When Dogs Cry Read Free

not.’ You always say of course not in that situation because you figure out pretty quick that your old man’s really asking, ‘Will I take the ice block or will I make you suffer in a hundred different other ways?’ Naturally, you play it safe.
    The ice blocks were handed out and a small smile was exchanged between Octavia and me, then Rube and me.
    Rube held his ice block out to me. ‘Bite?’ he asked, but I declined.
    I left the room, hearing my father say, ‘Pretty good actually.’
    The bastard.
    â€˜Where’d y’ go before?’ Rube asked me later in our room, after Octavia had left. Each of us lay on our bed, talking across the room.
    â€˜Just around a bit.’
    â€˜Down Glebe way?’
    I looked over. ‘What’s that mean?’
    â€˜It means,’ Rube sighed, ‘that Octavia and I followed you once, just out of interest, and saw y’ outside a house, starin’ into the window. You’re a bit of a lonely bastard aren’t y’?’
    Moments twisted and curled then, and off in the distance I could hear traffic, roaring almost silently. Far from all this. Far from Cameron Wolfe and Ruben Wolfe discussing what in the hell I was doing outside the house of a girl who cared nothing for me.
    Then I swallowed, breathed in and answered my brother.
    â€˜Yeah,’ I said. ‘I guess I am.’
    There was nothing else I could say. Nothing to cover it up. There was just a slight moment of waiting, truth and feeling, then a crack, and I said more. ‘It’s that Stephanie girl.’
    â€˜The bitch,’ Rube spat.
    â€˜I know, but—’
    â€˜I know,’ Rube interrupted. ‘It makes no difference if she said she hated you or called you a loser. Y’ feel what y’ feel.’
    Y’ feel what y’ feel.
    It was one of the truest things Rube had ever said, just before a quietness smothered the room.
    From next-door’s backyard we could hear a dog barking. It was Miffy, the pitiful Pomeranian we loved to hate, but still walked a few times a week anyway.
    â€˜Sounds like Miffy’s a bit upset,’ Rube said after a while.
    â€˜Yeah,’ and I laughed a bit.
    A bit of a lonely bastard. A bit of a lonely bastard
. . .
    Rube’s statement reverberated inside me till his voice was like a hammer.
    Later, when I got up and sat on the front porch andwatched shadows of traffic filter past, I told myself it was okay to be like this, as long as I stayed hungry. It felt like something was arriving in me. It was something I couldn’t see or know or understand. It was just there, mingling into my blood.
    Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.
    Even in the night, in bed, they woke me.
    They painted themselves onto the ceiling.
    They burned themselves onto the sheets of memory laid out in my mind.
    When I woke up the next day, I wrote the words down, on a torn-up piece of paper. And to me, the world changed colour that morning.

    Â 
    words of cameron
    Nothing comes easy to a human like me.
    It’s not a complaint.
    Just a truth.
    The only problem now is that I have visions spilt on the floor of my mind. I have words in there that I’m trying to get out. To write.
    Words I’ll write for me.
    A story I’ll fight for.
    And so it begins . . .
    It’s night and I walk through the city of my mind. Through streets and alleys. Between buildings that shiver. Between houses hunched, with their hands in their pockets.
    As I walk these streets, sometimes I feel like
they
walk through
me.
Thoughts in me feel like blood.
    I walk.
    I realise.
    Where am I going?
I ask myself.
    What am I looking for?
    Yet, I walk on, moving deeper to some unknown place in this city. I’m drawn there.
    Past wounded cars.
    Down grimly lit