Poesy Swift
I ran across the wide and dusty road, straight into Blacktown. I wanted to lose my way in its hot, narrow lanes.
Nothing had turned out as it should. I never meant for it to happen this way. Everyone had turned rotten and the stink was suffocating.
I ran, weaving my way between the rickshaws, the tea-wallahs and the crowd that flowed into the old town, into the narrow lanes of the flower bazaar. The sun flickered through the lattices above the stalls, and garlands hung like pythons from the cross-rails. The laneway was cluttered with buckets of flowers, petals lay strewn across the path, and the gutters spewed buds and stems.
I stumbled and fell at the feet of an old woman who was threading orange marigolds onto a string, and my stocking tore. The old woman spoke to me in that Hobson-Jobson language but I didn’t stop. I was on my feet again in an instant, running blindly with no sense of direction.
I ran faster and faster, my feet slipping on piles of smooth leaves between the stalls. I thought of the first time I had seen Eliza, standing in the sunlight outside Balaclava Hall with Mr Arthur beside her. I thought of Charlie when we first met, pressed against me in the heart of an old gum tree and then later, lying beside me in the dark at Adyar. I thought of Mrs Besant, her arms open wide as she said, ‘Truth may lead you into the wilderness, yet you must follow her . . .’ But I was lost, with no truth to follow.