I have this pet theory that adults and children come from different planes of existence. I mean, they occupy the same Cartesian space and everything, but they seem to inhabit totally separate realities. You probably couldn't write a dissertation on the subject, but if you think back to your own childhood, you'll realize it has to be true. A child's world is huge and bright and wonderfully unpredictable; a place where the laws of physics are constantly rescinded as a matter of course. Time has a fluent, malleable quality unknown in the adult realm. A minute could last for an hour, an hour could stretch out to a year. A good summer could literally scroll away into eternity, sort of like those old-fashioned barber poles you used to see down in your main street. That's the thing I remember most from my childhood: the days seemed to go on forever.

I think it was because we were experiencing everything for the first time. There was so much to see and touch and know from one heartbeat to the next, we had to squeeze the life out every last meandering second. A simple walk to the park could take you to some crazy, Technicolor land where cats could fly and trees could dance and every rainbow led to a pot of gold. As you grow older, you lose touch with this world of gnomes and sprites and Puff the Magic Dragon. You're taken to a room where you forget the wondrous lessons of infancy and learn the insurmountable truths of life in the Real World. And finally, you descend into some lifeless gray limbo of loans and paychecks and mortgage repayments, where nobody lives happily ever after because all the fairytales are politically correct.

And the worst part is this: you go there of your own free will.

Well, most of us do, anyway.

For those of us who never quite abandon Alice or Pooh or Dorothy, there are the memories of an endless, golden season in the middle of the year. Looking back to those fine, still mornings I spent playing in the Reinhart's front yard, I realize that they were amongst the happiest in my life. There were shadows, needless to say (including the one I faced every afternoon around 4.30), but they seemed to take up only a tiny portion of each day, like the passage of a single cloud over a vast green landscape. If the cloud signaled the presence of an oncoming storm, it seemed too low on the horizon to pose any serious threat. The days were long, the days were warm, the days were beautiful. And whenever I recall the casual miracles of that everlasting June, I know that I'm seeing the world once more through the eyes of a child.

I tiptoed down the stairs with a hand touching the banister, listening for sounds of movement down in the living room. Mom usually slept until about twelve, but she occasionally woke up early and staggered 'round the house in a rambling stupor. It didn't happen very often, but I knew better than to draw attention to myself when she was tanked to the gills. Last time she'd awoken in that state, she'd gone on a minor rampage, smashing glasses and screaming at the top of her lungs. I spent the next two days hiding in my room, listening to her cursing my father to hell.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I crept down the hallway towards the front door. I was dressed very simply; blue spandex bike shorts under a Hard Rock t-shirt four sizes too big. This was a radical departure for me, but there wasn't much else to choose from. Everything else was in the laundry, had been for the last fortnight... Still, the new look suited me in some respects. I'd taken to wearing oversized t-shirts over the past week, ever since the night I played the spinning game. The one I had on now hung almost to my knees, so I'd hitched it up with a knot at the right hip.

I glanced back over my shoulder, making sure she wasn't standing at the top of the stairs. That was how these things always work; it was kind of like those Wes Craven movies where you think the hero's finally safe and then the monster appears out of nowhere to rip his face off with a rusting garden hoe or something. They always get you when you're not looking. Fortunately, there was nothing lurking on the first floor landing, so I continued down the corridor, glancing into the living room as I slipped past the doorway.

Mom was lying on the sofa.

No, that's not the right word. She wasn't lying; she had collapsed like a landslide, like an imploded skyscraper. The sofa was surrounded by the wreckage of her disintegration; a chaos of upturned furniture, broken bottles and cast-off pizza cartons. Shattered glass and scraps of refuse littered the floor; a trail of chicken bones and KFC boxes led out to the kitchen. The whole downstairs area was a wasteland stinking of garbage and cigarettes and three-day old vomit.

But worse than all this was my mother herself.

She was sprawled half off the sofa with her knuckles grazing the floor, her lank, matted hair pasted to the side of her face. A thin runner of drool hung from the corner of her mouth, threading its way tenuously to the floor. Her face was puffy and bloated, the skin tinged with a faint yellow cast. I studied her features, trying to see the woman she'd been only a few months before, the woman who used to cook me flap-jacks for lunch every weekend; flapjacks with sugar and maple syrup. There was no sign of her. She'd been submerged beneath a torrent of rancid, melting flesh. Her body had fared no better; she seemed to be overflowing around the midsection. Her loose-fitting jogging pants had worked their way down her hips, exposing a sweeping vista of pulpy cellulite.

Despite my fear of her drunken rages, I still felt some degree of compassion. At the age of nine, I understood that she was lonely and hurt and depressed, that she wasn't entirely responsible for her actions. There were things I didn't understand, of course. I didn't know that Dad had managed to drain most of her bank account all the way from Chicago. I didn't know about the unpaid bills, the repossession waivers or the eviction notices. I had no idea how desperate our position was about to become. No idea whatsoever.

I stood at the doorway staring down at her, wondering what I could do, how I could help my mother escape the gray, swollen mass bulking out the sofa. Even now, I ask myself if there was anything I could have done, any words I could have said; something that might have brought her back from her self-constructed purgatory. But I was a child, barely three months past my ninth birthday. What could I have done?

She stirred on the couch, grunting under her breath and fluttering her eyelids. I backed quietly down the hallway, holding my breath in case she heard me and woke up shrieking.

A moment later I was stepping out into the wide, cool morning, shutting the darkness behind me as I trotted down the porch steps. A green haze of dragonflies darted across the lawn, their multi-faceted eyes glinting like emeralds. I watched them swarm off towards the street, then walked over to the fence dividing the Reinhart's yard from ours.The sun had barely cleared the trees, the day was unfurling before me, and the cloud had passed over the landscape.

At least for now.

The Old Stewart Place was a colonial-style homestead with a veranda running all the way 'round the outside. Easily the most picturesque house on Lakehurst Avenue, it had bay windows out front and attic sleepers in the roof. The front garden had erupted into full bloom almost the same day Chrissie arrived and appeared to be taking over the footpath as the season progressed. You had to follow a footpath through the rose bed to reach the veranda. Maybe that's why sprinting up the Reinhart's front steps always felt like coming home. By definition, a home should have a garden.

The front door was open (Eve didn't believe in air conditioners, said they caused insanity or something), but I paused to knock all the same. Even in a place like Fairmont, you don't just go waltzing into someone's house all unannounced, everyone knew that. I waited with my hand on the doorframe for a few seconds, then I heard a clear, warm voice inviting me inside. It was Chrissie's Mom, calling out from the living room.

"Come in Billy."

Evelyn always knew when it was me, probably because I arrived around the same time every day. I walked into the long transept hall, figuring Chrissie must've been up in her bedroom (as she didn't come scampering out to answer the door like she usually did). Probably playing with the Whipper-Snapper I gave her a few weeks back; she never got tired of zocking it back and forth.

As I headed down the corridor, I noticed a trail of tiny footprints leading from the staircase to the living room. Tiny wet footprints. For some reason, this fact didn't quite register on my consciousness. I turned into the archway, raising a hand in greeting, oblivious of what I was walking into.

"Hi, Mrs. Reinhart, is Chrissie - "

That was as far as I got. Freezing in mid-sentence, I dropped my eyes to the floor, my cheeks igniting with sudden embarrassment. All at once, I realized what the little footprints had meant. Chrissie wasn't up in her bedroom at all. She was down in the living room with her mother, standing in front of the sofa. Her moist blond hair trailed down the middle of her back, and there was a soft blue bath-towel lying at her feet.

And she was in her underwear.