The water moved blackly over grey rocks. She did not wish to descend, as the children did easily, the rock steps that led to the water's edge.

She stood on the path above, twisting her hands, and young Dave McCorkell, squatting a little further up the hill with two dew-wet rabbits in his hand, thought she looked like a princess in a fairy story. Her long grey dress had a sheen like the underside of gumleaves but it did not camouflage her form or even, with the skirt clutched to her, hide her tiny feet.

He thought he heard her praying, but whatever the words she spoke he never heard them, or if he did hear them they were driven from his mind by the force of his feelings as he watched her hitch, first her skirt, then her petticoats, and remove, in a flurry so confusing he could not be sure of what he had seen, a garment of some type.

It was a belt with some weight attached to it which, as he watched, she swung round and round. She was going to throw it out across the top of the falls, but she was not expert and the thing, whatever it was, flew out and caught itself on the lower branches of a flowering ti-tree which grew out, at an acute angle, from the bank on which she stood.

He heard her cry "Oh no", a lonely desperate cry. He put down the rabbits thinking he would help her. But then he knew that he should not have been watching her reveal herself so completely to him, and he picked the rabbits up again.

David McCorkell was eight years old when all this took place. When he was a soldier in Cairo in 1917 he was known as the "Rabbit", but it was not because he had once held two of them in his hands and watched a lady perform a strange ritual; it was because he had a small twitching nose and a timid manner.

He squatted on his haunches and watched fearfully, his small grey eyes riveted on Molly Rourke.

He felt sorry for the lady trying to climb the tree. He felt sorry when he heard her make small whimpering noises, was glad when she, at last, caught the belt in her hand, and felt for her when she slipped sideways and muddied her dress on the path.

When she swung the belt again he crossed his fingers for her and screwed up his face in sympathy when it caught, in mid-air, on a branch of a big old she-oak that hung above the falls.

The pair of them, Dave and Molly in their separate positions, watched Dr Grigson's electric belt suspended twenty feet above the Sandy River. Molly, recognizing the calamity she had brought upon herself, convinced that the belt hung there as shameful advertisement for her madness which all the world could read, resolved that day that she and her husband would leave Point's Point before the swimming season started.

When she walked back along the track she did not have time for giddiness. She was in a panic that left no room for jolts and explosions. She entered the town wet, torn and muddy, cutting across the back of O'Briens Paddocks where the tall bracken soaked her dress, slipped up beside the blacksmith's shed, and left a large lump of mud on the back veranda (which she would later blame Archie Hearn for and abuse him with unusual heat). She made such a fuss about the little lump of mud and her outburst was so unlike her that Archie concluded, quite rightly, that Miss Rourke had the marriage jitters.

At about the time Molly arrived, torn and panting, in her room, young Dave McCorkell was suspended twenty feet above the Sandy River retrieving Dr Grigson's Electric Invigor-ator.

He carried his treasure back to where his rabbits lay in a patch of new sunshine. He could not imagine what this treasure was for, but thinking about the cloudy, unnameable, unknowable possibilities made his penis become stiff. He scratched his bare legs and resolved to keep it a secret.

Yet a week after Molly Rourke's Protestant wedding to Jack McGrath everyone in Point's Point knew the whole story about Molly Rourke: that she had worn, for all her time amongst them, an electrically operated chastity belt.

But by then Molly and Jack were on their way to Geelong, Jack marvelling at the way he had managed to make the decision so quickly whilst Molly sat rigid in the train seat: her future madness hung before her, dangling by a rope in her mind's eye.

Molly stayed in bed while the voices assailed her.

She had always liked flowers. There had been no flowers in her youth, just a backyard with puddles of stale water unnoticed by sunshine. She tried to think of flowers now, to enjoy what little the view from her bedroom afforded in March. She loved the tender, brilliant complications of flowers, like the folds of ball dresses. She cared more for her flowers than the Hispano Suiza or the house or the society of important people who always left her feeling as if she had been unworthy of their company. But flowers had always made her feel better and she looked at them and drew from them that nectar that Annette Davidson might hope to draw from art.

She had planned her garden in Geelong so that there was always something to see from her bedroom window.

But today was not a good day. The canna lilies, rich red and pretty pink, occupied the midground of her view, and the creamy chrysanthemums the foreground. Yet there was no joy to be had here, and it was not because there was a fine drizzle of rain falling, or because the winds of early winter had begun to whip across Corio Bay making the water an unpleasant green-grey.

Petals loosened themselves and fell and whilst, on a happier day, this early destruction of a flower would have caused her anxiety, today there were other things preying on her mind.

There were voices in the house, and no one else in it.

She had fare welled her daughter to the library. She had seen Herbert Badgery walk away down the esplanade. It was Bridget's day off. She was all by herself and she had, twice, put on her dressing gown and walked through every room of the house and around the wide veranda. There was no one in the house but there were voices. It was not the wireless, which she had disconnected from the wall, nor His Master's Voice.

She retired to bed with voices in her ears. She was having tiny explosions in her head. She detected malice in the voices. Her bed was too far off the floor and made her giddy. She lay in the bed, pale and sweating, while her green eyes viewed the garden from a bed of puffy flesh.

It was then, as one particularly vicious gust of wind shook the branches of the leafless peach tree and bent the fleshy green stalks of the canna lilies until their faces were pressed into the ground, that the naked figure of her daughter sailed slowly through the air above her eyes. She did not seem to merely fall, but to move with dream-like slowness, transcribing an arc while the coppery triangle of her pubic hair, until now protected from her mother's gaze, was exposed quite clearly to its anxious audience.

The figure landed with a thud on the grass beyond the canna lilies.

It said: "Hoof."

Molly McGrath was beset with hot prickling skin and a thundering heart which she tried to still with the pressure of her hand. She saw her daughter stand, and saw her arm hang like a broken wing.

Molly McGrath whimpered and curled her fifty-year old body into a shaking ball beneath the sheets.

When Jack McGrath arrived home, triumphant from his negotiations in Colac, he had great difficulty in persuading his wife to leave her bed. The slightly fixed smile she brought to the table made him feel very uneasy indeed.