Luck in the Greater West Read Online Free PDF Page A

and went in to her brother. Peter had been crying, but he’d found a game to play with his makeshift toys and had forgotten why the tears had cleaned a path down his cheeks. Sonja hugged him. She looked up at Polly. Pancakes were doubtful. Any meal was doubtful. Unless Sonja cooked something. Katerina Marmeladova indulged in emotions as her husband indulged in thick oblivion. The parents were wasted tonight.
    Sonja went back out into the hot, thick air.
    â€”Are you okay, Dad? Are you feeling sick? she asked.
    â€”Sonja. My beautiful daughter.
    Zakhar had spilled wine down his shirt and on his crotch. He looked too pathetic to hate. Besides, Sonja knew he thought hewas only abusing himself. It was a different story with her mother though. Her reaction to his drinking was becoming a habit, and a predictable one. Sonja wondered whether her mother thought it was the right thing to do to yell and cry and nag her husband and neglect everything else. The thing was, though, that her mother wasn’t like this when her father was sober; the situation was his fault.
    Sonja made some toast with stale dark rye bread. There was no butter, of course, so she drizzled some vegetable oil over it. The three children ate; the mother sat and cursed, occasionally yelling; and the father sat and drank, eventually wetting himself on the lounge-room floor.
    Sonja and Polly slept together in the single bed. Peter slept in the broken, paint-peeled cot behind the door. Sonja hugged her sister and smelt her hair. She loved it. It was her home smell. Lying back down away from her sister’s perfect little head, Sonja began to think of Raz. Shit, Raz. She’d pushed it to the back of her mind when she’d seen her father’s — and her mother’s — state. Shit. She hoped he wouldn’t be too pissed off, that he’d still want to meet her another time. But she didn’t want to think about it too much, because he probably would be pissed off, and wouldn’t even want to talk to her again. She’d have to think of an excuse; one that wouldn’t make her family look neurotic and alcoholic — one that seemed normal and Aussie.
    Â 
    Once, last year, in Year 9, a boy had brought a magazine to school. He was showing all the girls the pictures in it and laughing at them when they said yuck. Sonja had looked at the pictures. A woman had a man’s penis in her mouth. He also had it in her down there, and in her bum-hole. In one of the pictures, the man was holdinghis penis and it was spurting pearly liquid onto the woman’s stomach. She said yuck as well, but later, at home that night, she wished she could look at the pictures again.
    Nothing like that could happen to her, she was sure. It was nothing she’d ever experience. The boys at school were just that: boys. The people in the pictures, especially the men, seemed very adult. Veiny, muscular, confident. The pictures had been strangely arousing, but they were alien, of another breed. Any attraction she had to the boys at school, like Raz, was more about wanting them to find her appealing. Sex with these boys seemed way too remote. She doubted they looked anything like, or could do anything like, the men in those pictures.
    Sonja was pissed off with her parents. For making it a miserable night again — the first of many to come if she knew her father. And for making it impossible to meet up with Raz. But the night had made her feel differently about the whole Raz thing. The curiosity had fermented overnight, and now she just wanted to know why he wanted to hang out with her.
    She finished urinating and washed her hands in the stained stainless-steel washbasin. She looked in the quarter of mirror above the basin. Today, at least, she just didn’t care. The rollcall bell rang and she left the smoky, cheap-perfumey toilets.
    Raz was outside the toilet block, spitting and kicking pebbles.
    â€”Hey, Sonja, he said.
    â€”Hey.
    â€”Did