October 1972

For an hour or so, the night has no secrets. We’ve slipped out of the hospital and are walking along a path by the lakeshore. Above us, the full moon shines on a quicksilver world – so bright and dark and so in awe of itself, I want to kneel down and pray.

I breathe in the smell of eucalyptus and feel the chill in the air. I’m free and as light as a bird. At the edge of the lake I step along the top of a stone wall, one foot in front of the other, my arms spread like wings to keep my balance. Michael walks on the path beside me, talking about comets and solar winds, and I glide in his dream of space, feeling vast, wide open to the night. A wind blowing through me.

I tell him I no longer have a name. ‘Names close you off from the world.’

He laughs, and I can tell he knows exactly what I mean. ‘You’ve become a nymph,’ he says. Then he spins around on one leg in a spontaneous dance, hair frizzing out from under his beanie, his coat unfastened and loose. With his vintage air force boots strapped below the knee, he looks like a wild man from the Russian steppes, a rangy Cossack. He whirls around again, this time catching me in his arms, and we are dancing, lake and trees flashing by, his eyes bright as onyx.

Inside my head, a voice breaks through from another place. ‘The night doth magnify my soul,’ it says, and I think of angels. Someone or something has reached inside me and turned up the volume of my being, so loud all I hear is wings and silence.

‘Catch me if you can,’ Michael calls, disappearing into a spinney of trees. I follow but I can’t find him. When I call out his name, he replies from above, and I look up into a gum tree silhouetted against the sky. At first I can’t make out where he is, and then I see him lying on a branch sloping upwards from the trunk. His arms are outstretched, his body suspended in the moonlight above me.

My eyes lock on the image.

I see a castaway in an oversized coat and heavy boots extended on a cross, facing the sky. Where his shirt has ridden up, his skin is white and exposed, and his unbuttoned coat hangs below the branch like a broken sail.

When Michael slides down from the tree, I put my arms around him. Darkness has shown its other face and I want to protect him. But inside his coat he’s as thin as a bone, and all of a sudden I can’t stop shivering.