So I walked up the Street of Stares, back toward Redfern Station where the sign said DANGER: LIVE WIRE ABOVE, and they watched me. (See how they visit and talk to each other here, Snake had said. In the rest of Sydney they can't sit and talk.) — They'd given me presents to remember them: a boomerang pulled off their. wall, and a catalogue of a dot painting exhibition in which they'd inscribed their names for me. Below hers Sadie wrote TRUE BLUE KOORIE. Then Snake wrote AUSTRALIANS ABORIGINAL. — I followed the wall that was muraled with boomerangs and suns and dot-painted flowers, that long wall that led away from the Street of Stares, riddled with forests of muraled meaning, inscribed with swooping lines like the long furrows that ran down Snake's arm at the hilt of his blade of bony muscle. That was the wall that now hid me from all the addicts who tried to sell me boomerangs, from Sadie, who'd shown me a dot painting with its snakes and snails and coils, from Rob, now disappeared to get high, from Snake and Ruthie who sat looking at the empty case of beer.
* Of marijuana.
A steep land creaked with sap in the beech-green air. Ivy grew up the backs of trees, pretending to help them with lying green vertebrae, as meanwhile it sucked their strength. To live means both to strive like the ivy and to suffer like the trees. Dying unites both these elements in a painful struggle. Did the vegetation feel this? They say that plants and slaves do not feel. — Below tolled cowbells like a gamelon, rising through grasshoppers' seed-rattlings among the gone strawberries. Delicious green swellings of the mountain, those the ivy could not drain, but cows grazed them down to the thick. The cows scarcely moved, it seemed, but they ate all day, tearing off greenness with big bites. They gnawed more slowly than the lake-haze, which, hot and blue-white like the wrapper of a milk-chocolate bar, ate the summit, but of course what they gnawed on also took longer to grow back. Even as I watched, those mist-ringed hills of grass, flowers and cowshit (lake and sky both white) were regurgitated. The cows, on the other hand, did chew their cud sometimes, but the grass remained as short as a soldier's hair. Of course the cows' lives were passing. Bronze bells clanged. Now again squatted the haze like a red cow splayed down, gazing stupidly at nothing; once more the hills were lost, but the cowbells still rang. They told milkmaids where the cows were; they did not tell the cows anything. When John Donne wrote what I already knew, that my companions' death-knell is also mine, he failed to map out why I need to hear it. Perhaps the bell does not toll for me. Why not suppose that its real purpose is to keep God apprised of where I am, so that in His good time He can lead me into the slaughterhouse? Perhaps the inevitable needs no warning. That was why the cows' lives rang on and the cows did not listen.
The dark bull ran through the ring with his horns lowered, leaving tracks in the brown sand. His life was ringing out. He jerked his head. It was only the first tercio. The banderilleros flared their lavender and yellow capes at him like dresses, so he charged, but they pivoted in place, baffling him repeatedly. He stopped, wanting to give up, and they annoyed him again, so he gored the weary old horse, which fell on its side without a groan. I wonder now whether the horse had followed the bull's movements with much attention; if so, there would have been no wisdom but that of fatalism. How severely the horse was hurt I don't know. I saw no good death. The banderilleros raised it back up again, and the picador in yellow remounted. Then came trumpet and drum. Most cattle die violently, so perhaps it would have been too much to expect a bell to call this bull to his fate; did he hear the inner bell yet or had the trumpet been no warning? Why should we be warned? The bull hornswiped the cloth away from a picador. He leaped, lowered his head, swished his tail. Everyone whistled with happiness.
One banderillero backed away; the other rushed in and threw the first two darts. The first dart came out; the second hung in flesh. The bull jumped. The man threw two more darts. The bull turned, watched, began to switch his tail. What was he to do? His life stood hardly in his power. The man skipped closer to the bull. The bull lowered his head. The man stabbed the darts in.
