Australian Love Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

terrain of his palm. I take the other and lift both hands to my cheeks, slide them down my neck and over my shoulders.
    Mum, Sammy calls, are we going to have cake?
    Yes, I say. First let’s get the fire going.
    Max Assunzione and I gather the drift of scrunched and twisted butcher’s paper strewn on the floor to light the fire. We touch whenever we are within reach. My body begins to turn yellow. We stuff the papers into the fireplace, make a tepee of kindling sticks, load in wood. Soon the air is crackling. An orange glow enters the afternoon.
    What are you going to make for us? Sammy asks at dinner.
    Max looks at me. I have put on my purple dress. A spark spits and fizzes in the fireplace. A log falls into red coals with a sigh.
    I’m going to make you a swing set, he says.
    Sammy claps his hands.
    Oh Mum. Cool!

WHY CUPID IS PAINTED BLIND

The Lesson
    KEVIN BROPHY

    At the end of his street, which is at the top of a hill, there is a medieval church with tombstones lolling around at all sorts of angles right up to the walls. Hundreds of years ago there would have been a neat parish cemetery in the block of land beside the church and a garden of flowers between church and graves. It took those few hundred years for the multiplying tombstones to tumble across the lawn into the flowerbeds and up to the walls of the church. Now the April jonquils and the bluebells grow any which way in surprising corners and gaps. The whole place is fenced off, but people still gather in the church to hold services, sometimes for a new funeral. They can always find a place to squeeze a shiny new plaque between the old tombstones. There is always room for more if you have yourself cremated. The names on the tombstones are the names of the streets around here. There’s a Mr Thorobold, ‘Barrister’, who died in the eighteenth century, he has two streets named after him. There are two signs at the gate to the church grounds, one listing the names of local men who died in the Great War and the other asking people to take away their rubbish.

    He goes in to his mother. She is watching television and drinking beer. She looks beautiful, he thinks, as she sits there in the sunlight that slants through the side window. Her red hair shines. She has chosen to sit right in the sunniest place in the room. Her sleevesare short, her crumpled blue dress is pulled above her knees. Her eyes are red because she has been crying. The television laughs, and laughs again. His mother doesn’t laugh.
    Where have you been? she asks.
    At the church, he tells her. I didn’t leave any rubbish. It’s their small joke.
    And you didn’t lie down on a grave? Never lie down on a grave. It’ll bring you bad luck. And never sing in a graveyard either, that’s bad luck too.
    What kind of bad luck?
    You don’t want to know.
    He had in fact been lying down on a grave. He had enjoyed being down there at what he thought of as bone-level. He knew that the older boys took girls in among those tombstones at night and lay down with them in the dark where shadows helped them do whatever needed doing. He had seen couples go up there holding hands and drinking, the boys usually looking like they wanted to pick a fight with someone.
    Beside his mother on the lounge chair is a box of tissues, one new bright white paper bloom coming from its centre slit. Her hand hovers there above it as though she is considering how much more crying she needs to do. The can of beer in her other hand is probably already too warm to really enjoy. There would be fish and chips again tonight or maybe a kebab from the corner shop. That’s all right with him. Neither of them is really interested in meal times.
    What would you do, he asks, if a homeless person camped on our front garden outside your bedroom window?
    Don’t start, just don’t.
    What if there was an old man in the street who had forgotten who he was and where he lived? What would you