Dream 6/8
India. I can’t remember most of it. Towards the end: my satin ballet flats are getting ruined as I step on the mudsunken milk-crates that make up the boardwalk, as a local geisha passes me with her cameramen or admirers, on my way to the private hotel shopping centre with its spa smell. I’m in a ball gown – it’s not quite clear to me why I’m dressed like this. There I obtain sneakers so I can brave the polluted and diseased ground again, though I fear my hem is getting wet, and outside again I have lost Kit. I holler, holler then I fin her and she has come across Janine, they are coming across the wet-sewrage ground which is seeping and squelching, yet just over there utterly careless the rugby boys are playing football. Janine’s not-exactly-happy-to-see-you eyes make me extra self-conscious.

Vivian answers the door—a treelined ashfield-like suburb located where leichhardt is—and she looks overgrown, broad, tall, her head relatively small, long and curvy and heavy like someone drawn by dobell. and she holds a mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. and when I see her I feel this filial rush and go forward to kiss her but she draws back subtly so I know it isn’t right. And there’s Philip standing by in the back right and I make to go to him to, but I realise, no, no.
Seated at the Nicholas Datner table, Adriana (I think, or is it Isabella, or another?) comes over all grown up. Yes, grown up: she is about seven foot tall and has a cool uni-savvy look. I am seated and she stands over me and as I ask the routine questions during the conversation she starts prodding at my underarm with a rubber billiard cue but we keep talking while this goes on. I feel nervous.
But out the back, they have a peninsula, a long thin outcrop of cliffy rock that juts out into the ocean, grassy green, and a surprising number of people have flocked here for the activity now that the annual winds have come: we are all going to get on the horses and ride them as fast as we possible can off the cliff so we take flight in the storm, and now I’m with Lucas and Odette, and Rhonda’s about somewhere, and others are taking off, buffeted, ahead, and I am on my brown horse and I ride fast as I can fast, into the hard grey waves of wind and I’m swept up and Odette is with me I think or is it Kit and for two seconds, for a moment, we are flying but flying sideways for the winds are unexpectedly strong, it’s dangerous, we’re plummeting crashed down into the churned sea, swirling. And I think, *Lucas is gone.* And Odette and I are ok, and Rhonda is straggling out of the sea, but we think Lucas has drowned, but then it washes in: a car washes up on the beach and Lucas is inside and he opens the door in the rough shallows and gets out and tells us calmly that when he was caught underwater he found an old wrecked car on the sea floor and had the sense to get in so he could breathe the air inside to keep him alive until the car washed up.
The car was silver and quite new.