The Tankermen Read Online Free PDF Page A

another wife now. He’s not all that interested in me.’
    ‘You reckon?’ Jed looked closely at him. ‘What’s the stepmother like?’
    ‘Okay. Friendly enough, I guess. It’s just that I don’t matter much to her, you know? When I see her with her kid, she acts different to the way she acts with me.’
    Jed sat up and brushed the sand from his elbows. ‘Different how?’
    Finn didn’t want to say. The words rattled around in his head. Sometimes she hugs him so tight he can hardly breathe. It doesn’t matter how disgustingly he behaves, she always looks at him as if he were a big present she was really excited about opening. ‘Just different. Like with me she’s kind of shy. Especially when I first get there. By the time Christmas rolls around we’re usually getting on okay, but then I have to go, don’t I?’ He didn’t want to go on about the Christmases tainted with everyone’s New Year plans that never included him, with that air of relief about his going. Christmas was the low point of the year. It signalled upheaval, another round of adjustments to make, different ones each time.
    ‘Why don’t you stay there?’
    ‘I couldn’t stand it. My dad goes on at me all the time. “What are you going to do, son?” Like, what am I going to do with my
life
—I’m not even fifteen and he wants me to have my career all mapped out. “You don’t want to close off your options, do you? What are you aiming for? What’ll you do in Year 12?” Geez, I couldn’t give a
stuff.
That’s two
years
away! I don’t wanna
think
about it! But he’s so organised, you know? That’s the way he did it and that’s the way he reckons I should do it. But I’m just a different kind of person.’
    ‘What, you mean you’re slack? Just kidding,’ grinned Jed. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s hard with fathers. When I started getting into bikes I gave my dad a few heart attacks with accidents and that—nothing serious. I was pretty lucky, really, considering what an idiot I was at the beginning. Now I tell him, “Hey, look, I haven’t had even a
little
bingle for
years
now. Stop worrying, will you?” But he won’t—he’s always hassling me to buy a car, always telling me the same old stuff about how
dangerous
bikes are, as if I didn’t know.’
    ‘It’s like they can’t stop themselves,’ said Finn gloomily.
    ‘So why don’t you stay up north with your mum?’
    ‘Hah!’ Finn lifted his head and fought to pick out the dark block of a container ship on the horizon. ‘She wouldn’t be able to jaunt off overseas then, would she?’
    ‘Bit of a butterfly, is she?’ Finn could hear Jed smiling.
    ‘When I’m there we live like the poorest people on earth. She gets the pension, and works part-time and doesn’t tell Social Security, and scrimps and saves and counts every cent so that when I’m not there she can hop on a plane to Turkey or Asia or to stay with her friends in America. It makes me sick! It’s like when I’m there it’s not her real life—she’s just looking forward to when I’m gone so that she can go off and have some more adventures. I’m just useful because she can get the pension when I’m there. Some mate of hersoffered to take her to Thailand for a month, so she just up and off-loaded me on Dad and Janet, three months early.’
    Finn shifted on the sand, aware that he was only painting the blacker parts of the picture. Once he got used to it, the freer life at his mum’s was definitely the one he preferred. Up there his time out of school hours was entirely his own, and he could wear grotty clothes and leave his room as chaotic as he wanted. He liked that, and the slower pace of things away from the city, and the way his mum would throw together some crazy meal out of whatever was in the fridge, or give up altogether and take him out for a pizza. She wasn’t as mean as all that. It wasn’t so much that
she
was the problem . . .
    ‘Like, I missed out on exams, which was