A Million Windows. Gerald Murnane

      On the cold morning mentioned he had decided, and for reasons that he could never afterwards recall, that his mother was not to be trusted. If he did not understand at the time how singular was his decision, he began to learn soon afterwards and went on learning throughout his life that it was singular indeed. He learned at the same time, however, what he ought to do and to say in order to seem to be a son who had never made any such decision about his mother. And she, his mother, whom he always suspected of knowing what he had decided on that cold morning, seemed to have learned what she ought to do and to say in order to seem what the two of them knew her not to be.

      He had followed her home, so his mother had told her neighbour, in order to learn where she, the dark-haired girl, had lived, but at his desk who could say how many years afterwards, he could not be sure why he had walked out of the schoolyard through the gate that he had never before used and had walked ten or twenty paces behind her past the pepper trees marking the course of the creek and then over a timber bridge and into a network of streets where he had never previously been. He had never, in fact, learned exactly where she lived. It might have been enough for him to know that she lived in a district strange to him, or so he had surmised long afterwards when he recalled that the end of his adventure had been her turning around, soon after he had followed her across the bridge, and her staring at him until the face that he had previously considered pretty was creased and frowning, although perhaps not hostile. So he had surmised at his desk, but then he had got up and had stepped to the window. The sun had set, which allows me to surmise that the last rays of sunlight may have reached his window only a little while before, and while he had been writing his own version of the substance of this paragraph. He looked through the twilight towards one of the distant wings. He supposed it to be one of the wings occupied mostly by female personages, but he could not be sure. Here and there in the far wing, a window was already lit from within, and while he stared at one or another distant glow, he composed in his mind a sentence reporting that the boy turned back towards the bridge and the streets familiar to him from a concern that he had been about to disturb an existence hitherto untroubled.

      She who had lived on the far side of the creek was named Barbara. (She was the first of four of that name who had attracted him during his first twenty years. Three of the four were dark-haired, although the one that he had most often in mind while he wrote fiction had pale hair.) After her came someone whose name he never learned. He could recall having seen her only once, and she was probably unaware of his existence. Like the first of the four Barbaras, she and her family moved into his suburb and then out again within a year, although this was not uncommon at a time when many families rented rather than owned their homes. When he saw her, she was with her two young brothers in the dusty front yard of their weatherboard house. After more than sixty years, he recalls only an approximation of her face but he can readily visualise what he believes to be the exact shade of the newly painted weatherboards behind her: something between grey and turquoise. He learned long ago not to struggle to recall her face but to call to mind first the bluish grey of the old timber house and then to hold the rare shade in focus, as it were, until he not only caught sight of some or another detail of clear, pale skin or dark eyebrows but felt what he supposed was something of the impression that the actual face had made on him long before, during the few minutes while he had observed it. He learned in time that this feeling was sometimes available to him even when he was unable to recall the face that had first given rise to it, and often in later years he needed only to call up an image of blue-grey weatherboards in order to feel again as though he was sauntering past a certain shabby house on a hot afternoon in the mid-1940s, in an inland provincial city, was staring at a girl of about his own age who was pushing repeatedly a worn rubber car-tyre suspended from a tree-branch and serving as a swing for one of her two younger brothers, and was waiting for her to turn so that he could see her face.