o come along.

"What are you looking at, my grandma? Why do you keep stopping and sort
of staring at the wall?"

Kezia and her grandmother were taking their siesta together. The little
girl, wearing only her short drawers and her under-bodice, her arms and
legs bare, lay on one of the puffed-up pillows of her grandma's bed, and
the old woman, in a white ruffled dressing-gown, sat in a rocker at the
window, with a long piece of pink knitting in her lap. This room
that they shared, like the other rooms of the bungalow, was of light
varnished wood and the floor was bare. The furniture was of the
shabbiest, the simplest. The dressing-table, for instance, was a
packing-case in a sprigged muslin petticoat, and the mirror above was
very strange; it was as though a little piece of forked lightning was
imprisoned in it. On the table there stood a jar of sea-pinks, pressed
so tightly together they looked more like a velvet pincushion, and a
special shell which Kezia had given her grandma for a pin-tray, and
another even more special which she had thought would make a very nice
place for a watch to curl up in.

"Tell me, grandma," said Kezia.

The old woman sighed, whipped the wool twice round her thumb, and drew
the bone needle through. She was casting on.

"I was thinking of your Uncle William, darling," she said quietly.

"My Australian Uncle William?" said Kezia. She had another.

"Yes, of course."

"The one I never saw?"

"That was the one."

"Well, what happened to him?" Kezia knew perfectly well, but she wanted
to be told again.

"He went to the mines, and he got a sunstroke there and died," said old
Mrs. Fairfield.

Kezia blinked and considered the picture again... a little man fallen
over like a tin soldier by the side of a big black hole.

"Does it make you sad to think about him, grandma?" She hated her
grandma to be sad.

It was the old woman's turn to consider. Did it make her sad? To look
back, back. To stare down the years, as Kezia had seen her doing. To
look after them as a woman does, long after they were out of sight. Did
it make her sad? No, life was like that.

"No, Kezia."

"But why?" asked Kezia. She lifted one bare arm and began to draw things
in the air. "Why did Uncle William have to die? He wasn't old."

Mrs. Fairfield began counting the stitches in threes. "It just
happened," she said in an absorbed voice.

"Does everybody have to die?" asked Kezia.

"Everybody!"

"Me?" Kezia