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Sport 10: Autumn 1993

[section]

I lie awake in my cell in the nurses' home, determined before I sleep to examine my conscience. Isn't conscience character? Straightaway I realise this is ludicrous: the conscience-less do not fail to exist. Dorcas, my neighbour, has posted to her bedridden father a valuable sheepskin underblanket. She sees it as part of the National Health and would do it for all her relatives. My mind goes round in circles, condemning Dorcas and then praising her. It occurs to me this circling is the same as a cat going to sleep and I must hurry.

Was the image that compared me to Aunt Cora false? What if my mother had been turned the other way? Why am I so overcome by a conjunction of planets? Soothsayers never apologise when they are wrong, I recollect, and this fills me with anger. Is my mother ever going to say, 'I thought once you were like Aunt Cora but I was wrong. You are more like Aunt Agatha.' This will fill me with anger too, for the energy I have expended on investigation. I have given my life to another's estimate, another's history. I have become inextricably entwined with one aunt on a circuit of aunts. What should have been merely picturesque: the gaunt farmhouse, the rumours of parties, has passed into myth and legend. It is unbearable, I think, to be both human and myth. I am no heroine and I cannot conceive of retaining poise in a maelstrom.

And then, since extravagance always has a monetary component— perhaps this is the largest part of it—I begin to worry about my chequebook which is once again overdrawn. I have bought a hideously expensive pair of snakeskin shoes, seduced by the faint hiss they make as the heels touch, as though there is whispering in grass. But what if the whispering says: Extravagant, extravagant.

This is the reason my nightly musings lead nowhere. I plunge straight from the heights of myth to some trivial detail. I pull the bedclothes up to my chin and console myself that tomorrow is payday and the crocodile shoes, like those rooms of animals we have consumed in a lifetime, reputed to pass before our eyes in heaven, will pass into oblivion. Oblivion is page 56 legitimate because it has no images. Then I fall asleep and there are rooms of shoes and rooms of animals that have been made into shoes and Aunt Cora wearing my red shoes as she disappears up the driveway of the farm. I catch the glow of a red shoe in one of the puddles.