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meant Grace must have been able to see into the house. She might have crouched right here at this spot and peered in. What would she have seen? Polly followed the wall, heedless of being seen, not as if anyone would think she was a burglar, she giggled at the thought and at her boldness.
    She ran a hand lightly along the brick as she walked in its constructed shadow. Then it was sun rays at their last low angle as she came around the corner; and all was beautiful reds and pinks of backlit and underlighted cloud formation, and she had to shield her eyes until adjustment came. Sandpaper to the running fingers’ touch she put end to that before her fingers bled. The wall stretched out for some considerable distance so it was some house in there. Or grounds at least. She moved out from the wall until she could see the roof of the house, grey it was, they looked like stone rectangles. Turning, she could see the tree, less what the wall cut off, and she tried to pick what branch it might have been, not the picture itself, of (my) her sis Grace hanging; that had been imagined and come forth in dreams, vomited out of her guts, her heart, a hundred times over. It remained a vivid, stark picture, but one with less meaning than what had brought it about. In her more sensible sixteenth year, Polly Heke thought of the death as the final miserable moments lasting however briefly long they did. But the life before it, leading up to it, as a never-ending — not nightmare, it was worse than that — as an endless lying out in this paddock, middle of bitterly cold, raining winter night with not even stars for comfort. That’s what Grace Heke must have felt life was like. (And you — youuu —) Polly suddenly trembling in her anger (you didn’t even think about what she was going through) as she thought of her father, all six foot three inches of him, of old measurement since he was from that era, of raping fatherhood.
    At the next corner there was a long driveway, which took some working out and only from the line of trees and deduction and the break in the wall — when she got the courage to step out to get view of it — and open iron gates. Now she definitely was a trespasser, as well feeling suddenly like the girl Charlie Bennett’sinfluence and her mother’s good sense and love for the man had made her: sort of, well, a better class without being fancy-dancy about it, but not like what was behind that brick wall living in the grey-slated, white house she could see a slice of through the wrought-iron gate. Charlie Bennett’s class was lower than that and Polly Heke was glad it was. (Happy as I am.) But I’m no Pine Block girl out here in a lost state, a wretched state, about to end her life for reasons unknown on the property of someone she neither knew nor was remotely like, no. I’m not here to commit suicide, I just want to understand, to put my mind at rest; and if they come out and ask me what I’m doing, I won’t be no Pine Block bitch with attitude and thieving intentions casing the place, tell them I was just looking, that’s all. Or just passing, even if on their land.
    She was just Polly Heke of Western College with a mother and an adoptive father expecting, not hoping, more of her than what her mother in her earlier union had ever imagined; why, there had been talk of university. An otherwise impossible thought if it wasn’t for the fact that Boogie was at one right now, as this sister baulked at several moments from the last of following up on their sister Grace’s last, very last, moments. Old enough now to do this. But not quite ready to take it further.
    She turned and walked off into the dusk, the colours all bled down into the horizon, the night just starting with that funny quiet, of the mothers cooking their kids’ tea and (too) many of ’em wondering what the night was gonna bring; Jake Heke wasn’t the only one of his type round these parts, the property behind her excepted. A sister wondering,