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ignore him, but sensed his persistent witness and censure; he felt a kind of violence towards Billy that he could imagine giving in to. He would throttle the boy if he could, seize him by the neck, fiercely crush the pink cord of his little-boy breath, and close everlastingly those insolent, staring, grey eyes. Only later did he learn that Billy was a deaf mute. If he had seen anything, well, he couldn’t say. He was, Nicholas thought, more creature than boy, rightly contemptible.
    When Stella returned from hospital, Nicholas moved back to the shack with his wife and their baby. They were an insecure family. Stella was quieter, still detached, but also given to barbed observation and general unhappiness. Her baby was a duty, her husband a fate to be suffered. Aboriginal women took Perdita into care for hours and Stella barely noticed her daughter’s absence.
    Nicholas decided he would make the best of things andbecome a famous anthropologist. He would crack open the code of primitive humanity, return to Cambridge triumphant, drink sherry with the dons, wear a long cardinal gown with an ermine trim, receive a silver badge on his chest, rosette-shaped, from the King, and an accolade detailing his discoveries, in full, in the Sunday Times .
    He would write something incomparably difficult, fuelled with academic afflatus and magnificent prose. He wrote first to a bookshop in Sydney, ordering a crate of miscellaneous books, and began sketching out his own key to all mythologies, a work of dilatory, exalted oddity that he would never finish.
    The books from Sydney, as it happened, saved Nicholas and Stella, and eventually their daughter would also discover them. Derangement of many forms finds its home within books. Stella was still self-consolingly reciting Shakespeare, especially the tragedies, and Nicholas, driven by the power of his compulsion to fame, was absent more often, away somewhere in his ‘field’. But when they came together, appalled to be in each other’s unmediated company, they could retreat, singly and sequestered, each into his or her own reading.
    The books were stacked high against the walls, teetering in Babel piles. Nicholas never bothered to construct a bookshelf – he had not a handyman bone in his body – he simply leaned his books, as they accumulated, in random towers, never ordering or straightening, or even disposing according to subject. This is my memory of the furniture of our home. These books swelled in the moist heat and were prey to mice and to silverfish; an unlettering occurred, in titles, in spines. In some books only certain letters disappeared, as if an intelligent bug had taken offence at particular words; in others it was the edges of the pages that were consumed, so that they were lacy and partial, and left one to guess the lost sentence beginning every verso and the chewed sentence ending every recto. Snakes,attracted by the mice, liked to nest between the columns; we became accustomed to seeing an uncoiling as we dislodged a book from the back of the stacks. Stella was at first frightened, but became in the end so blasé about the supernumerous snakes that she kept a shovel nearby, so that she could flick them out the door as she was seeking her text. Sometimes, just out of annoyance, she cut them in two with the blade, disposing of them in a swift, elbow-jabbing, downward chop. It was a singular pleasure, she said, to see their writhing mad deaths.
    By the time I was ten, when I began seriously to read – so that silent words, not utterance, would be my form of expression – half the front room was crowded by books. My narrow canvas stretcher was in the same room, against the side wall. I would fall asleep watching my parents read at the kitchen table, and if I woke in the night I found myself in this peculiar, librarian city, the massive architectonics of other people’s words. Terraces, ziggurats, prominences and voids. In the darkness the