Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane

willow-trees at the edge of a certain river, so that they were reputed to be amphibious beings. The author of the comic-strip encouraged this belief in his or her readers by depicting the leader of the abductors of Princess Narda as a man possessing no hair and no eyes and only the rudiments of nostrils and mouth. When the abductors had first brought Princess Narda into the presence of their leader, he, being without eyes, had put his hands on the face and neck and shoulders of his prisoner in order to satisfy himself that she was a good-looking young woman. When I studied the line-drawings of the man whose head and face was a fleshy dome, I was prepared to believe that he could remain for long periods underwater. I learned, however, from later episodes that the hide out of the abductors and their leader was not unlike the burrow of the platypus, which creature I first read about in the School Reader a year after I had first read about Bridget. The lair of the platypus was an underground hollow close to a watercourse. The hollow could be approached through either of two tunnels, one of them leading downwards from among scrub and the other leading upwards from below water-level. The abductor of Princess Narda wanted it thought of him that he lived underwater, but only one of the entrances to his hide-out was beneath the river, and Princess Narda was safe from drowning throughout her captivity. So, too, was Bridget after I had learned to see her as lying on her flag-leaves in a dry, airy cavern like that in which Princess Narda had been held captive. (I mentioned the platypus just above for no other reason than that I admired as a child the layout of its burrows. I read only recently that the eyes of the platypus remain closed during the many hours of each day while the animal is underwater, even while it feeds or copulates.)
    It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that one or another detail should be incongruous, if not inexplicable. At some time after I had begun to see in my mind an image of Bridget lying in her cavern, I began to notice an image of a strand of dark hair lying diagonally across her forehead. What seemed incongruous was that the strand of hair seemed to be lifted from the forehead and then to be carried away and then to drift back towards the forehead. Even though I had found for Bridget a safe, dry cavern in my mind, still she seemed to lie in the path of some or another current underwater. It seems characteristic of images appearing in the mind that some details of the images seem fixed in the mind while other details can be altered by the effort of the person in whose mind they appear. In my image of Bridget, the strand of hair seems still to move. However, I learned long ago to see the seeming movement as a trick of light. Long ago, I caused to appear in an upper wall of the cavern a large window. On the other side of the thick glass of the window is part of the lake that Bridget is reported to lie beneath. The currents in the lake, or the drifting from side to side of underwater plants, check the passage through the water of the sunlight from far away, causing a play of light and shade across Bridget’s face. I could wish to change further the detail of the window. I could wish to see instead of a view of water a window of coloured glass showing an image of a trickling stream or of a shallow swamp bordered with clumps of rushes.
    I have often wanted to bring forward the story of Bridget. The time when I seemed most likely to do so was a certain year in the late 1980s, when I was employed as a teacher of fiction-writing and when I approached my place of employment on four mornings of every week on foot, having walked from the nearest railway-station through certain back-streets of a suburb of Melbourne where the value of the meanest cottage would have been twice that of the house that my wife and I had been paying off for twenty and more years in a suburb on the opposite side of the city.