Spinning Around Read Online Free PDF Page B

to care. Certainly not Matthew. And though I thought that Miriam had emerged from the episode looking a lot more competent than I had, Matt still seemed to prefer me. He said that I’d been ‘cute’. He gathered me onto his lap, and tucked my loose hair behind my ears, and said that I ought to trip up on my own hemline more often.
    It was at such times that I felt I knew him through and through, as if I was looking into a mirror.
    But then I would hear about how he’d met some miners in a bar, and gone off with them to the dog races, and had ended up rock-fishing off Clovelly because their car had broken down, and suddenly I would feel as if I didn’t know him at all. He could do these things, you see. He had it in him. He had Aboriginal friends, and television actor friends, and biker friends. He had a sprawling, extended family situated around Newcastle and Morrisset and Fassifern, which entertained on its fringes all kinds of ex-con third cousins and religious maniac great-uncles. He had a long string of bizarre experiences and extraordinary jobs under his belt. Sometimes, for instance, he would talk about his spell at a chicken farm, where he had culled cockerels and collected eggs while wearing a red-and-white suit that was supposed to make him look like a chicken, and he would seem as strange to me as a man from Mars. Or he would relate to me the story of his lost tooth, which had been knocked out while he was shooting pigs in Queensland, and it was as if he was talking about another person.
    That other person, I should tell you, was the only person my parents saw when they first met him. It was the tatts, needless to say. I would look at Matt and think: pig-shooting is not his first choice of pastime, but he’s an easygoing guy with a wide circle of acquaintances, and the sort of amiable character that would lead him to take part in a pig-shooting expedition simply because his mates were interested. My parents, on the other hand, would look at the tatts and think: pig shooting. Drug dealing. Unsafe driving. Dogs in the kitchen. Kids with rat-tails. I could see it on their faces, when I brought Matt to my sister’s twenty-first birthday party. I’ll admit that he did look somewhat out of place, among the Regency stripes and the Laura Ashley florals. The leather jacket was probably a bad choice. In fact he pretty much presented the appearance of someone whom I had deliberately, in a fit of post-adolescent defiance, brought home for the purpose of annoying my parents and upstaging my sister.
    My sister and I get along pretty well, most of the time, but there have been some rough patches. Being the youngest sibling, she’s more of a party girl than I ever was; my parents always worried about her rebellious streak, which manifested itself in things like her bellybutton piercing, her decision to go backpacking around the Northern Territory after high school, and her wish to become a fashion buyer. (Rebellious streaks on the North Shore aren’t quite what they would be in, say, a Detroit trailer park.) The fashion-buyer fad didn’t last long—much to my parents’ relief—and by the time she was twenty-one, Danielle was studying business management. As a matter of fact, she’s a very sharp girl. She’d have to be, or she wouldn’t be working in London, now, organising sales conferences or whatever it is she does.
    At her twenty-first birthday, she was busy flaunting a new boyfriend called Crispin, who was a pleasant surprise for both my parents. Previously, Danielle had spent something like two years having fiery arguments and passionate reconciliations with a troubled med student who flunked university during the course of their relationship. Crispin was a great improvement. He was from a family of wealthy graziers, he was receiving high marks in law, and he was innately placid and well organised. My parents liked him very much. They were also immensely