We are catching the rattler into town, me and Karen and Maxine and Jo and Elizabeth. Maxine is wearing a full blonde wig, a tight red dress and spike- heeled shoes. It's Friday night. The old train with the swing-over seat backs and half-round silver ashtrays and wide heaters you can rest your feet on is our favourite. You can walk from carriage to carriage. We are smoking, and laughing, and Jo has brought her violin and it perfectly backgrounds our erratic conversational meandering. Taped to the inside of Karen's old leather bag is a postcard of a painting by Chagall: Paris through the Window (Paris par la fenêtre). Its bizarre and beautiful images, its rainbow colours make me yearn for something. Something indiscernible. Maybe to be how we are now, only more so and forever. That night we stand behind Victoria Market smoking dope. Five small figures in a single coat of pungent smoke almost lost to sight against the huge brick-walled back of the market. I am hallucinating slightly, everything inanimate is almost alive, and everything alive is shriekingly so. I fight the urge to panic. But I enjoy myself with an edge of hysteria to every moment. It is almost too much when one of page 22 Maxine's heels breaks and is hanging by a thread and she weaves her way in front of me with her wig and her flapping heel, her head at a defiant angle as people stare and laugh. Elizabeth is flicking through books at the second-hand book stall, Karen is holding a lacy dress up to the light in the second-hand clothes stall, Jo is talking to another tall pale stoned youth, her violin case tucked under one arm, one patched stockinged leg wound around the other. Maxine cruises the junk jewellery display, touching and exclaiming and engaging the stall attendant in loud conversation. I stand staring at the brightly embroidered afghanistan hats like little round boats lined with red.

Outside the market Jo takes off her black beret that highlights the pale animation of her face and rests it upside-down at her feet. She is wearing white stockings with thick blanket-like patches sewn on to them, a white transparent dress under a black coat which reaches to her ankles. She tucks her violin under her chin and half closes her eyes and begins to play. Her face, when she plays, looks like despair and ecstasy, like those paintings of Christ on the cross, that crossover point between being human and not. Above our heads is Jo's jutting arm with its racing fingers, and her sweeping arm with its light horsehair bow, and the notes which seem to come from the unspoken moments of every person who steps around her, who drops a coin or doesn't, from our own and her own unspoken moments. A young guy who stretches out on the gravel at the bottom of the steps to listen and watch comments, 'She doesn't know if she is a gypsy, or if she should be sitting on the left-hand side of the first violinist in the NZSO.'

We sit on the steps beside her and people walkover and around us. When Jo has earned enough money we head back into the market for coffees, smokes and custard squares. Elizabeth's sister comes in while we are sitting over our coffees. We make room for her, and together she and Elizabeth tell stories using their own lives, weaving silvery spider webs over dark corners. Telling stories is playing. When we were children we would get a long piece of elastic and sew the ends together, then two girls would stand with the elastic around the calves of their legs and one girl would be in. She would weave her body in and out of the elastic strands, jumping, twisting the elastic, making patterns, and sometimes we would all chant. Here is the elastic, here is what we make of it as each of us throws herself in, doing our fleet and twisting dances. But we need people on either side of us holding the elastic, and it helps to have an audience, and it helps if they are chanting.