Wildflowers by Peggy Frew

Author:Peggy Frew [Peggy Frew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT WEEK, IN CLASS, the tutor ignored Nina. He did not look at her, and he did not call on her to answer questions. She sat in a kind of numb horror, writing nothing in her notebook, oblivious to the discussion. As the class went on and drew nearer to its end her heart began to pound. Look at me, she begged, inside her mind. Just once. But he didn’t, and when the time was up and everyone rose she stayed in her seat because her legs felt very heavy and perhaps even unusable.

The tutor, who had put his papers away quickly, departed in the middle of the group, and Nina was left alone. The room seemed to be making faint clicking sounds, like a cooling heater. There was a feeling of extraordinary slowness—as if she might remain there for a very long time, months, a solitary reptilian creature, blinking into space—but then the door banged open and two boys came in and dropped their backpacks onto a table.

‘You new?’ said one of them to Nina, pulling out a chair. When Nina didn’t answer he shrugged and turned to his friend. ‘I slept for fifteen hours last night,’ he said, ‘and I could go back for more.’

A girl came in, and then another, and then three more boys and another girl. They all looked at Nina.

At last she stood, holding on to the edge of the table.

‘Are you all right?’ someone said.

‘Yes,’ Nina heard herself reply. ‘I’ve just got the wrong room.’ Somebody laughed, and somebody else said, ‘Shut up, it’s easy enough to do; I’ve done it myself.’

And Nina got her legs to walk to the door and out, and to the library. She sat there until it was dark, leaned forward between the partitions of a desk, resting her head on her unopened rucksack.

After some time, possibly hours, she went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She had a lipstick in her bag, which she had bought at Myer, mostly for its name—Cleopatra—which reminded her of the painting at the National Gallery of the queen with her broad, defiant, somehow Spanish-looking face, something careless and modern in the way she leaned back in her chair, dropping the pearl into the glass. The lipstick was a matt crimson and smelled adult and dangerous and Nina had never actually worn it. Now she put it on, badly, so that her mouth looked lopsided and crude—but before she could fix it someone came in and off she scurried with her head down.

In the dark her heavy legs took her through the university and out into the streets, where impatient lines of cars inched past the Italian restaurants and the streetlights were fluttering on, orange and cool. A herd of people waited at the ticket booth for the cinema; hard bunches of red and white and yellow roses stood in buckets outside a greengrocer’s; pigeons sank their heads into their fat necks and curled their red claws;

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