Demeter tried again to vary her tone. She wanted to have a voice that could stop buses. She wanted cloaks thrown down at her feet. She wanted recognition, sparkling blue eyes. All the noises of the house went on and she creased her forehead trying to will away their bickering, their inability to get anything done without her. She took her breath down,as she had been taught, down into her lower stomach, her perineum, imagining darkest treacle there, thick and slow moving, sticky with black sugar. ‘Savage’ she told the mirror again, ‘savage’ and was, as usual, privately pleased at the moody, red haired hallucination whom she knew to be herself. Of all the books she could have chosen to read, this book, now in her long tapering hands, with its green black pictures of rage and lonely victory,with its angry misspellt poetry, seemed exactly hers. When she surveyed herself like this, she felt as if everything she had experienced was compressed into this one inked word, and that the word had wriiten her and that she was now waiting to hear what her next one must be. She leant forward, ignoring the sound of her brother starting the shower, and tried to listen for the other voice she had been told about, a voice that would bring her a next step,a dramatic new gift.