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bothered Polly, too, was how could she be older than someone who was born before her? In her mind Grace was always older. She wasn’t the — the thing down there, height of Polly herself since she was tall like her father, beneath the weight of earth, the girl aged thirteen when she put herself to sleep, she was growing into a beautiful woman as her kid sister Polly hoped she in turn would grow into. Though in her heart of hearts, she knew shewas now older than the suspended forever-in-time sister; Grace was thirteen. She’d stopped existing at that age. But then she hadn’t: she existed in Polly’s mind, dwelled in her (virgin) womb, floated in the liquid (tears) of her (loving, sisterly) existence. She was a girl who’d put a rope around her (gracefully long and slender) neck, tied to a branch on a tree at the Trambert property (why the Trambert place?) and jumped. That’s what she was. Polly Heke, your big sister is a was.
    No! You’re not a was.
    She was not a photograph that looked natural because no one in the Heke house at that time had a camera and the ones Mum had had done were from the class photograph when Grace was in form 3, which the photographer separated out from the classmates (as if Grace was born to be alone even when she’d been in a group photograph ). She’d put aside her own suffering for as long as she could to give her younger siblings comfort, till that — Polly every time had to wipe at her eyes to stop the crying, six years this’d been burning and tearing at her, the more as she got older and began to contemplate the enormity of it — till that visit to Boogie in the rental car which she did remember, the car she did, the smell of newness and the luxury of the back seating, the visit that never happened. Poor Boogie waiting in a boys’ home, poor Mum’d saved and saved to hire the rental car, slaved to make a big feast of a picnic to eat with Boogie at his court-imposed Riverton residence, and they never got there. (We never got there.) Which she couldn’t remember. Only the terrible fuss next day of Grace being identified down at the hospital morgue. It was that night.
    So she wiped at her eyes, she was sick of crying, it didn’t change a thing, and she walked past the line of pine trees, avoiding Nig’s grave (one is more than enough, sorry, Nig) and got a recall that that day had been quite cool, though this day was warm, and there was wonderful mass singing. But she dismissed that, too, as meaningless after the event, blaming most people in her mind for allowing a girl’s life, her potential, to be self-extinguished like that. And she sat in the bus shelter and got thought of her father, a man in his forties without a car, and how life had not only left him behind but he probably also missed his share of buses, too, from being hungover. The black bastard. Dirty, raping, incestuous, drunken black bastard.
     
    T HIS IS WHERE she would have walked — or run. Polly Heke very much hoped her sister had run (swiftly) to her self-taken death. Though now it was three more streets wide with new urban development where in Grace’s day it had been a paddock. Their State house had backed onto it, Polly remembered that place more than anything, the two-storey grimness of it, the neighbour through the wall next door, the streets she couldn’t now imagine she had been born and raised in, not now they were in Charlie Bennett’s house (wonder when she’s gonna marry him?); it was scary coming back here like this, and confusing to start with because the new suburb stretched out hundreds of little boxes from their old place. Not that she was now living in ritzville, it was just a couple of steps up from this.
    The looks she got; though there was one girl who in the middle of about to say something nasty had suddenly recognised her (I recognised you, too, Lena) so put a hand to her mouth, mumbled Polly’s name and pulled her two girlfriends away. Polly thought she heard Lena say, leave