Red Read Free Page A

go to the Centre and see the photos on the wall. Someone in my family might have been away for the day. My mum or my dad, they might have been at work in the city or visiting somewhere else. They could be desperate, going crazy looking for me right now.’
    â€˜OK, but I’m telling you, you won’t find anything.’
    They shared a packet of biscuits, crisp tasteless squares, and a bottle of strangely flavoured juice. ‘It’s what they have for soldiers,’ said Peri. ‘You can’t buy this in shops. It’s full of everything you need to stay alive in a battle zone. Protein and stuff. Another good reason not to join the army.’ He grinned. ‘They’re opening up all the emergency stuff they keep for when there’s a war.’ He wiped his face with the back of his hand. ‘It’s just like that out there. There are soldiers and police all over the place and tanks and army tents. And everywhere looks as though it’s been bombed.’
    â€¢ • • • •
    They retraced their steps to the place where Peri had found her. ‘I used to swim at the next beach down that way.’ He waved his hand to the south. ‘The cliff collapsed there in the storm. You’d have to be a mad dog to swim there now.’
    â€˜And all those houses are wrecked or gone,’ said Red.
    They scrambled over the rubble, the smashed furniture and the dead and broken trees. She could hear the sea, the low, even murmuring of the water washing itself against the land. Then she saw it. Far in the distance the clear blue of the sky rubbed up against the duller blue-green of the ocean. Closer in, its colour changed to the brown of floating tree branches, timber and mud. Each crashing wave dumped more rubbish on the narrow strip of land.
    She couldn’t take her eyes away. The sound, the rhythm, the feeling … she was being picked up, rolled over, dumped, water above her. Water below her, pushing her on and down.
    She was shaking. Tears streamed down her face. Her chest tightened. She gulped and forced herself to turn around, to put the sea behind her.
    â€˜Did you hear what I said?’ Peri frowned. ‘There used to be an unreal beach down there.’ He pointed. ‘In the olden days there was about a hundred metres of sand when the tide was out. Kids used to surf ’cos it had the best waves. Sand’s all gone now. Once I met this old bloke who said that when he was a kid they used to have big carnivals at the beach. Hundreds of surf lifesavers and kids too, all competing for prizes. Swimming, boat racing and marching. He’d said he had photos to prove it and one day he’d bring them down and show me but he never did.’
    â€˜Maybe I lived in a house around here.’ Red was trying to talk normally. She turned to right and left, her eyes skimming over the mounds of mud and bricks, timber, lumps of concrete, wire, furniture and toys. A shimmering blue party dress, the skirt torn into dangling shreds, hung from the upturned roots of a Moreton Bay fig tree.
    â€˜Or you could’ve been just visiting.’
    They slowly picked their way back. Part of Red wanted to search under every scrap of debris but another part felt sure there was nothing to find. She kicked at a pile of bricks under sheets of iron. Black flies shot up like an exploding firework. She saw a swollen, rotting animal, its matted hair, distorted face. Someone’s dog. A putrid smell. Red’s stomach leapt to her throat. She stumbled forward and knelt in the mud as acrid-tasting vomit poured from her mouth. The smells of dead and rotting grass, stagnant pools and the foul water leaking from broken pipes hung all around her.
    â€˜Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
    â€¢ • • • •
    Back at the ‘palace’, Peri put the remaining food into the backpack. Red rinsed her mouth and sorted through the new clothes, choosing a pair of