Can You Keep a Secret? Read Online Free PDF

castaway is from a magic island. An island so powerful it can turn your compass! That sounds hot. Ha. That sounds cool , actually.’
    Colby had been standing beside Trevor, looking out towards the horizon. Grant was half-asleep in his deckchair.
    ‘I don’t think it’s actually true,’ said Caitlin. ‘It’s just what they taught us in school.’
    ‘Did they teach you that Captain Cook discovered Australia, too?’ Colby asked suddenly. He hadn’t turned around.
    ‘Yes,’ said Caitlin, nervously.
    ‘Well, I don’t think that’s true.’
    ‘You mean because of the Aborigines?’
    ‘I mean because of the Portuguese.’
    Caitlin hadn’t known what he was talking about. Robert saw her confusion, and jumped in to save her from embarrassment. ‘Ignore him,’ he said. ‘He’ll have read something in a book. Don’t let him lecture you about it. And I don’t want to hear about the Portuguese. I want to hear about Magnetic. How many people live there? Did you have an apartment or a house?’
    ‘A house,’ said Caitlin. ‘I don’t think there were many apartments.’
    She was still a bit flushed – embarrassed, actually – by Colby’s intervention. Did he think she was stupid? She was also surprised by how much she suddenly cared about what Colby thought.
    ‘And what kind of house was it?’ asked Robert.
    ‘I don’t know. Just a house house.’
    ‘And did you go to school on the island, or did you have to go to the mainland for school?’
    ‘There’s a school there at Horseshoe Bay,’ said Caitlin. ‘We had to walk over a little creek to get there. There were stepping stones. And there’s a shark cage in the bay, so if it’s lunchtime, you can swim. You can see the shark cage, actually, if you go down with goggles. It’s got wooden bars, with slime hanging off them, and sometimes you’d see a hammerhead on the other side, looking back at you.’
    ‘Hammerheads!’ said Robert. ‘That’s fantastic.’ He was delighted. ‘Did you hear that, Grant? Daisy Duke here went to school with sharks.’
    From behind his mirrored glasses, a dozy Grant murmured, ‘I work on Wall Street with sharks.’
    ‘I’ve got to know more,’ said Robert. ‘Tell me everything, Daisy Duke. But get me another beer first. And don’t let me fall asleep. We’ve got a plan to stay up until it’s dark. Then we’ll eat. Then we’ll nap. Then we’ll wake up tomorrow, and all this jet lag will be gone.’
    Caitlin nodded, and went down the tiny spiral staircase to the galley. She was wondering how much to share. Magnetic Island is famous as a nature reserve. There’s a colony of tamerock wallabies. It’s home to the curlew, a bird with thick knees that bend backwards. Hippies think it’s paradise, and where you find hippies, you find marijuana. Caitlin had grown up with that: she learned to count with her mother’s five-weight copper scales. And where there’s drugs there’s often other problems, all of which were on her mind as she emerged from the galley with three more beers.
    ‘So, did you just have the run of the island?’ Robert asked. ‘Or am I fantasising?’
    ‘You’re fantasising,’ murmured Grant, but he didn’t mean about the island.
    ‘I suppose I did. Mum was pretty slack,’ said Caitlin. ‘I didn’t really get told what to do, if that’s what you mean.’ She wasn’t kidding: there were some hippies on Magnetic in the early 1980s who practised what’s now known as attachment parenting, meaning they kept their toddlers on their long nipples until well after they could walk. But Ruby’s style, if she even had a style, might best be characterised as benign neglect. ‘Go away,’ she’d say if Caitlin ventured home before it was completely dark, ‘and don’t come back unless you’re bleeding.’ But actually, there was no point in Caitlin heading home when she was bleeding. Ruby wasn’t the type to keep Smurfette Band-Aids in a medicine kit. She’d hold open whatever wound