A Cry from the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page B

see.
    â€œI’d be delighted to show him around and take him to things,” she announced gladly.
    â€œGee, thanks, Auntie Betty. You’re a sport.”
    I hope not, she thought.
    As she pottered around the flat for the rest of the afternoon it occurred to her to wonder from time to time why she reacted so badly to her nephew. Things had got off onto the wrong foot when he had arrived in London eighteen months before. He had been warned that she was a working writer and never had guests in the flat for longer than a week, but he had made himself and his copious luggage at home in the flat and displayed a clear intention of staying there as long as he could string it out. In those first days in Britain he had made determined attempts to break into the acting business there. He was not without credentials, though nearly so. He had had three months ten years earlier in Neighbours, as the resident hunk. His contract had not been renewed. The experience had not cut much ice in Britain. Since then he had made a living as barman and bouncer, swimming instructor and rugby player with a minor side, PE teacher and “personal trainer”—with no doubt some extra income from selling his body to whomsoever was attracted by it.
    Bettina pulled herself up. She had no evidence whatever that Mark sold himself on the side. The only experience of him that had given her the idea that he might was his habit, in that one week in her flat, of going around the place in his briefs or—on one occasion only, when he had been the object of her wrath—in only a jockstrap. She had felt uneasy with him. It was as if he was offering himself to her—at her age!—in lieu of rent. That sort of aggressive male sexuality made her uneasy.
    Still made her uneasy. It made her realize that she had never got over that terrible night in Bundaroo. It wasn’t enough, never to have gone back. To put it forever behind her she would have had to have had no people like Mark who could remind her of it. In this day and age, she said to herself, that was unlikely.
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    It was two weeks after Hughie began at Bundaroo High that Betty walked to school with him and Steve Drayton. Steve was from Wilgandra, where his father was a stockman, and he only walked with them because he had designs on Betty’s friend Alice Carey, and thought that through Betty he might attain what he coveted: Alice’s partnership at the Leavers’ Dance in December, her brilliant revision notes for the end-of-the-year examinations, slices of her mother’s well-thought-of passion-fruit sponge, and beyond that her heart—and beyond that still her bed, or at least access to her knickers. Betty rather liked Steve. He was down-to-earth in a way she approved of.
    â€œAlice Carey’s brilliant at geography,” Steve was saying. “I can never make head nor tail of it. I wish it was just maps, and ‘What’s the capital of Austria?’ ”
    They were approaching the bitumen strip of Bundaroo’s main street, and Betty saw the brawny form of Sam Battersby outside the Grafton’s Hotel, rolling empty barrels around to the strip of wasteland at the back. She changed her position so that the boys were between her and the hotel.
    â€œWhatcher doin’ that for?” demanded Steve. “I was talkin’ to you.”
    â€œI don’t like the way Sam Battersby looks at me,” said Betty, keeping her voice low.
    â€œLooks at you? Listen to ya!” said Steve, taking no such precautions. “He’s just lookin’ at the kids goin’ to school. Not much happens in Bundaroo.”
    â€œThis happens every day,” said Betty.
    â€œBetty’s right,” said Hughie. “He does look at her.”
    Steve seemed about to make some jeer at the newcomer, but he bit it back. Sam Battersby had upended a barrel on a low dray outside the front entrance to his hotel, and had planted his big fleshy arms