Wind in the Wires Read Online Free PDF Page B

down.
    ‘They sent him over there in ’42 and he didn’t set foot back on Australian soil until 1945,’ she said. ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather the day she walked in with you. And she was too old to be taking you on, and I told her so. I said to your mother the day I first set eyes on you. What a damn fool thing to go and do with Robert thousands of miles away dodging bullets. Not that she ever listened to me.’
    ‘Where did she get me?’ Cara’s heartbeat thundering in her ears, muffled her own words.
    Gran flicked a bird-claw hand towards the heavens. ‘God sent you. All the churches had those homes for the unwed, and by God there were plenty of them around during the war.’ She lifted her cup, sipped and spoke over the rim. ‘We all knew they’d been talking about adopting before the war, but she never said one word about doing it while your father was away. Mind you, not that I saw her from one year’s end to the next. While Robert was over there, I saw your mother at Christmas and Easter if I was lucky. And she only lived half an hour away from my house. Too busy with her lodgers to worry about how an old lady was getting along.’
    The cup was down again, and empty this time. Cara’s stomach threatening to get rid of Christmas dinner, she picked up the cup and walked fast to the kitchen where she stood over the sink, swallowing her need to vomit while staring through the window at the crowded table. Her mother – not her mother – laughing at something Uncle John had said – not her Uncle John. Not her cousins either, not even Pete.
    And she was going to howl because Pete wasn’t her cousin, howl and vomit at the same time. She’d asked her parents. They’d looked her in the eye and said no, they hadn’t adopted her.
    ‘Liars.’
    Every nerve in her body wanted to run out there and call them liars in front of everyone.
    Knew she couldn’t. Knew she’d have to hold it inside her until those tents came down. And they wouldn’t be coming down until after New Year.
    She poured a glass of water, drank it down. Washed her face, wiped it on a tea towel, remembering so clearly the day she’d asked them if she was adopted.
    ‘Liars.’

A D IFFERENT C HRISTMAS
    T here was something about Molliston, something about its air. The more of it Georgie breathed, the more relaxed she became. By midafternoon she was calling Jack’s mother Katie and walking with her around the veranda, admiring her pot plants while Jack and his father sprawled on chair and couch, sleeping off Christmas dinner.
    Their home was a hotel. It sold beer but didn’t smell of beer. If you walked within ten yards of Woody Creek’s hotel veranda, the smell of stale beer was enough to give you a hangover. Jack’s parents’ hotel smelled of wet soil and greenery. She’d never been here before, but she felt she’d known that veranda and those pot plants a hundred years ago.
    And the bar room. In Woody Creek, women weren’t allowed in the bar and few would want to go in there. Georgie had tasted her first glass of wine in Jack’s parents’ bar room, at a rough-cut bar where a hundred years of people had leant and she’d known that she’d sat there in some past life, which was totally weird when she didn’t believe in past lives.
    Granny had. Maybe she’d been here, or maybe the aged smell of the rooms reminded her of Granny’s house – before the renovations. The west side of the hotel veranda was vine-covered like Granny’s hut’s west wall had been, and the dark hotel kitchen with its tiny high window smelled like Granny’s old kitchen.
    The day a scorcher, they delayed their return trip until after nightfall. The sun long gone down had forgotten to take its heat with it. Every window of the car was open, but not a breath of breathable air entered.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ Jack asked.
    ‘That you must have had a normal life.’
    ‘What’s normal?’
    ‘Molliston is, and your parents. Everything