This River Awakens Read Online Free PDF Page A

St John’s school stood between the highway and the railway. It had been there when the grain fields covered this part of the land, when the farmhouses wore healthy paint and all the children had rural faces and rural hands. Built of Tyndal stone – a golden limestone crowded with fossils – it was blockish and small, an edifice of stability.
    And like all country schools, it was a communal teaching ground sown with virtues and morals rooted deep in the land. It had stood in this immovable obstinacy for fifty years before the highway was widened and houses crept out from the city and urban children crept out from the houses. In this new age the changes forced on the small country school proved too much for it to bear, and so an addition was built by city planners and city builders. The edifice sank into the shadow of a tall, square concrete temple at its side.
    Jennifer Louper sat with her friends behind the school, facing the railway track and the open sky above it.
    The four boys had just passed beyond their view, making for the highway and the river beyond it.
    ‘Who was that new boy?’ Barb asked. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’
    Jennifer studied her friend from under lowered lids. ‘Watching boys now?’
    ‘Well, no—’
    ‘Don’t bother,’ Jennifer continued. ‘At least not with them.’ She sat cross-legged, her lower back against the wall. ‘None of those guys,’ she said as she slowly leaned forward and began squeezing the tobacco from her cigarette, ‘even know where their dicks are.’
    Sandy giggled, her face hidden by black bangs. She sat leaning forward on Jennifer’s right, crushing marijuana leaves between her fingers.
    ‘Could be Lynk’s cousin or something,’ Barb said. ‘They sort of looked like each other.’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Sandy looked up. ‘The new guy’s bigger.’
    Jennifer paused and eyed Barb. ‘Oh yeah? What size is his underwear?’
    Barb shrieked a laugh. ‘Yeah, Sandy, why don’t you ask him?’
    ‘Fuck off both of you.’ Sandy whipped her head back, tossing the hair from her eyes, and looked away. Then she said in a low tone, ‘I was talking to Roland yesterday. He said the new guy’s name is Owen, and he’s got an older sister. They moved into the Masters’ old place.’
    Barb sneered. ‘Talking to Roland, huh?’
    ‘Shut up, Barb,’ Jennifer said quietly, studying Sandy’s face. ‘How old’s this sister?’
    ‘Sixteen.’
    ‘Give me the grass.’
    Sandy slid the flattened paper bag with its small mound of marijuana to Jennifer.
    Everyone fell silent as Jennifer began refilling the cigarette tube. She knew Barb and Sandy were watching her every move, and she could feel their tension. Chicken shit sucks, she thought. ‘This way you got a filter, so I don’t have to hear you coughing your lungs out. We’ll roll the next one.’
    Barb asked in a hushed voice, ‘We’re gonna smoke two?’
    ‘Sure, maybe three. Maybe four.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Sandy said. ‘My throat still gets sore from cigarettes.’
    Jennifer exchanged a glance with Barb at this admission, but neither said anything.
    The match flared like the beginning of an occult ritual. Jennifer slowly lit the cigarette, pulling even but hard. She handed it to Sandy, then leaned back, waiting to feel the now familiar loosening of her senses. She tilted her head upward and gazed at the dull grey sky, but it was not dullness that she saw. Mists swirled up there, heavy with rain. The clouds, rolling towards the setting sun, would soon swallow fire and somewhere, far off beyond the horizon, the rain would fall hot and steaming, and its rhythm as it fell on the slick steel and concrete buildings of a city, as it filled the streets and rushed into the sewers and tumbled down into the dark underworld – the rhythm of all this – came to her as music.
    Now thirteen, she hadn’t played the piano in two years. There’d be no songs of innocence coming from her. That had been their dream,