Julie looked up towards the peak of her mothers insurmountable height and wondered what was wrong with her. Are adults blind or dumb, ignorant or indifferent? Of course, the thought did not occur to her in exactly those words, well, they were not words at all, more like a suspicion that cannot properly or explicitly take root in your consciousness. She did not want her mother to be stupid or retarded. She could not conceive of this possibility. Her mother was a genius, even if she did stay at home all day crying over the washing machine, her companion and sympathiser, a cold metal shoulder to lean on. Julie did not understand why it was that her mother cried at times or why she could not see the wind.
“Can’t you hear it?”
“Of course I can hear it Julie, I just can’t see it. Nobody can see the wind. Its invisible, like ghosts and god.”
And so started Julie’s constriction of things. The wind could not be seen, but ghosts and god exist. Julie felt alone for the first time because her sight did not correspond to another’s. She had to decide whether it was her or her mother who was crazy. Her mother was infallible; obviously the crazy one was she.
They moved on, further towards the Anzac war memorial. Julie realized how slim Hide park actually was. You could see right across from Elizabeth street to Macquary Street. It was nothing more than a landscaped medium strip, a semi colon in the punctuation of metropolis. There was no where for a child to hide, nowhere for her imagination to run to. She could not imagine a dragon or a dark knight chasing her through the sunlight and almost naked readers that littered the manicured grass. Imagination seemed ridicules in such a place, not like the sweeping current that overtook her when her parents took her down to Stanwell Park and she played in the valleys ravine and creek.
The memorial looked as if it was an afterthought. It looked like its meaning, an afterthought to war, an afterthought to the dead. She would often wonder later on in life, remembering her visit, whether it would not be better to think of human life and its loss before war rather than after it. The memorial is a testament to futility, to how small things seem when they sprout from death, how tombstones seem so much smaller than the existences we daintily mark in stone.
I am not a precocious child. I am an adult in a child’s body. My growth was not retarded, it was not some developmental freak occurrence. My mind has developed too quickly and this is not to say that I am a gifted child, I have no gift. Mathematics, electronics and mechanics escape me. I blunder when I put bread in the toaster and my grammar is sometimes imperfect. I am an adult with all adult imperfections and limitations. I just happen to be ten years of age.
I find that it is always to early or to late to go to sleep or to wake up. This leaves me constantly indecisive. My mother looks at me strangely when she comes into the living room, sleep riddled and bladder pressed, at three in the morning only to find me watching television. I often have to change the channel quickly, guiltily, so she does not catch me watching the adult movies. I find them slightly ridiculous, slightly arousing and slightly disturbing because there is no concordance between the mature, greedily salivating genitals of those, sometimes softly, sometimes violently, moaning women on the television screen. I look at older boys in a way that bewilders them, leaving them blushed and pavement obsessed. They always look as if they have done something mortally wrong. I want to assuage their guilt by a telepathic “I Want you. It’s alright, I’m old enough even though I don’t appear to be”, but they must never receive my psychic Morse code because I never receive a similar response.
It appears that I have become preoccupied with sex six years ahead of time, and this could be the reason that I cannot find a convenient time to sleep. Like I said it’s either too early or two late. When the sun is coming up and the day has started without us, it would seem such a terrible waste to lay one’s head on a pillow and dream of nighttime things, and when the night becomes a time of comfortable isolation, when all the windows in our neighbourhood are dark and cats cross roads without a care in the world, it would seem a shame to spare oneself the vast moments of peace that comes with other’s silence.