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with fatigue and later it must have been pain, for she had cancer and sat on alone in the night by the small fire in the scullery poulticing herself with hot rags, and it seemed to Weekly she could hear Aunt Heppie wincing quietly to herself when everyone else in the world was fast asleep. It was soon after her death that her father received the fatal kick from the dray horse.
    No amount of wishing could bring this childhood and its sense of comfort back, so Weekly dried her eyes and stood waiting hopefully. A long black hearse drawn by four horses came in a slow cloud of red dust. The manes and tails of the horses were tightly plaited with black braid, fine shudders rippled, one after the other, through their smooth well-cared for sides as they tried to rid themselves of flies. A second cart rumbled by following the hearse; a third cart stopped.
    â€˜Dear child come up beside me,’ an elderly woman so flamboyantly dressed that she seemed quite out of place at a funeral helped her into the cart. She peered closely as if she could hardly see.
    â€˜Poor dear child!’ And as she drew Weekly to her shesaid, ‘There! Sit close, I’m all bones, but sit close or else you might fall. The road is rough.’
    The procession of carts with the black horses turned into a little, lonely cemetery of the kind that were scattered all over the place then. The old graves were almost hidden by wild oats. The cemetery was fringed with long-leaved peppermint and trailing eucalyptus. And the yellow-flowered acacias and other flowering trees made curtains between the graves. And among the headstones and crosses, all over the mounds, tiny four-o’clocks flowered.
    A heap of earth startled Weekly and beside the heap was a deep hole with pieces of wood laid across it. High above, white clouds flocked without concern across a clear blue sky. Looking up it was as if she saw the sky and the freedom of it for the first time in her life.
    â€˜Poor dear child!’ the old woman dressed in black and orange feathers guided her towards the grave, pressing her bony fingers into her shoulders. She had tried to get a lift to run away from the Remand and was at someone’s funeral. Whatever could she do now?
    â€˜Your mother was a lovely person,’ the old lady whispered and Weekly woke up howling aloud and was sick in the long dry grasses at the edge of the track. She had fallen asleep. No one had come by to give her a lift. It was only a dream and her mother was not dead, only ingaol. She ran all the way back to the Remand home and was inside the fence in time for the greasy food at tea time.
    Now because she was sleeping badly these memories came back to her as vividly as if she was looking at an old photograph album and seeing pictures of the places and of the people.
    Nothing had come along the track to take her anywhere.

Four
    Carefully Weekly moved her thin old body under the bedclothes. She did not want to smother the kitten. She would have to pull herself out of sleep, which had come too late, and get up and sweep and then go off to work, whether she wanted to or not. She must work and get paid. She wanted the money to add that day to the money she had worked for the day before. She rested a little while longer, lingering on the shiny slopes of her money mountain, seeing all that the money, in its power, promised her.
    The morning sky filling the narrow window was changing. A light, as if from pearls, came into the ugly room. Crazy was busy in a corner with the kittens; the firstand largest one, still neglected, cried from the end of the bed. Stiffly Weekly got up from the bed and, taking the kitten in her large rough hands, she hobbled across the linoleum on her bare heels and gently put the kitten with the rest of Crazy’s family. But she might have saved herself the trouble for, while she sat taking up the space on the side of the bed trying to draw on her stockings, Crazy stood patiently with the kitten in her