929 and titled ‘Week Seven’, there appeared to come a breakthrough.
It was hot this morning, and a mild breeze blew from the north. We were sitting together on the front deck after break-fast when a most peculiar thing happened. I told Vivien to go back to the cabin and fetch her exercise book so that we might run through some lessons— I’d promised her aunt before we left, that Vivien’s lessons would not be neglected while we were on the seas (she fears, I think, that if the girl’s intellect is deemed unsatisfactory by the English uncle, she will be sent straight back to Australia). Our lessons are an interesting charade and always the same: I draw and point to the book, explaining various principles until my brain aches with the eternal quest for clarity of explanation; and Vivien stares with blank boredom at the fruits of my labours.
Still, I made a promise and so I persist. This morning, not for the first time, Vivien failed to do as I’d asked. She didn’t so much as deign to meet my eyes, and I was forced to repeat myself, not twice but thrice, and in increasingly stern tones. Still the child ignored me, until finally (the urge to tears pressing in my throat), I begged to know why she so often behaves as if she cannot hear me.
Perhaps my loss of control moved the child, for she sighed then, and told me the reason. She looked me in the eye and explained that seeing as I was merely a part of her dream, a figment of her own imagination, she didn’t see any point in listening unless the subject of my ‘chatter’ (her word) was of interest.
Another child might have been suspected of cheek and clipped about the ears for giving such response; but Vivien is not another child. For one thing, she does not lie—her aunt, for all her eager criticism of the child, conceded I would never hear an untruth from the girl’s mouth (‘Frank to the point of rudeness, that one’)—and so I was intrigued. I tried to keep my voice steady, asking as nonchalantly as if I were enquiring the time of day, what she meant by saying I was part of a dream. She blinked those wide brown eyes and said: ‘I fell asleep beside the creek back home and I haven’t woken up yet.’ Everything that had happened since, she told me—the news of her family’s motorcar accident, her removal like an unwanted package to England, this long sea voyage with only a teacher for company—was nothing more than a great big bad dream.
I asked her why she didn’t wake up, how it was possible that someone could sleep for such a very long time, and she responded it was bush magic. That she’d fallen asleep beneath some ferns on the edge of the enchanted creek (the one with the little lights, she said, and the tunnel that leads through a great engine room, right to the