In World City Read Online Free PDF Page B

lake was suddenly chill and Dion opened his eyes to see the sky had clouded over. He felt a lick of wind pass over his face and jackknifed himself upright, treading water firmly. A shadow was moving across the water and seconds later the gust hit him full in the face. He made for the shore with regular, determined strokes, though the wind piling waves in his face made for a difficult swim.
    Cycling hard, he still got home late, but there were no recriminations. Instead, he found an open bottle of wine on the table and two empty glasses. His parents only ever had wine on special occasions. Dion looked at the wine bottle then at his father; he’d not heard of anything special happening. His father looked pleased and slightly flushed. He said, “Whitlam’s coming next week. He’ll turn this place round if no one else will. I’ve made a deal to acquire this whole area for him to develop. Where this squalid little street is, there’ll be a golf course and holiday flats.”
    Dion was pleased to see his father pleased; it made the house an easier place to be. But who this Whitlam was he had no idea. Neither did he care – no more than he cared about golf courses or holiday flats. Dion’s parents lived in a world that meant nothing to him. He had a world of his own: his island that he had seen the wholeness of and whose life he felt as his life; his island to whom his grandmother was introducing him; his island that had in it a place he could live forever.

Handelmann’s Hotel...
    Dion watches the porter insert the lock card. He thinks of Miranda Whitlam – at least, Miranda Whitlam when he had last known her: Miranda Whitlam, who brought down everything he had built. Miranda Whitlam, he had tried to betray.
    How does such a person greet you after ten years?
    â€œHello, Dion. How’s it going? I hear you’re working in World City now.”
    He had recognised her voice instantly, had felt a sick emptiness and replied, “I’m all right. Where are you?”
    â€œI’m back where you started – in the Waste. Where did you think?” A pause, then, “Listen, I have something new I want to get going. Can you give me a way in?”
    â€œI’d rather not.”
    â€œI know that. Where do you want the contact made?”
    â€œWhat is it?”
    â€œYou’ll see.”
    Dion had known he could turn her in. But he’d already tried that once. In the ten years since, his only consolation had been that he had not succeeded.
    â€œOkay. Handelmann’s, room 243, 3.30 p.m. Saturday.”
    He watches the porter reach for the door handle, thinks of his own hand on the handle of a hotel-room door, with the warmth of her body close to him, the pressure of her hand on his shoulder, the softness of her hair against his cheek. He waves away the porter and walks into the room alone.

4
    Miranda Whitlam discovered that if she stared hard enough at the moonlit wall of jungle confronting her from her new bedroom window, she could make of it an abstract picture in planes of grey. She could make the moonlight shadows flatten over instead of beckoning her to fall into them, and she could see the tangled, writhing foliage that threatened to reach out and grasp her become no more than an intricate arabesque.
    Continuing to stare fixedly at the two-dimensional picture, she could feel her anxiety easing with the increasing depthlessness she could impose on the scene. More than that, just two dimensions made jigsaw-puzzle pieces of the tangled jungle screen, pieces she might be able to reach out and grasp and perhaps rearrange, reorder in some way, just as her father had done with those lines on his screen.
    Shortly after seeing him work his magic, just before they had left for the island, she had tried it herself with some interlocking plastic bricks the house-clearance had revealed, pushed to the back of one of her cupboards. She built what she called ‘a