Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) Read Free Page A

and girls and we had special talks. Our talks were about being modest and having babies. The teacher showed us a map of Australia and drew a big rectangle inside the middle of it with a ruler.
    â€˜See this – all empty. And whose job is it to fill up the empty continent with lovely healthy babies? It’s your job, girls. What an honour. What a privilege . . .’
    Then we had to write an essay about duty, but because I was the youngest I was allowed to draw a picture. I drew the middle of Australia filled up with Baby Jesuses. Baby Jesuses covering all of the paddocks of all the farms, Baby Jesuses top-to-toeing it across the desert and one Baby Jesus high up on Ayers Rock with a smiling dingo for company.
    The boys’ talks were about the war. The war was in England, the mother country to our country, but the fighting was happening in other places, like France and Turkey.
    After school I walked back up the hill and looked for Dad in the sheds. Often he was down at the creek fixing the pump so I went paddling and made dams until it was time for tea. It was my job to butter the bread. Then Dad did the orders or read some books. He was on a quest for knowledge and I was not to disturb him during the quest. Then Abe the cat played the piano. It was all broken down and the white keys were a bit yellow where I had put butter on them to encourage him, but some of the black keys still worked. Abe walked backwards and forwards making his jumbly music. He was four octaves long. He had three tabby legs and one white leg. I liked to watch the patterns of them as they struck the keys.
    On Saturdays we went on deliveries right into Melbourne. On the way home we visited my aunty in Hawthorn. She made us tea but we had to sit outside because we were dirty from the cart. On Sundays I had a bath with Dad and we washed our clothes and went walking. We walked every track in the district. Sometimes we followed the creek up into the bush. Once I saw three lyrebirds on the same day but they might have been the same one.

    My cat Abe went missing on a school day. Dad said he’d probably gone courting but we looked for him in the sheds and in the orchard and under the fruit crates. I walked to school on my own. For physical jerks we walked along a balance beam ‘graceful like a cheetah’. I felt sick. I felt like I’d swallowed a stone and whenever I moved it scraped at my neck.
    I was peeling my orange at lunchtime when I saw Dad talking to the teacher in the doorway to the classroom. His nose was all sunburnt and his ears stuck out like the handles on a toby jug. The teacher motioned me over and I heard Dad ask if it was all right for me to come home now because he had a lot on and a bit of help from the nipper wouldn’t go astray. The teacher gave him her soft smile and nodded. I got a piggyback up the hill. My hands were orange juice sticky on Dad’s shirt but he didn’t mind.
    Abe was in an apple box on the kitchen table. He was all long and flat – all of him was there but none of him was there. His fur stood up rough and wouldn’t sit flat even when I stroked it. His mouth was open a little and the pale pink of his tongue made me gulp. Dad parted the fur on his one white leg to show me the puncture wound from the snake’s fangs – two holes an inch apart.
    Dad got the shovel and we searched around the sheds and down by the creek. I went along with it but I didn’t really want to find the snake. I was frightened, but mainly I didn’t want to see the killing.
    I thought I saw it – a branch wrapped in muscle flowing over the concrete apron under the pump, but I didn’t call out. Instead I complained of being thirsty, of a pain in my eyeball, of needing to pee, so Dad would come away.
    We dug a grave for Abe in the orchard.
    â€˜All clay, this soil,’ Dad said. I picked some dandelion heads and put them in the hole then we went back to get Abe. Dad picked up