Australian Love Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

clear to him: but he felt that there was something ahead for him now. He had his father’s weak chin and his mother’s red hair. He knew he would never be handsome. He would never stand on a corner with life coming right up to him and wanting him. He was more like that North Sea going at those grey stones again and again, tasting each one over and over blindly, just doing what it does. He would be like that, just doing what he needed to do day after day, and Aileen Cowan would love him for it. Or she wouldn’t.

    What if you could reverse your life like you reverse a car? Would you?
    Go away, go away.
    He would not go away.
    The Vikings were pagans weren’t they, but you can’t hate them for that can you?
    He remembers the way his father had slammed the door of the car when they got back from Beeston Road. There was a banjo song being played on the car radio. He liked it and wanted
    to keep listening to it but his mother took the key from the ignition and threw it toward her husband.
    Go on then! she had called in her ragged way. Get out of here, get away from the bitch and her loafing brother, the one you want to murder!
    Bitch, he had said again with his back turned to her as he went into the house.

    What if dad came back? What would you do about that? he asks, but his mother was gone into her bedroom.

    Dreams are things that don’t exist, his father used to say. There’s only these hands and this street with its stones stuck in it and we’ll be driving over the faces of these stones back and forward, back and forward, till we die. Dream about that if you can. He would pull a cigarette hard into his face and blow smoke all over the room. He was a man and everything about him was manly. He loved to show the muscles in his arms at home.
    That was his lesson, the one about stones. He said it whenever he lost his job or something went wrong like some man disappointing him or his mother’s brother coming round for money. Trying to charm the money out of them. His uncle’s laugh was high pitched and silly but his eyes were dangerous in a way that made his parents give him money. Well, he guessed they gave him money because of the way it always ended with his uncle shaking his father’s hand at the door and his father’s eyes on the floor.

    The box of tissues is still there on the chair with some used ones dropped around it, lipstick marks on some of them as if shehad been practising kissing. Tomorrow he would walk home with Aileen again. She might now walk beside him despite the narrowness of the path through the churchyard. Their hands might touch, casually, and their bodies would wait for the meaning of this touch to take hold. It might take years or it might be instant. Why does the sea keep swallowing those stones on the beach at Sheringham, bleaching them and rounding them, testing them for thousands of years? It is as if there is something big for the sea to think about, something that has not yet occurred to him. If he could think of it, too, he would be occupied like the sea for the rest of his life. He thinks of how the sea is locked inside itself really, imprisoned, and how his father looks like this sometimes, all the troubles of a whole sea inside him, but in the end his father is just another prison.
    I’m going to be me forever , he thinks, not quite miserably, but sensing the decisiveness of a trap springing shut.
    What if there was a lesson you could learn at the beginning of your life that would keep you safe, what would that lesson be, Mum? He calls so that she can hear him from her room.
    She ignores him.
    What if you got a phone call from someone who was about to commit murder, what would you do?
    She returns, sipping another can and sucking on a cigarette thoughtfully, glancing silently at the laughing television.
    What if I was not here, where would you look for me, Mum?

    She would drive to Sheringham and look for him down beside the volunteer lifeboat