Australian Love Stories Read Online Free PDF

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    She finishes her can and gets up to get another from the fridge, which is making a lot of mechanical noise as usual. She shoves the closed door hard because sometimes this settles the fridge. It is suddenly quiet.

    Easter is coming but this year there will be no holiday on Beeston Road in Sheringham. He will not be able to go down to the murky sea and watch the waves come in over those blue-grey shingles, so many of them and each one placed there by the infinitely patient and repetitive North Sea. No walking along the crumbling cliff top, waiting for some part of it to give way, imagining that eventually all of Norfolk could crumble into that dull sea. Two thousand years ago Vikings had come across that sea and stepped out onto those stones, shocking the villagers who never expected the sea would deliver Vikings to them. Those mad pagan Vikings taught the men of Beeston how to make the boats that would make them famous for hundreds of years, so you can’t know, can you, whether what you see coming out of the water in front of you is a dog of doom or an angel of salvation. There is just no way of telling until maybe a thousand years have gone by.
    Everything changed when they were driving back from Beeston Road last August. His father had taken them away for a holiday when he had lost his job again. They had rabbit traps and fishing rods in the back, because his father usually returned to his dream of being ‘self-sufficient’ when he was out of work. They were arguing, his mother and father, they looked uglywhen they did that. His father’s face became larger in a bursting kind of way and hers was stretched and twisted and the tears would come springing out of her eyes. ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she’d say. ‘Bitch,’ he would answer under his breath. He would toss his cigarette out the window. He did it as though he might toss his own son out the window too at any moment. ‘Your fucking brother,’ he would say. It was always her brother who had done something bad. ‘I could murder him. He still owes me, and now, now…’ She put her palms out on the dashboard in front of her as if the car was a mad thing she had to restrain. The car was a poor thing that hardly went. It coughed and lunged at hills so that you thought it would never get up them. It wobbled through corners. ‘Bitch,’ his father would mutter when he glanced across at her. His job was gone and that probably meant they would have almost no money again, and his father would be at home all day in his bad way. His father’s hands had been shaking too much to hold the steering wheel steady.

    Yesterday he kissed Aileen Cowan on the way home from school. They did it among the graves as they cut across the churchyard. He had stopped and she had bumped into him because as usual she was walking right behind him talking wildly about a book she was reading or it might have been about something her brother had told her. She had a slight lisp, and a huskiness about her voice, which he listened for more than her words. They had been playmates in pre-school, so she was really close to him, she might as well have been his shadow. He spun round and grabbed her and kissed her because he had been imagining doing this for about a month. She did not run away or turn away. She laugheda short, quick laugh and pushed him in the chest. ‘Caarn, get going,’ she said. He turned back to the path and they went on past the list of war dead and the warning about rubbish out onto the street where everything seemed normal but wasn’t. ‘Sorry,’ he said before leaving her, not because he was sorry but because he wanted her to say something about what she thought about the kiss. She shrugged and just walked away from him.
    He thought he had learned something important, or had taken an important step toward learning something. Whatever it was he had learned he could not say, for it was not