Millie and the Night Heron Read Free Page B

completely opposite. Why did they do that? There was a long silence. Not quite silence, of course, because all the birds were calling out to each other and squabbling over little fish.
    â€˜You might be right, Millie,’ Mum said slowly. ‘Maybe I should. It’s just scary stepping out from what you know you can do and trying something different, something that mightn’t work.’
    â€˜But you’re doing that now,’ I argued. Sometimes Mum was peculiarly stupid for an intelligent woman. ‘I mean, going for this job. How do you know that’s going to work, but you’ve sailed intothat, haven’t you? And you’re always telling me not to be scared of life.’
    Mum laughed. I liked it when she laughed. It was such a glad sound, as though the sun had brightened all of a sudden.
    â€˜Oh, Millie, you’re a wise child,’ she said, hugging me hard to her side, awkwardly, because she was doing it with only the arm that was still around me.
    â€˜And a wild one,’ I said, pleased. ‘Don’t forget that I’m a wild girl.’
    I sat in the car while she went for her job interview. She got dressed up, in an artist-goes-for-a-job kind of way. We both wished Sheri had been there. Mum had brought every last respectable thing with her, of course, which was fine, but none of them went with each other.
    â€˜These trousers,’ I said, holding up a pair. They were my favourite. They looked liked old men’s trousers—you know, brown checks—but groovy, too.
    â€˜Brown’s not a power colour, darling,’ Mum said. ‘Damn. I wish I was like your father. He’d just throw on one of his eternal white shirts, a pair of dark trousers and an unusual, look-at-me-I’m-a-genius tie and get the damn job before he’d opened his mouth.’
    â€˜Well, you’re not Patrick.’
    There is always someone practical in a family, isn’t there? Someone who has to state the plain truth in an in-your-face way so that everyone stops dreaming about what might be and gets on with the life in front of them. I was that person.
    Eventually Mum wore a different pair of trousers, my second favourite pair, the colour of dark chocolate, and with that a pale pink shirt and a dark scarf draped in an arty way and secured with a kilt pin. She let her hair go wild. There wasn’t much else she could do—it was going to rain.
    I waited in the car and it did rain. Lashings of water streamed down the front window and the trees bent so far over I thought some of the smaller ones would snap. Mum was gone forever, leaving me lots of time to think. Have you noticed how thoughts come in little gasps and how each one leads to another? But if you said to someone, I started out thinking about pelicans and ended up thinking about pizza, you’d be the only person probably in the world who would know how pelicans could lead you to thinking of pizza napolitana as made by D’Angelos. Not that I was thinking of pelicans. That’s just an example.

    I actually thought:
    Do trees ever snap in the rain?
Does our boot still leak and is there anything of mine in it?
If Mum gets this job, will she get a new car?
It’d be cool to have a car with a CD.
I wouldn’t mind being a famous singer.
But I can’t sing in tune.
I don’t want to be a scientist, I can never spell what Patrick is doing.
An artist would be okay, except that’s what Mum is, so it’s been taken.
Can you be struck by lightning if you’ re in a car?
That’s a Patrick question.
Maybe being a scientist isn’t a bad idea.
But I might have to go overseas.
I would be a lawyer.
Was that more lightning?
I should join a debating society if I’m going to be a lawyer.
I wonder whether there will be one at my new school.
I don’t want to move.
But I don’t want to stay living the way we are either.
I wish Sheri had never met Brendan Trotter.
What kind of name is