Days Like This Read Free

rubbed out and she was alone in a closed-up world. She had to work hard at those times to remember what outside even felt like.
    ‘I can’t believe he killed Sherbet and they just let him,’ Lily said, snapping herself out of her reverie.
    Daniel didn’t answer. He was obviously still in pain.
    Lily shook her head. How could Megan just walk away from Daniel’s suffering? Where had her love gone? It was like someone had taken a giant sponge and soaked up all her joy and love and fury, her father’s too.
    Lily had enough passion for all of them. She loved looking at historical events on her screen. She was mesmerised by the violent eruptions of volcanoes that went back into history, the massive cauldrons of smoking lava bubbling out of the earth. She was envious of that kind of energy. She wanted to smash the sedately ticking grandfather clock that ate her life. She’d like to crash through the hoardings that covered the old stained-glass windows. Sometimes she wanted to take her parents and shake them until their teeth fell out of their heads.
    She was even jealous of the flying foxes that swooped in at night from wherever they roosted. They landed on the fig branches she could still see from the little window in the bathroom, the only one in the house that hadn’t yet been completely boarded up. But even the flying foxes came in much smaller numbers now. Would those little creatures eventually slip away altogether, to where all the other good things had gone?
    Lily wanted to go back to the days when she and Daniel could run and play and climb trees, before her parents became strange, before the warming ate away at all the living things in their shrivelled-up world. Before the Wall.
    Lily hated the Wall almost more than anything else. Its construction had marked the beginning of everything bad. Daniel had tried to be upbeat when it was built twelve years ago, cordoning off the privileged areas around Sydney Harbour, keeping out people considered less worthy, people who could not afford water or food from the food-production facilities, people the newly formed Central Governing Committee had deemed expendable.
    Lily remembered how she had once heard Max telling Pym about ‘people over the Wall who defied the Committee’. It gave her hope that some people might have survived out there.
    Daniel used to tell her they could overcome the Wall; that it didn’t have to define them. But the fact was, the Wall kept them in just as much as it kept other people out. It was a high price to pay for their supposedly privileged lifestyle.
    ‘Dan,’ she said now, ‘I’m sorry about Sherbet.’
    ‘It was my fault,’ he muttered.
    ‘It wasn’t. You were just standing up to them. You did the right thing.’
    When he didn’t answer, she said, ‘What did you mean about the pills before? Are you saying you don’t think they’re for preventing disease?’
    ‘Can’t,’ Dan whispered. ‘Not now. Later.’

TWO
    The weekend passed with the usual monotony, but at least Daniel didn’t get another headache. Monday brought the same pointless schooling routine they’d been following for the last three years. It was always the same. An hour each of English, Maths, Geography and History, in that order. The computer marked their work. Their father checked it. They did it all again the next day. Saturdays and Sundays were free.
    This Monday morning had dragged more than usual. Lily couldn’t get her mind off what the Blacktroopers had done to Sherbet. She couldn’t stop thinking about Megan and Pym’s gutlessness, either.
    At lunch, Lily saw that Daniel was still simmering, too. They ate in silence until Daniel pushed himself away from the dining room table, his chair tipping over with a crash.
    ‘You’re allowed to go outside, so why the hell can’t we?’ he shouted at Megan and Pym.
    ‘Sit down, Daniel,’ Megan said quietly. ‘We’ve been through this. You can’t go outside because of the Committee ruling. Why are you