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room on to the street (with aspidistra) which we never used except on Sunday afternoons if we had company. Compared to other houses in the road, we were far from overcrowded. But my mother, poor honest soul that she was, thought we had broken the law. Because it was writ ten . She became withdrawn and anxious. She lived in fear of being prosecuted. She no longer went to the market in the morning but sat in the front room with the door shut behind her staring out from behind the lace curtains on tothe street waiting for the authorities to come. This went on for days. I said to Tom, “We have to do something.” But what could we do?
    I don’t know if I want to write about this. This is the part of the dream that I try to put away. One morning I crept downstairs and took the book. I got up in the dark before anyone was awake and threw it in the canal. I came home and slammed doors and overturned chairs and ran into the street shouting “Thief! Thief!” (I pinched some other items as well and threw them in the canal) and made such a racket that my parents half-believed me. My father wanted to call the police but my mother begged him not to. Was she relieved? I never knew. Tom tumbled to it. He knew what I’d done, but we made a pact and I swore him to secrecy. Tom never split. That’s the painful part, because when it was discovered the book was missing Tom got the blame. My father gave him a hiding with his belt, it was terrible. Tom never split on me. That’s what I can’t bear about the dream, I never owned up.
    The dream keeps coming back to haunt me. Sometimes the book is falling into the canal and my mother is watching it fall, waiting for the splash, her face half-turned towards me with an expression of relief. At other times she is gazing up at me from her bed with a pleading expression in her eyes; there is a smell of ammonia in the air and the bed is the bed that she died in; I am trying to explain why I took Home Law and the Family from her, that I did it to save her from herself, but no words come and I wake up witha purple tinge behind my eyelids, and a sore throat. But I think I know my dreams well enough to know when they are trying to deceive me, playing tricks with my memory and distorting the rampages of a ten-year-old into nightmares of unreality and forgiveness. I was ten going on eleven, or eleven going on twelve. I don’t remember. Then the war came and I was evacuated.

SIX
    A FEW DAYS after Lawrence telephoned with the verdict, he rang again and asked me to meet him at Parliament House. He was coming down on business. Lawrence belonged to a government think-tank charged with reviewing the jury system, and he had some business in the House as well.
    We met in the Beehive, in the cafeteria.
    “You got the material I sent, Ches?”
    Lawrence had sent me a formal letter after the trial ended, thanking me for my participation and enclosing a résumé of the judge’s summation on the final day. Lawrence had listed three areas where in his view the judge had erred and from which I inferred there were grounds for an appeal. He also sent me a number of medical reports, including thetranscripts of prison interviews with Huey made by prison staff and also the hospital psychiatrist, Dr Wilson. I had missed Toby Wilson’s testimony and cross-examination in court and had never met him, but I knew his reputation and, reading the reports, was impressed by his thoroughness and the way he had put Huey’s truthfulness and reliability to the test. Several times he had tried to trip Huey up. Huey claimed to have scored a try on the football field in the first half, playing in a match for his college, and Toby returned to the point later in a subsequent interview, saying to him, “That try you got in the second half—you must have been a popular guy.” “No, no,” Huey corrected him, “in the first half. It was the only try of the match.”
    I said to Lawrence, after thanking him for sending me the material,