Surface Tension Read Online Free PDF Page A

stared at my two-step arm, half in and half out of the fish tank.
    I didn’t know this about water, that it had all these tricks. When I said that, Mr Chadwick laughed. He said they weren’t exactly tricks. They were experiments. Science.
    It seemed tricky to me, though. And it made me feel strange about water, wary. As if your uncle had suddenly pulled a rabbit out of a hat at a party one day and now you couldn’t help watching him out of the corner of your eye, wondering what else he might have lurking up his sleeve.
    I blinked in the sunlight and turned my head to make the surface flat again. It was as simple as that.
    Then I dragged myself from the mud and headed up the bank towards my towel.

six
    On the way back into town, I rode past the pool, past the yelling and the squealing and the loudspeaker blaring: “No running! No diving! Watch your children at all times! Hot chips now available at the canteen!”
    The chlorine hit my nostrils like a slap. I put my head down and pumped the pedals furiously.
    When I came to Country Crafts, halfway up the main street, I slowed. What day was it? No, Dad wouldn’t be there today. His slots were Monday and Saturday, sometimes Thursday during peak season, when the town’s population doubled for a month over summer and the streets filled with people you’d never seen before and would never see again. Those were the days he came in and worked on the wheel, demonstrating and chatting to customers, quietly selling them things without them even realising.
    The people who ran the shop liked to keep things organised. It wasn’t like the old days. I’d seen photos of Dad back then – straggly beard, rolled-up sleeves, hands plunged deep into the clay, part of the messy gaggle of artists who came and went as they pleased in the sprawling wooden building.
    I wheeled my bike across the street. Some of Dad’s work was featured in the window, and there were a couple of small pots sitting just outside on a display shelf. I picked one up. It might be a vase or a potpourri holder. Or maybe just something that would sit on a shelf somewhere and look arty. Dad said sometimes he just let the clay do what it wanted, let it run through his fingers and find its own shape. Then he let the tourists decide, smiling as they turned his work over in their hands and said
What an interesting cup
or
I love the design of this paperweight.
    I remembered this piece. I remembered the glaze Dad had used. I had been on my way down the hall to hang my towel when he called out to me. The afternoon sun was streaming through the window behind him, making him look like a man on fire.
    “What do you think, Cass?” he said. “Blue? Or maybe green?”
    I shook my head. “Red.”
    “Hmm, okay.” He smiled, nodded. Like I knew what I was talking about. Like I had a good reason for choosing it, rather than just liking the warm glow the day had set around him.
    And now here it was. A red something – on a shelf outside the shop. Waiting for someone to come along and tell it what to be.
    I leaned my bike against the wall and stared at the piece. I had never quite got used to this. It was weird seeing something that had started out as a lump of shapeless clay turn bit by bit – under his hands and on the wheel and in the kiln – into something else completely, something that would make people stop in their tracks in the main street. It made me look differently at everything around me. It made me wonder about the invisible hands that were behind it all, out of sight.
    Footsteps slowed behind me and I half turned towards the street. It was probably someone wanting to check out the display. I should put this back, get out of the way.
    But as I leaned towards the shelf, an arm came around from behind me. A hand gripped my wrist. Firmly.
    I looked up. It was a man, shaking his head. A man I knew. A man everyone knew – in the way everyone knows everyone in this kind of town, but in another way as well. From photos and