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dark green felt, sat a young woman with frizzy hair and bee-stung lips, Simone-someone-or-other, who acted as secretary to the chants and invocations. Victoria saw her pen inscribe, upside-down, the mysterious word corps . The handwriting was copperplate and there was a netted shadow of hair filaments lying, with a perceptible quiver, across the perfectly formed letters.
    ( You cannot imagine , said Victoria, how red that room appeared .)
    Did Duchamp introduce her?
    Only, Victoria thinks, as L’Australienne . It was years before some of them called her Victoria. She thought of having a map of Australia tattooed on her forehead, so that it would be too unSurreal and literal-mindedfor them to call her by her emblem. Disbelieving in nations they still wanted an Australia.
    ( It is the same with Africa. All of Europe , Victoria added, wants an Africa .)
    After the séance they drank bowls of Kir Royale. Scarlet rose-petals floated on the surface of each drink. People stood around the room peeling petals from puckered lips and flicking them away. A man in a quilted smoking jacket lined with silver braid, a rich man, perhaps, or a figure of importance, spat out a mouthful of petals so that they adhered to a pink lampshade; he proclaimed: An explosion of bloody flowers, set off by gentle anarchists! And soon everyone was spitting. One of the women pasted two dripping petals on the cheeks of another, and there was a short epileptic burst of applause.
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    How did it happen, her presence there, witnessing this theatre? How had she come across the ocean, yearning for mother-England, and ended up in this red drawing room, clenching her gloved hands, anxious for approval and known only as a nation? The details remain spot-lit in her old woman’s memory: the scattered alphabet, like blown litter, across the broad green table, a woman’s hand in the act of forming the word corps , the pink standing lamp of spat rose-petals, the man with candles for eyes, her generalised confusion and disorientation.
    Words of English came drifting above the crowd. Victoria looked up from her Kir and saw the painterLeonora Carrington, sashaying towards her in a polka-dotted dress. She had a rose-petal stuck to the centre of her forehead and walked directly to Victoria, said Hallo Australian with a fake Indian accent and a sideways shake of the head, then kissed her on the lips. Victoria was close enough to see the streaks of her pale makeup and feel the electricity of her long black hair. She is my age, realised Victoria, and so much more confident. There was a scent of patchouli oil and sexual fluids. Someone wound up the gramophone and saxophonic jazz rose quaking into the room. Leonora took Victoria by the wrist, an emissary with floral lungs from the land of noir , and led her forward to meet the Surrealist maestro, Monsieur Breton. He removed a petal from his tongue and inspected it critically on the tip of his index finger. Then he announced:
    We are all Australians.
    All bodies are black.
    And Victoria thought to herself — quite unSurrealistically — Neither statement is true.

3
    Somewhere in the past you will find Anna in girlhood, in the blazing goldfields, awaiting Visions.
    She likes to sit on the verandah at twilight, watching the moonrise. She peers into mauve-coloured air and sees boys skidding their bikes beneath dark shadows of jacaranda which release blooms and whispers on waves of desert breeze. Dust arises from wheels, performing wheelies. There will be a dog-fight somewhere, a few blocks away, and the sound of batteries crushing ore further off in the distance. Lights randomly switch on, in beady spots and rectangles. The triangular shapes of poppet heads can be glimpsed against the sky. Insects whirr: moths and mosquitoes. There is the smell of mutton cooking and an echoic clatter of plates and pans. Her father, who must work night-shift, is moving about in the kitchen, preparing their dinner. Soon Anna will be