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After the meal, Stella began pouring herself more and more sweet sherry. Her hand grew trembly and her talk erratic. She decided that she would perform, as a Christmas treat, Act Five of
Othello
. Nicholas rolled his eyes to the ceiling, expressing his contempt for the performance before it commenced. He leaned back with his glass, disengaging.

Stella began at the point in the drama when Othello enters Desdemona's bedchamber. She had long ago told Perdita the details of the plot: the black Moor of Venice is enraged with jealousy, goaded by evil Iago to suspect his wife's infidelity. He smothers her (‘
Down, strumpet
'), discovers his error, then stabs himself dramatically. It had always seemed to Perdita a more
vicious version of
The Winter's Tale
, all waste and fury, all havoc and murderous idiocy, with no one saved. They were still seated at the table, the ruins of their meal uncleared before them, and Stella stood a few feet away reciting the bedchamber scene, modulating her voice between Desdemona and Othello (smothering her even before she can pray!). When she was Othello she wound the shawl, turban-like, around her head, in order to make herself hooded and black, and she spoke in a gruff, stentorian tone.

Stella's time in hospital had not decreased her Shakespearean recall. With surprising facility, she played out the debate between the good Emilia, Desdemona's friend, and Othello just after Desdemona's death. She recited, word-perfect, Othello's long self-justification, his long self-revelation, his long self-indictment. She remembered the scene in which Iago stabs Emilia (his wife), trying to silence her. Emilia protests:

Stella's voice rose higher and higher, inordinate and tough. And by the time she had arrived at Othello's closing speech, she was overwrought, shrill, full of her own vehemence. Wrapped in the Spanish shawl, tangled in difficult feelings, she twisted herself into misery before she mimed her own stabbing and collapsed on the floor:

Nicholas had also been overindulging. Sherry adorned his white shirt-front in a colourful stain, a trail of roses not unlike those decorating the dresses they wore. At this point, when Stella was folded into herself as the great tragic Moor, ‘
who loved not wisely, but too well
', he let out a deep, derisive laugh. Stella unfolded from the floor and lifted up silently, her speech unfinished. She had tears in her eyes and was still ensnared in the moment of Othello's slow death.

Without warning Stella lurched sideways and in delirious fervour began to strip the newspaper cuttings from the walls, tearing them as she went, furiously ripping the paper, spraying the room with black-and-white newspaper confetti. When she reached Winston Churchill she crushed his face in one grasp and hurled him at Nicholas.

Perdita and Mary were both motionless with fear. They did not even see the moment that Nicholas rose. He had hit Stella before they knew, sending her flying backwards so that she toppled a stack of books. When Mary rose to protest, Nicholas also struck her, but though she wavered and was hurt, she did not fall. She stood before him in staunch, smarting accusation, so that he became self-conscious, or perhaps even ashamed.

But no apology was offered. Nothing was said.

Nicholas turned and strode from the room, banging the flyscreen door behind him.

Perdita felt once again the sting of her own cowardice, the way she had become a mute witness, a child whose limits defined her. On the floor before her, Stella was lying still, curled inwards, her nose a bloody mess, the Spanish shawl –
her
Spanish shawl, only for distinctive occasions, only for rare Shakespearean splendour – cast off, tossed negligently, like a black dead thing. There was heavy breathing and soft weeping and the tumultuous event settling down. There was no past
and no future, just this painful arrest, in which impulse stilled and sensation flickered into prominence. There was ebbing, slack release. It was Perdita who performed the low, soft weeping. It was Perdita's role to conclude
Othello
, to lament for fierce, corruptible men, to mourn the despicable intensities that might enter and shatter a family.

Outside a murder of crows cawed, their voices harsh. It was still Christmas Day. On 29 and 30 December that year – the war-time year of 1940 – a massive German air raid attacked and bombed London, killing, among others, both Stella's parents and her younger sister, Iris, a spinster, who was still living at home. Stella did not find out about their deaths until early 1942. So many injuries in the world, so many violations.

It was a hot day, the air lolling and billowy, stirring from the east. Nicholas had been gone, with Mr Trevor, for almost four days, and the house relaxed into a comfortable, easy pattern. In the front room, shadowed by books, Mary was relieving Stella of lack of purpose by teaching her the rules of poker. The suits, the scorings, the calculated value of a hand. She laid out the suits on the kitchen table, lining up the black with the black and the red with the red, and forming the hierarchical domains of the look-alike monarchs. Stella was instantly captivated. There was an order here, and fierce competition. She loved at once the sequential feel of the shuffle, and the swift distribution of slippery cards, flung like flying saucers from a flick of the wrist. She loved the fan shape as she held the cards and decided which to retain and which to dispose of, and the slapping of a card on the table, and the grabbing up of a replacement. Mary did not, Perdita noticed, teach Stella how to cheat, and every now and then she saw her mother beaten, sitting forward in her chair looking addled and glum, with Mary, poker-faced, disclosing not a thing. They tried not to catch each other's glance; it was another understanding they shared, and spoke of in the darkness.

Billy was the most skilled player of the group. At each game he bent over his cards with exacting attention; he hated to be distracted or touched, and focused only on the glossy
rectangles sprayed before him, their exchanges, their values, their feasible realignments. His ginger head was bent in concentration; his freckled hands flashed out, releasing and gaining cards. When he smiled, it was wonderful. His crooked teeth were endearing. Even Stella was charmed.

Between the four of them they spent many hours at cards, and for a brief period at the beginning of 1941, it was a rational system surrounding them all, an inconsequential orderliness, reassuring and trite. Newspaper cuttings had begun reappearing on the walls. Once Perdita glanced sideways during a game and began to read what was before her. The Germans and Italians had engaged in conflict with the Greeks, and British, Australian and New Zealand forces had been dispatched from Egypt. Perdita imagined armies in the night, marching orders, columns of uniformed, look-alike men. At once she knew with startling clarity, like a punch in the ribs, one of the terrible, unassimilable anomalies of this world: that there is always war somewhere and peace somewhere else, that there are people dying and –
at the same time
– there are people playing cards, sipping, as they do, from cups of sweetened tea, preoccupied only by the pleasures and vexations of a cardboard figure.

It was April and Perdita will remember all her life the moment she understood this rupture in the texture of life. She was ten years old. She glanced up, pleased with two Aces and the possibility of a third, and saw in a newspaper cut-out the vague grey shape of a soldier, stooping, beaten, slumped around his rifle. His face was obscured in shadow but his posture was eloquently distressed. The image was by then already a little tattered – it had been on the wall for two weeks at least – but it seemed suddenly to address her. This was a man whose job it was to kill, and somewhere, behind the image, were the corpses he had made, post-mortally transforming to grotesque blue jellies, and those too, perhaps, of some of his comrades,
indistinctive in the banal democracy of death. And the day after the photograph he would again kill or be killed. He would revive from slumped exhaustion and return to his job. Perdita had yet to see the archives of victims that would appear only after the war ended, but this was enough. She thought to herself:
I am ten years old, there is a world war going on, I am playing cards
. And there the moment stopped.

The lanky stockman, Willie, appeared at the screen door and without opening it announced that Nicholas had fallen from a horse. Nothing serious, but he would spend one or two nights in the hospital in Broome while a doctor checked and bandaged his ribs. Stella smiled. She looked down at her cards. There was silent celebration. Perdita knew then her second significant revelation:
tyranny, and release from tyranny, occur everywhere, and in every scale.

The wind rose higher, the barometric pressure fell. There was something ominous in the air, a swelling and tumbling. At first Stella noticed the heaviness about her, but then heard that the birds had gone quiet, or had fled, or altogether disappeared. Small stirrings occurred, a circular sweep of dried leaves, the uplift of sand in a reddish spiral. It took her only seconds to realise that a cyclone was approaching. Stella called Mary and Perdita inside, and they waited there, listening to the world of inanimate things begin to rouse and animate. Outside rain began to fall, sweetening the air, then there was the slightest tremble to the world around them. The table seemed to move, the chair slightly to shift. Rain-beat on the roof became heavier and heavier, and with the rain sound came a gradually increasing roar. All at once, the sky was falling in. All at once, the sound was like the noise of St Pancras Station – echoing and inhuman, hugely threatening.

Stella fell to the floor and began to cry. Perdita saw Mary bend and clasp her mother close, then wipe the tears from her face with the open palm of her hand.

As though in mysterious repetition, someone appeared, wet and glistening, at the flyscreen door. It was a shape, at first, as Mandjabari had been that day, patiently entreating Mary to join her; as Willie has been when he announced Nicholas's accident. But Perdita saw when the screen opened that it was not Mandjabari but Kurnti, the man who had been in chains, the man she had waved to, a year ago now, as he laboured outside the Continental Hotel. Stella saw him enter and let out a little scream, but Perdita calmed her.

‘Kurnti,' she said. ‘It's Kurnti, come to save us.'

She was not sure why he had suddenly appeared, or why she had designated him a saviour. But now the noise of the storm was booming and the walls were shuddering, as if the shack was a motor engine, turned over and starting up; and it seemed just one more out-of-the-ordinary event, this man's black face, made silver with rain-slick, asking in a shout if her mother was all right, squatting in front of them, his knobbly knees akimbo, with a look of earnest enquiry and concern.

Perdita saw bits of the war clippings tear and fly off the walls and a china cup on the table shake to the edge, and fall to the floor with a disintegrating smash. Books opened their covers and pages turned by themselves. A stack of cards near where the teacup had stood began flipping upwards, one by one, so that hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades went spinning, fifty-two of them, throughout the room. Perdita observed this activity with a kind of joy: the images dispatched, flipping into the wind, the turning of pages, the ghostly reading.

Kurnti ran into the bedroom and, above the noise, called on the others to follow. He heaved the double mattress off the bed and held it up like a roof; they all lay on their bellies and
he lowered it around them, before sliding under himself. So there they were, together waiting for the cyclone to pass.

As quickly as it had begun, everything quietened. The moist air stilled. Perdita could hear playing cards flutter and settle in the other room, susurrations of paper, curtains, feather-sounds, sighs. She held her breath. They waited in silence. It was stifling under the heavy mattress, a choking heat, but Kurnti said simply: ‘Wait; comin' back.'

The other side of the storm seemed more uproarious and violent. Rain poured as if from a massive funnel above them; there was again the shaking of walls and the railway roar. A waterfall scrim appeared at the window. Stella began to chant:

She had entered a trance of intensity. Her voice, challenging the heavens, was deep and strained.

Perdita recognised the speech as one from
King Lear
. She hated the idea that her mother might boost or encourage the storm by her fanatical invocation. But then Stella ceased her recitation and resumed her anxious crying. Perdita could feel her mother's body heave in intermittent sobs, and sensed her general fear, and her wish to die. There was a crack like gunfire. A sheet of iron lifted from the roof and spun away. The banging of other sheets loosening their nails set a rough tattoo and
seemed suddenly louder. The sky was let in and the room was gusty and wet. Leaves and bits of stick whirled through the air; a tiger snake was washed from a recess beneath the roof and hung suspended above them, swaying and twirling like a party streamer, its body conducting a white line of water.

When it was over they pushed back the mattress and rose to their feet.

Kurnti smiled. ‘Bloody good one, eh?' He rose, looked around. ‘Safe now. C'mon.'

Perdita embraced Kurnti and thanked him. She was thanking him for his smiling silver-slick face; she was thanking him for coming to the shack no one else cared about; she was thanking him for protecting her from her mother's black-magical speech – a world of thought-executing fires and all-shaking thunder, a world in which a cyclone might be commanded, by rough magic, to flatten the shape of the earth. She turned and saw that Mary was holding Stella. Mary was brushing back hair from her face as one does for a child. Her palm rested on Stella's forehead, as if testing for hurt, or a fever.

Mary looked directly at Perdita and repeated Kurnti's words: ‘Safe now. C'mon.'

The pure notes of a butcher bird rang out in the air.

‘'Im one Maban butcher bird,' Kurnti declared, touching his ear to make them listen.

‘Magic fella,' Mary whispered.

The notes scaled upwards; Mary nodded at Perdita.

‘Safe now.'

Together they walked outside and saw the gleaming world, everything bright but wrecked, everything washed clean but destroyed. A kerosene tin bucket was caught high in the branches of a bloodwood. Sticks and iron fragments lay all about. Inside things were outside, clothing, images. How easily
the look of the world reversed; how easily a squall, spraying warm rain and blowing like crazy, might re-order and trouble ordinary objects. Stella saw a playing card floating in the red, streaming mud at her feet and bent to retrieve it.

‘The cards,' she said, through her tears. ‘We must find the cards.'

Perdita watched her mother scrabble on all fours in the disorder of the departed storm. She was filmy in the grey light, her face pale and possessed. Horatio had appeared from nowhere and was sniffing the ground with excitement, his tail a wild flag. In the distance there was a fan of light, where the sun had just hidden. There were shapes, tumbling like ocean, and turmoil retreating. There were lightning flashes in the sky, long and sharp as knives.

In the life of every child there are times in which the symbolic gains more weight and magnitude, when childish things, and their comforts, are put away, and there form the intuitions and understandings that ground the later adult. These are known only in retrospect, just as the gist of any tragedy is apparent only at its conclusion. The meaning of one's parents – the remote father, the unstable mother – is likewise discovered when they cease to have authority over us, in death, or in the mind's demented retreat, or in the distances we manage to create as adults. But at seven, or eight, or nine years old, we may nevertheless glimpse them, sense in a hunch what will later unfold, know in the briefest presentiment their true specificity, and the claims they will have on us. When I saw my mother searching for the cards, disregarding me, and the busted house, and the storm-wrack all around, when I guessed she was acting out Lear tormented, believing herself infirm, weak and despised, I realised in a
wave of pity that I was stronger than she and would be called upon some day to act my part and protect her. Her wet hair hung in rats' tails beside her face, her thin cotton dress was spattered with red mud, she was bedraggled and lost. And she was searching in desperation, as if she had misplaced her own heart.