Between My Father and the King by Janet Frame

you cross the court in those boots. Don’t you see the notice? No one, no one is allowed on here in anything but soft shoes. You’ll ruin it, you oaf.’
    She looked lovingly at the drab, prison-grey surface. She had bought five tickets in the raffle, even bought one for Roly, butneither of them had won anything, not a thing, and all for this tennis court, and she didn’t even play tennis, but still, she had a share in it and had to protect it, there had to be someone to protect it.
    â€˜Get off at once,’ she flung. ‘Get off at once.’
    She clittered on over the court. Tack , her shoes said. Tack, attack . Soon she disappeared behind the hedge, knowing that Roly would follow her. Her anger with him had died down. He was a poor soul, but the rain should have not been so sudden and rained all over her best dress.
    Roly stood a moment looking at the court. He saw the players getting ready to come out for a new game, and he knew he would have to walk across the court: even if he took his boots off, he would have to walk across it. So he stooped down and removed his boots, the left one, the right one, and tied the laces together, and hung the boots around his neck in the way he had seen it done. Then he approached the court and stepped on it. His bare feet were narrow and sunless and his big toes curled back like the prow of a canoe. The surface was hot and pricked his feet, but he walked across, smiling, smiling to himself and thinking, Why did they all go away? Why did they suppose that nothing would happen? But there seemed to be no one to look at him. He left the court and disappeared behind the hedge.
    Then the two players emerged from the pavilion and resumed their game. They volleyed and shouted. Their whiteness made them seem like tall sticks of chalk, but they made no mark on the court, and their feet moved softly, as on grey blotting paper. And the sun, lower in the sky now, shone out of a clear darkening blue, and there was no more rain that day.

A Night at the Opera
    We acted the cliché. We melted with laughter. Not the prickly melt that comes from sitting on a hot stove but the cool relaxing melt, in defiance of chemistry, like dropping deep into a liquid feather bed. We did not know or remember the reason for laughing. There was a film, yes; a dumb sad man with hair like wheat and round eyes like paddling pools; another man with a moustache like a toy hearth-brush; and many other people and things — blondes, irate managers, stepladders, whitewash, all the stuff of farce. And there was a darkened opera house growing cardboard trees and shining wooden moons.
    I shall never know why we laughed so much. Perhaps other films had been as funny, but this one seemed to contain for us a total laughter, a storehouse of laughter, like a hive where we children, spindly-legged as bees, would forever bring our foragings of fun to mellow and replenish this almost unbelievably collapsing mirth.
    Nor was it the kind of laughter that cheats by turning in the endto tears, or needing reinforcement with imagery. It was, simply, like being thrown on a swing into the sky, and the swing staying there, as in one of those trick pictures we had seen so often and marvelled at — divers leaping back to the springboard, horses racing back to the starting barrier. It was like stepping off the swing and promenading the sky.
    After the film we managed somehow to walk home. The afternoon was ragged with leaves and the dreary, hungry untidiness of a child’s half-past four. Faces and streets seemed wet and serious. The hem of sky, undone, hung down dirty and grey.
    But the laughter stayed with us, crippling, floating, rolling, aching, dissolving.
    â€˜It must have been a comic picture,’ our mother said, not knowing, not knowing, when she saw our faces.

    The refractory, or disturbed , part of the hospital, known as Park House, was built a safe distance from the bright admission ward whose pastel