Can You Keep a Secret? Read Online Free PDF Page B

Caitlin presented to her, pour water into it, and then she’d say, ‘Okay, off you go.’ If Caitlin said, ‘But it hurts, Mummy,’ Ruby would scoff and say, ‘You’ll live.’
    Ruby’s cooking wasn’t her strong point either. She served up Cornflakes for breakfast, and cheese jaffles, or bakedbeans on toast, at what she called ‘teatime’. And she never ran a bath for Caitlin and she never cut her hair, except once, and that was only after the school ordered her to do it because Caitlin had nits. The memory was seared into Caitlin’s psyche. She had been sitting at her wooden lift-top desk in Mrs Landry’s class at the school at Horseshoe Bay when the child behind her shot up his hand.
    ‘Nits!’ he said. ‘Caitlin’s got nits!’
    The class collectively said, ‘EWWWW!’
    Mrs Landry said, ‘Quiet!’ and ‘Don’t be so silly.’
    ‘But they’re jumping off her head, Mrs Landry! They’re jumping on my desk!’
    Mrs Landry walked briskly down the aisle towards Caitlin’s desk. Caitlin was beetroot red, and she’d never felt more like she wanted to reach up and scratch her head, but she didn’t.
    ‘Look, look!’ said the boy. He was on his feet, dancing from one foot to the other, pointing and saying, ‘Look, there it is!’ And there it was: a single nit with a translucent body, limping crookedly across the surface of his wooden desk.
    ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Mrs Landry. She squashed the nit and gently touched Caitlin’s shoulder, saying, ‘It’s alright.’ But the rules decreed that a note go home. Caitlin would have to have a nit treatment and, to prove it had been done, she would need to bring the empty nit solution container to class. She walked home feeling the weight of that problem. Ruby loathed spending money on nit treatments (and on shampoo, conditioner, soap, toothpaste,toothbrushes, floss, make-up, pimple cream, hairbands, and pretty much everything else).
    ‘Sweet Jesus,’ said Ruby, when Caitlin broke the news. ‘So, you’ve got nits. Doesn’t everyone?’
    ‘You have to get the special wash,’ said Caitlin, but there was only one shop on Magnetic, and it kept strange hours. ‘We can go to Townsville. We can go on the ferry.’
    ‘No, we can’t,’ said Ruby. ‘It’s ridiculous, a teacher telling people how to spend their own money, and how to live their lives.’ She got up, and went into the pink-tiled bathroom. ‘Like every kid at that bloody school hasn’t had nits at one time or another. Now they want me to prove that I’m doing something about it? Anybody else’s parents have to prove anything to the teacher?’
    She had been looking for scissors, but not found them. ‘I’ll prove that I’ve done something about it,’ she said. ‘Come here, and bring the StaySharp with you.’
    The StaySharp was a twelve-inch kitchen knife that lived in a triangular plastic case stuck with double-sided tape to the kitchen bench. In normal circumstances, Caitlin loved to drag the blade out by the black handle, but on this day she refused.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Ruby, drawing the blade herself.
    ‘Sit,’ she said, and Caitlin sat between Ruby’s knees and under her lit cigarette, and she cried silently as her mother hacked at her hair with the StaySharp. ‘Now you can go back to school and you can tell them, “Mum fixed my nits.”’
    Caitlin did go back to school, with hair chopped like felled trees in a forest.
    ‘Goodness,’ said Mrs Landry, ‘did you do that yourself?’
    ‘Yes,’ Caitlin said.
    ‘Oh my! Why didn’t you ask your mum?’
    ‘Mum’s not feeling well.’
    That was in fact true. Ruby was often not feeling well. She smoked too much dope and could spend days in bed, leaving Caitlin to fend for herself, which was how Caitlin learned to cook. Towards the end of her time on Magnetic, she was regularly feeding her mother, but none of that – she was sure of it – was what the three men from New York would want to hear, so she said,