Floundering Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gran and Pa’s. I went out to look at them finches. There was one dead there, on the bottom of the cage. I opened the door, leaned in and looked at it. The other birds went fluttery. The dead one had poos on it. I picked it up. The feathers felt slippery and cool and it was small as my hand. I closed the cage quickly and took the bird back to our room.
    Jordy was asleep, all in one corner of his bed. Our beds and covers matched and there was matching gold lamps that turned on when you tapped the base. Later Gran put up a dinosaur poster, but then there was only a watercolour picture of the beach, washed out up there on the wall. Pa painted them, always the same beach over and over again. I put the bird under the bed, wrapped in a tissue. The bird stank for a while, but one day when I looked it was gone and Gran never said nothing about it.

    I can’t see any more birds here, just the grass that’s patchy right the way to the edge of the cliff. There are no fences or nothing. Just a sign saying BEWARE and a picture of a crumbly cliff and a stick figure man falling into nothing. Loretta’s still leaning on the car, blowing smoke. The cliff is way up above the ocean. It looks like solid ground but in the picture it is pancake thin, the guts blown out from under it. Jordy walks out to the edge.
    Look, Tom, he yells back at me. He’s thin as the stick man. His shorts billow in the wind.
    I walk a little way, stepping around the scrubby bushes.
    Look, he says, leaning over the edge.
    I step a little further, but the closer I get the louder the blood rushes into my ears. I look at the ground. The dirt around my feet is grey as chalk.
    Look, he says. The edge is so close.
    I feel dizzy.
    Look. He grabs me by the arm and points down to the waves that are throwing white into the air. Way down there the rocks look the shiniest black. I can’t feel my feet. Jordy grabs a hold of my other arm and steps back a little. He pushes me closer to the edge but hangs on to my arms, so for a moment it’s just my toes touching the earth and the rest of me is out there, over the edge, the chalky dirt crumbling.
    Saved ya life, he yells and yanks me back. I stumble onto my bum. My heart is pumping blood to every single bit of my body, even my fingertips are pulsing with it.
    I hate you, I say. I hate you, and I grab a clump of dirt to fling at him. He flinches, but the wind takes it away and none of it hits him. He’s laughing in chuckles that seem to burst out of him like hiccups.
    What are you doing? Loretta says. She’s suddenly there, her hair blowing up and around her head. She grabs us both by our school shirts. You shouldn’t be near the edge. She’s pulling me along the ground, so that the rocks are digging into me, and my shorts are coming down.

    Stop, I say, you’re hurting me. She’s got a hold of Jordy too, and there’s all three of us on the edge of the cliff.

    Stop it, says Jordy and pulls from her grip, you’re hurting him.Loretta lets me go and I shuffle back into my shorts. A gull, catching the wind, flies up and hangs right in front of us not flapping its wings. I look off into the blue that seems brighter here than anywhere. A shadow falls on us.

    You kids shouldn’t – oh, the man says, oh – I thought you were kids. I didn’t realise – his words hang in the air like the gull.
    Pardon me? says Loretta and Gran sneaks out of her mouth.
    The man blushes like a girl, from his neck right to the top of his head. Sorry, he says. He runs his hands through a thick head of grey hair. I didn’t mean anything – he looks back towards his caravan, parked near Bert, and his wife is there with her arms crossed. His wife has short grey hair, they all do. Like it’s impossible to grow old with long hair.
    Because the sky’s low with Loretta’s silence he says, Where you headed?
    I get up. Loretta pulls us in front of her. West, mate, we’re headin’ west, she says.
    Well, nice to meetcha, he says and after standing