©1994

Skipping across a cloudbank. Searching mist for answers to questions she can’t invent. Below, there’s no one — as in a long time exposure in which no moving objects show at all. Skipping, resting, picnicking; this must be a dream. But it isn’t, thanks to Balloon Aloft. Pity the others ignore her. They’ve had too much champagne. Canberra from here is magnificent as new-painted lacework. She ignores them and the capital. The sun spins airwebs round her soaring thoughts.
Skipping along the street. Six, to school, a silver Electra bearing down like a ray, diving for the airport. Momentary terror. Skipping on, shakily. She reaches the decaying playground. Is it Saturday again? It is empty. It has to be a dream, a bad one. But no. There are people, skulking in the frosty shadows. Puffs of breath roil and fade over the quadrangle like clouds in a time-lapse film. She imagines the kids kicking acorns through dust trodden soft like talc, while making fun of her name. Pity they ignore her this time. They have no excuse. She burrows into her foreign past, self-sufficient as an earthworm.
Skipping. Not running, jogging, walking. She could keep it up for hours. She skips over puddles under a winter sky. (Sometimes she splashes her socks.) People may not ignore her; she ignores them. She is a crucible. The morning, fresh, like a newly picked capsicum, a gumleaf whistle of wind in her plaited hair. She skips round a brushwoody corner. They stare. One of them picks up a stone. It hits her in the centre of her forehead.
Skip, skip, goes her heart. She can still feel the crater, 34 years on. She has done the dishes, washed the clothes, fed the cat. There are no people here. It isn’t a dream. She is alone in front of the radiator, boxed in by Japanese screens, smoking. She reads. They’d ignore her, anyway. She reads Hazlitt’s reactionary essay on the sun-dial. She skims through the Canberra Weekly. She reads about terrors, here and elsewhere. Not momentary. Her past seems entirely momentary. The sun skids across the sky like a loose balloon. She skips pages.
She’s always been warm and safe, like a chrysalis in a lightbulb.
“Here’s me.” says she, pointing to a blur in a school photograph. Her aging new-age friend smiles, and peers.
“I was skipping for the camera.”
A pendulum tick-tocks.
“Eh? Can’t see what you looked like.”
The world skips round the galaxy.
She’s just come back from the bulk-billing medical supermarket where you put your name down, come back in an hour, and get a medical certificate with few questions. It is very convenient but makes her feel unwanted.
“I love cats.” she interposes, stroking Antigone. “Bloody thing wants food again. I don’t know!” Such talk keeps them going, as long as it keeps going itself.
“Like your brother.”
Her brother can’t skip, he’s overweight, but he invents things. It focuses him. He’s been taking time exposures that make buildings disappear. Even mountains … well, he’s working on it. He used to be a woman till the op.
Her friend likes her brother. She yearns to get pregnant, to make her indelible mark on the universe, and on herself. They’ll skip the formalities and get right down to it. Build on the rock, as they said in Sunday School. Pity she doesn’t know yet.
Time skips by; nothing seems to connect. Like some disjointed tale, telling nothing but signifying an idiot. She collects timepieces, water clocks, hourglasses, sun-dials … She is on the roof, away from them all, hanging out the washing in an imaginary land. Below, the children of centuries twist a rope and dance. She hasn’t been to work for a while. ’Flu and boredom.
They don’t ignore her there, unless she burrows into her ancient misery. But the job, repetitive and deadly, skips on forever like a worn-out mechanical clock, ticking trapped round the same hour of five. She squirted some oil into hers. It stopped altogether.
Born far away, she has skipped whole continents, and now finds it hard to cross the carpet without reminiscing. At every angle of pattern she lets her feet drag, shuffling languidly through the captured winter sunshine like an aphid on a magnifying glass.
Once, she had a destination. Now it’s a dream, for to have an end is to admit death. And death, as someone once said, is ‘the harshest anti-Utopia’.
Her clocks begin to chime, springily.
The dream is a blind burrow. A wombat hole in alien soil. The creek’s rising.
Her brother says he’s invented a way of detecting movement in the stillest things. His house is a jungle of photographic and video equipment. She is afraid, for if he’s succeeded there’ll be no solid rock to build on. Matter skips under her feet like windcombed sand. Nature dances to a twisting rope. She feels seasick, and keeps very still.
“You o.k.?” says her friend, round to visit the sick.
“Let’s go out for a drink.” she suggests, caressing a clepsydra.
‘But you’ve got the ‘flu!”
They play Connect-4.

Early the next morning, Ceres the asteroid floats into the bedroom, which is dark as the bed of a stream. It is still, a stone, but round as a polished pebble; it doesn’t skip into her face. It has no face, but smiles. She embraces it, all aches and pains. It is hard, like an inflated balloon, but soft as marble. It begins to swing like a pendulum.
She wakes. Defiantly. Definitely. The ’flu is gone. The world is at peace.
There is a dream of cabbages rotting in a blue-cold field, waiting to be made into sauerkraut and preserved for all time, but she resists it and opens her eyes wide till the sleep in them vanishes.
She rises, puts on her pink dressing gown from Avon. Her teeth chatter like telegraph keys. Her back aches, and she is glad of the doctor’s certificate. She lights a Longbeach and the air is made palpable.
The night before is lying about in the lounge. She clears it up, clear-headed. She makes rosehip tea. Her friend went off late, coughing, to her brother’s. Breakfast, two boiled eggs and lots of toast, tastes of sun, as the sun steeps the grevilleas outside in rosewater. She spots a morning balloon, almost on top of the house.
“Never get me up in one of those things.” she says to the cat, who goes brrroop and growls at the balloon. No one waves; they all avoid her eyes, like house-painters on a cherry-picker. Without a scrape they pass overhead. Good thing her roof is flat.
It is Thursday. She will go to work, despite being ‘unfit for duty’. She will skip there, at least from the car, in her red high-heeled boots and multicoloured poncho. They, library-drab, will stare, but giggle like schoolgirls. No stones will be thrown.
She winds her clocks, or fills them up. They flow or beat like hearts. Not one of them tells quite the same time. Some indeed tell the time in Hong Kong or Singapore. Perhaps she, like Einstein, should have been a watchmaker. But what if there is no time to tell? She can invent no answer to that. She ignores it.
Yet she ignores herself too, her deepest burrows, in which secular wombats are drying out, grumbling and lighting cigarettes without thought of the future. Her heart palpitates, its fateful pattern. She feels tall as a termite hill, and beginning to crumble.
She is an inventor too. She invents herself every morning, despite the paradox of it. But there has to be a rock. Otherwise she will skip and slip downhill into an early grave. She is 40, now, and wants to be ‘grounded’, as her friend puts it.
“Giulia, you must learn to sit still!”
Skipping along the street. Six, to school, a manta ray bearing down …
The clock!
The cheap mechanical one, probably made by convicts in China. It no longer drowns in sewing machine oil. It is ticking. It is quarter to eight and time to shower and dress. It was good she hadn’t gone out for a drink. Hairspring steadiness is what she needs. Mental balance.
She opens the bathroom door and the lone and level sea stretches back to her birthplace. Stones skip across it, planets that purr and swish as they bounce. She ignores the impression and bathes in a rush, and is soon ready.
Ready – for one more day, on the way to where? A dead end, a blank wall, with water at her back. The rock drags the head under. She feeds the cat and drives away.
The engine is skipping beats in the cold. She sniffles. But the car rattles with a rhythm she can’t resist. Life skips – the movement claims her – she could keep this up forever – life can’t be photographed, lithographed, captured at all. Its rush is its rock, it has its own escapement that neither holds nor frees, it moves so fast it defies gravity, it skips, skips, skips, neither grounded nor up in the air, overshooting all ends, reborn. She isn’t stoned or blurred, she isn’t ignored, she feels heavenly, she is Giulia Wong and she’s all here.
Then she draws up outside the building, and skips and skips and skips …