Loving, Faithful Animal Read Free Page B

enough to scribble out, small enough to take back, if you need.
    She leans in close to study the fine crosshatching on a copse of ghost gums, whorls of night air like the feathery dark hair at her nape, pasted down now with sweat. What do you know about yourself, in these moments? Breathing her smell of forest, of cool earth, her hands stained from slapping out hunks of damp clay on a stone slab. Meant for coil pots, the clay. But the boys will roll theirs out into stumpy cocks, slimy from the work of their sweaty palms, to chase girls around the room. Barely older than Lani, Miss Dawes, but she never yells. Just wonders aloud how come the anatomy is so well-observed. Makes the blood roar up to their idiot faces.
    How about horses? she whispers conspiratorially. Galloping her hand across your page. Like you’re a child.
    Maybe horses, you shrug. Eventually.
    Okay, she says. Eventually. In their own good time, right?
    A vivid interior world , she writes. But maybe she writes that for everyone she doesn’t understand. (Look at this one, Aunt Stell says sometimes, grabbing you in a one-way hug. Too old for teddy bears, too young for wolves, hey?)
    You rip the last match across the striker strip, turn it back on the matchbook and let the flame eat the sketch. Nothing ever turns out looking true.
    A hot wind shakes your tree, the last northerly of the year. It came from inland, from the desert, and it will keep blowing on down the Hume, on into Melbourne, collecting firework smoke and radio countdowns and half-cooked resolutions on its way to the ocean, emptying it all out over the Bass Strait. Everything feels like the last, the very last, as though it’s the end of the century and not just the end of the year. The end of the world. That’s why everything alive down there in the grass is singing its insect heart out.
    Then there’s dust rising from over near the road, visible before the motorbike engine is heard, thin and waspish above the silvery cricket whir. The bike rips along the channel of chewed-down grass that runs alongside the fence. William Somebody. Healy, the mechanic’s son. His bike isn’t made for the country, and the girl hugging his back isn’t dressed for riding. She’s wearing his helmet but her arms and legs are bare, and the dress she has on is made of something wet-looking and slinky, a spangled black that’s scrunched up high on her thighs.
    It’s easy to tell, even this far away, that it’s Lani. The dress isn’t her dress, she must’ve borrowed it, and with the cherry red helmet she looks like a doll that’s had its head swapped with an action figure’s. Inside there it will smell like sweat and unwashed hair, cigarette breath and cheap aftershave.
    If she turns her bobble-head towards the pines, she ’ ll see your bike, leaning helpless against the foot of the tree. She ’ ll know you ’ re up there, Sneaky little shit . She won ’ t be able to climb up and whack you, not in those shoes. But she can be mean as cat spit, has a sixth sense for knowing what will hurt most. Looking down at your bike, the sleek almost-newness of it, you wonder how fast could you ride. Not fast enough. Nothing to do but hold your breath, scratchy pine bark biting into your skin, while you wait for your sister to see or not see.
    There is so much you could tell on her. Before Christmas she came and cut an L-shaped slit into the flyscreen of your bedroom window so she could sneak in and out at night. Mum won’t check your room, fuckface . And there are the pills she sneaks from Dad, the ones that are meant to keep him calm, which she sells to people at parties for two dollars a pop. And now this.
    You tell, she’s said, I’ll tell.
    Tell what?
    You know, she answers, bluffing—what could she know?—but it’s better safe than sorry.
    Lani and the boy pass right by, like a dream made of petrol fumes and churned-up