He had left no sign.
She told no one, and the day went on as if nothing had occurred. It was organised so tightly, and they moved through it at such a keen pace, that it was difficult to let any new thing in to find a place there: doing mental sums as fast as you could and then sitting up very straight when you had the answer, with your hands on your head and your elbows pushed back — straining, but not too obviously, to be called; vaulting the horse with your chin up and your eyes straight ahead as each of the others, one, two, three, four, went off before you, blonde, black or brown ponytails swishing; copying, but fast, before the blackboard was turned over, the chief products of Western Australia; all this kept your head filled with so many immediacies that there was no time for daydreaming, and no corner, with so much that was public and organised, in which anything unusual could lurk. Even when they wrote a composition and had to use their imagination the lines were strictly drawn. Miss Wilson wrote the opening paragraph on the blackboard. It was an old house on Dartmoor, in England, deep in fog, and they went on from there, filling the house with darkness and the sound of creaking doors, that might be ghosts but would more likely turn out to be tramps or stray dogs that left all mysteries explained in a last paragraph, which they were required to label conclusion.
Faced with the open invitation to confess a mystery, she might have let the boy in. But he didn't seem to fit. He was too tall, too ungainly, too much part, in his desert boots and T-shirt, of the sprawling sub-tropical town that began at the walls of their park, to enter the realms of the imagination as Miss Wilson defined it or to find himself on Dartmoor, in England. But she did think of him briefly. She allowed him to approach out of the fog and come up, in his floppy desert boots, to the door of that deserted cottage. Looking vaguely scared, he stood at the threshold, his whole body tense with what might now be required of him. Then she relented and let him off. She let him move away from his meeting with the perfectly conventional spirit she now introduced, who had once, in the olden days, been a witch whom the village people had drowned (though she wasn't really a witch at all, just a crazy old woman) in a greasy millpond, along with her cat called Lock.
There was an occasion during prep when she considered telling her best friend of the moment, Adele Morgan, who slept in another dormitory; was on the very point of it; but didn't. She had the odd sense that she would not be believed. There was no detail she could produce that would be at all convincing, and she was too matter of fact, had too clear a sense of the real and too high a regard for the truth, to invent one. She would wait till such a detail presented itself.
Besides, she had already anticipated the questions Adele would ask and they were not interesting. “Did he do anything? Weren't you scared?”
No, he did nothing at all. He was just there. And she hadn't been scared because there was nothing to be scared of. He was just an ordinary boy with red hair. Very tall when he stood up, and very shy. When she first saw him he had been sitting on the floor with one bare knee drawn up so that he could tie his shoelace (one was tied already, the other, drawn taut, was still, after the first simple knot, looped over his forefinger) and she had been reminded of how her younger brother, Jack, had learned to tie laces by practising it over and over, all one morning, on the verandah steps. The boy had had that same look of anxious concentration. It was perhaps his coming to her thus out of her own past that made her believe at first that she was still asleep in her bed and dreaming. That is why she had turned away a moment to look at her cool face in the mirror, to see that her eyes were open, and to drink. When she turned back he had got to his feet and was staring.
A tall boy, carrot-haired and unexplained; but he didn't scare her any more than if she had dreamed him. At that odd hour, and in the lingering heaviness of sleep, he seemed like a continuation rather than an interruption of her dreams; as if she had first dreamed him and then found him there. What was there to explain?
Of course his presence wasn't related to her daytime life, to the world of corridors and stairs and stairwells and rooms where the blackboards were filled, even in darkness, with chalked up facts. But then neither were her dreams. These hours that were for sleep belonged to nowhere. They were outside the rules. No bells governed them, they were free. She had dreamed the strangest things, and had sometimes been very frightened indeed. Once she had dreamed of being on a picnic with her family when a ship rode up the beach that had no sail. The sailors, who were very ragged and foreign-looking, begged for some garment they could rig up to sail home and she had offered her dress, a bright yellow one. They had fixed it to the mast and sailed right out of view on the still moonlight, out of sight of her parents and her two brothers, while she, in one of those strange dreamworld experiences of being quite palpably in two places at once, stood both at the water's edge watching and at the rails of the ship, while the yellow dress (which had not been hers in fact but her cousin Millie's) stood out stiffly in the breeze.
Compared with that, an unexplained but entirely ordinary boy with red hair wasn't extraordinary at all. He had just gulped and “Hullo.” But when she stood at the windowsill and watched him, where he was half-hidden below the Chinese elm, he had looked, she thought, like a painting. She saw him in a field struck by the wind, all agitated gold. His long legs, bare, his arms long and hanging at his side, his face tilted towards her, had made him at that moment not “too tall” as she had first thought but like someone drawn out, drawn upwards with the strain of being where he was, or who he was, as in one of the swirly paintings in the school corridor. It was the heightened reality of him that attracted her. As if he belonged to a world with other rules of perspective, or to another order of beings, and had come to induct her into other possibilities than she had so far discovered at home or at school, to reveal to her how she might cross into the further reaches of herself. Until he came into her life she had not known how suffocated she felt here, where every moment of the day was for something and had to be filled; or how it frightened her that the whole of life might be like this, that those corridors where you must never run, and stairs you went down only on the left, and quietly, might lead to places where the rules that applied were different only in detail, not in kind, and were invisible to her only because no one had ever pointed them out (that was for later, as Miss Ivers said of so many things) or given them names.
So she kept his secret because it was her own, and knew he would come again. She did not even bother to wait for him, since she knew she had only to fall asleep and he would be there; and when he was there she would immediately be awake.
3
Standing again,boots in hand, at the washroom door, he recognised in the scene some benevolence of nature that was reserved only for him. He had not expected it, but there it was. The world often surprised him like this. Behind him the raised window was a funnel for moonlight and the gathered noises of the garden, which he found comforting: soft wing-beats that might be an owl or a flying fox, the shifting of leaves, a stirring of furred creatures hunting. Beyond that, the wall he had come over; which formed in his mind a barrier he had passed between the world outside, that still made itself heard in the distant sound of a car (a Falcon, he guessed, changing gears as it turned uphill), the self they knew from the overalls his mother washed and the under-things she laid out for him, and this other self standing in socks and shorts at the threshold of a different world entirely, a strange still world of children sleeping in rows under bluish sheets, which belonged to the night, to this place only, and was female.