One Whole and Perfect Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

encouraging, except for that fearful little quiver in her voice that meant she was as scared as him.
    Lonnie’s HSC was long behind him. He’d passed it – by the skin of his teeth, as Pop had said. He’d gone on to TAFE and then university, dropping out of courses, and dropping in again. He was twenty-two now, no longer a teenager, and yet his habits were teenage; and Lily could easily imagine a modern-day Hamlet having such habits: lying in bed all weekend brooding about himself, using three towels to take a shower, abandoning them in a wet clump on the bathroom floor for someone else to pick up, leaving the electric heater on all night, instead of switching it off when he went to bed . . .
    Switching it off – all at once a disturbing thought struck Lily: had she turned off the electric jug before she left home this morning? She pictured the dark little kitchen at 22 Roslyn Avenue; the wooden bench beside the sink and the big electric jug which sat square in the middle of it – a jug so ancient that it didn’t switch off automatically and you had to turn it off at the wall. And Lily couldn’t remember if she’d done that this morning. She remembered putting the jug on after Mum had left for work, thinking she’d have a second cup of tea, and then realising she simply didn’t have the time.
    But had she turned it off then?
    Lily screwed her eyes shut, trying to remember.
    ‘Something wrong, Lily?’ asked Mr Skerrit jovially. ‘Sight of a bit of homework too much for you?’
    ‘Oh no,’ said Lily. ‘It wasn’t that.’ Jolted so abruptly from her anxious reverie she almost added, ‘I can’t remember if I turned the jug off,’ but stopped herself just in time. How ridiculous she would have sounded! How stodgy, how middle-aged! A warm tide of colour flooded her cheeks as she imagined the giggles and whispers rippling round the class.
    Lily took up her pen again and tried industriously to make notes. ‘Can a person always be a teenager?’ she scribbled. ‘Or always middle-aged? (Like me?) If Hamlet . . .’
    But it was no good; the dark little kitchen came sliding into her mind again. What would happen if she’d left the jug turned on? First it would boil dry. Then what? The coils inside the jug would grow red hot, and then the jug itself; the old wooden bench would blacken, begin to smoke, to flare; the curtains at the window would catch, and then the wall . . . Their poor old house would burn down to the ground. How pleased Pop would be! How triumphant! ‘Now you can buy a place that’s fit for human habitation!’ he’d roar at them delightedly.
    The bell rang for the end of first period. Second period was Library, easy to skip because Ms Esterhazy hardly ever bothered with the roll. Lily’s house (if it was still there) was three short streets away; she could be home and back before anyone even noticed she had gone.
    The jug sat on the bench, stone cold. She’d run home for nothing, and now she felt a fool. She felt stupid and – middle-aged.
    Sitting with Tracy Gilman and the other girls at lunch and recess, Lily could take part in their conversations; she could sound like them, she knew the words – goss and glam and fave and juicy – yet inside, where it mattered, Lily felt a fraud. When Tracy went on about some boy she fancied, or poor Lizzie Banks wondered aloud if that dimply skin on her thighs could possibly be cellulite, what Lily really felt like saying was: ‘Tsk,’ the little sound her nan made when the milk boiled over or Pop left a trail of muddy footprints on the newly polished floor. And ‘tsk!’ was worse than middle-aged, it was old . Even her mother never said it.
    What’s happening to me? panicked Lily, her stricken gaze travelling round the kitchen, over the grotty old bench and down the cupboard doors, and then very slowly across the ancient linoleum, as if the answer to her question might lie inscribed in those mysteriously faded patterns she and Lonnie had never