The Ivory Swing by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

Inside the lurching auto-rick Juliet and the children huddled close, hands raised to ward off the shower of pelted blossoms and stones.
    Perhaps, Juliet thought, I am considered to have the Evil Eye. I must be simultaneously appeased and driven off.
    â€œWe should have brought Prabhakaran,” she gasped. To mediate.
    It was a relief to emerge, like a chrysalis spreading sudden wings, from the child-crusted palm-canyoned roads into the white glare of the beach. Sand, coarse, terra-cotta in colour, embraced their sandalled feet like gritty fire. Directly overhead the sun slithered and smoked through a haze of water-heavy air.
    Yet, strangely, what Juliet thought of as she slung her sandals over one shoulder and waded into the blood-warm surf, was Lake Ontario frozen. It was the remembered exultation, the same sense of awe at the margin of a vast body of water whose far shore cannot be seen. The Balboa syndrome, she supposed — whether silent on a peak above the Pacific, or alien between the coconut palms and the broiling Indian Ocean, or poised precariously between January and February on a wafer of ice beneath the bleak Canadian sky.
    â€œDo you remember,” she asked the children, “walking out on the frozen lake? How it seems to go on forever and ever, as though we might reach the edge of the world?”
    They looked at her curiously, not seeing a connection, and splashed themselves with water that leaped back from their clothes towards the sun in instant vaporous tongues. She wanted them to savour the mysterious incongruities of their lives.
    â€œDon’t you remember how excited you were when you realized you were walking on water?”
    They nodded vaguely the surf frothing between their toes.
    â€œLook!” she said, picking up the frayed husk of a coconut and tossing it as far as she could out over the waves. “It will wander through all the oceans of the world and one day someone on a ship from Montreal, sailing out of the St Lawrence estuary, will see it floating between the fishing boats.”
    But the coconut came bobbing shoreward on the next wave and the children swam to meet it, competitive, awash in the present moment. Juliet sat on the sand beside their discarded cotton clothes and sandals, thinking of snowsuits and mukluks. And of that first of many winter odysseys in the small town beside Lake Ontario.
    â€œIt must be the oxygen!” David had shouted.
    She knew what he meant although she couldn’t really hear the words. The wind barrelling all the way from Lake Superior took words and whirled them in flakes of sound as far as Nova Scotia. She knew he meant the taut hum of ecstasy, the sense of being caught up in elemental and exalted matters remote from the dwindling town where dull people crawled between morning and night.
    She laughed and put her thickly mittened hand clumsily into his and called back, sending a futile missile of language into the blither of snow: “Let’s keep going to the edge of the world!”
    And the children, Miranda scarcely able to walk yet, reeled about like padded balls buffeted by an unseen playmate. Only their eyes were visible, clownish behind ski-masks, huge with wonder and the stimulant of cold. Breathless, they brushed icicles from their lashes and hurled their bodies into the wind and rolled in the snow, making angels with muffled arms.
    Sometimes they scooped away at the drifts until they had laid bare a black window into the lake’s secrets: air bubbles caught like diamonds, and small fish shocked into silver stillness, their deaths preserved like jewels until the thaw.
    Ah, Juliet had thought, drunk on insights and oxygen, there are ways to cheat change and decay.
    And they had hugged each other and danced and known they were not like other families, but set apart, blessed. Fumbling with the impediment of winter clothing, Juliet and David had kissed and their kisses had frozen on their lips, the shimmering salted