Heat and Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘They’re all crazy, twisted, that’s right. Out of control.’
    I heard that when they asked Mia, ‘Who?’ she closed her eyes and started to tremble.
    It was a few days until I got to see her in the hospital room. Mia wouldn’t look up at me, and I was afraid to get too close.
    I knew it was the best thing for Mia to move away, but for a long while, all through high school especially, I thought about her dying every night. I couldn’t shake it. As soon as I could I left the mountain and the stories behind.
    Years later, when I did find myself missing it all, prodding for a former version of me that wasn’t sculpted in anger – what do they say in Sydney: Aboriginal men are always angry – it was maybe too late; my grandmother had gone and my mother was an old woman who had turned timid. The Hill End Road house of generations had been sold and the mountain was out of my mind’s eye. I wasn’t a bush boy anymore, not a bush man. I had been in Sydney for almost a decade. I had stopped ticking the box. I thought, what’s the point? By then I had seen Mia at least three times: on the Parramatta train, in the Chinatown food court and dancing in a flash club on Oxford Street. She told me if I was going to make my way back home I’d better do it soon before the dust had covered my tracks.

Skin
    Outside, a rosella perched shyly on the edge of the bird bath. Marie watched her daughter, Irma, light up when she saw the bird, and she stumbled towards it. Marie soon noticed there was another rosella there, a smaller one. Irma’s hair shone a bronze colour. She and the pair of birds coexisted in the outside space in the shade for the afternoon. Marie looked up after every shirt she folded. There was something about seeing your darling when she didn’t know she was being watched. She felt Irma close to her skin. The sun interchanged. Irma’s mouth moved against her cheek, speaking words into the passage. Her thumb rested between her lips and nose.
    Evidently an afternoon often changed quickly in the valley. The air wolfish, the sky pale lilac, growing dark too soon. Irma lifted her head when her father spread out of the screen door and told her to come inside. Griffin had his arm around her shoulders as they came in together.
    ‘Quite breezy, isn’t it?’ he remarked, closing both doors behind them.
    ‘I can hear it,’ Marie said. She put the washing basket down and bent to touch a piece of Irma’s hair, stuck to her cheek.
    ‘You hungry, darling?’
    Irma nodded, still mute in her imaginings.
    ‘Dinner will be ready soon.’
    Their son, Pete, had found the dog and held it across its belly like a teddy bear. He had spent most of the day in bed with a head cold. Marie picked up honey from the woman, June, who lived around the corner, and spun it into strong tea. Pete didn’t like hot drinks and let it cool on the bedside, so when she fetched his empty mug the honey had sunk to the bottom like sand in the ocean.
    When the weather turned this way they were reminded of the thin structure they lived in. The plates in the cabinet shook for three minutes. Griffin moved quickly to shut every window in the house, so what resulted was a closed feeling, a whirling sound that haunted a part in Marie’s consciousness, an old anxiety, not forgotten.
    The gust passed and Marie and Griffin and the children went out the back to look at the foggy calm. When her sister Pearl came wading through the long grass, her hands on the hips of the ironbarks, part of Marie was unsurprised to even call out, ‘I knew the wind would bring you.’ Griffin and Marie hurried down the slope to help her – she was a dirty weight, belly protruding in her sweaty white dress, mud on her knees.
    ‘My goodness,’ Marie said, rubbing Pearl’s cheek in an effort to warm her, for as usual her skin was parched.
    Pearl said, ‘I need to eat.’
    ‘Oh, love, of course,’ Marie said. ‘I’ve got a pie in the oven. I’ll bring a piece to