An Easy Passage

Once she is halfway up there, crouched in her bikini on the porch roof of her family's house, trembling, she knows that the one thing she must not do is to think of the narrow windowsill, the sharp drop of the stairwell; she must keep her mind on the friend with whom she is half in love and who is waiting for her on the blond gravel somewhere beneath her, keep her mind on her and on the fact of the open window, the flimsy, hole-punched, aluminium lever towards which in a moment she will reach with the length of her whole body, leaning in to the warm flank of the house. But first she steadies herself, still crouching, the grains of the asphalt hot beneath her toes and fingertips, a square of petrified beach. Her tiny breasts rest lightly on her thighs. – What can she know of the way the world admits us less and less the more we grow? For now both girls seem lit, as if from within, their hair and the gold stud earrings in the first one's ears; for now the long, grey eye of the street, and far away from the mother who does not trust her daughter with a key, the workers about their business in the drab electroplating factory over the road, far too, most far, from the flush-faced secretary who, with her head full of the evening class she plans to take, or the trip of a lifetime, looks up now from the stirring omens of the astrology column at a girl – thirteen if she's a day – standing in next to nothing in the driveway opposite, one hand flat against her stomach, one shielding her eyes to gaze up at a pale calf, a silver anklet and the five neat shimmering- oyster -painted toenails of an outstretched foot which catch the sunlight briefly like the flash of armaments before dropping gracefully into the shade of the house. • Julia Copus's books include The Shuttered Eye (1995) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection, and In Defence of Adultery (2003), both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. In 2003 she won first prize in the National Poetry Competition.