The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

Author:Helen Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743481127
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2013-02-18T05:00:00+00:00

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Beside one of the speaker boxes crouched an androgynous creature in a raincoat. Its neck was bent, its hair was slicked back like a schoolboy’s off its sweating, waxen face, it nodded its head in time and kept its eyes turned up sideways and fixed on the lit, jerking figures above it. Something damned in its posture and its crooked stare made Athena shiver. She followed it to the lavatory – so it was a girl – and heard it vomiting.

She found Elizabeth standing watching the band from the side. The music stopped.

‘Did you see that girl? Is she all right?’

‘I saw a thing in a raincoat,’ said Elizabeth, ‘with no features on its face.’

‘She was vomiting. Do you think I ought to do something?’

‘What – clean up? They hire people to do that.’

‘But she looked like a child.’

‘They all do,’ said Elizabeth. ‘They are.’

The girl emerged, paler than before, and slithered back to her crouching position of worship, or supplication. Athena noticed that from where Elizabeth was standing, Philip looked . . . famous. From below the stage, where Athena had spent most of the evening, he had looked like a bloke with a guitar doing a job of work.

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