Winter

Winter Read Free Page B

Book: Winter Read Free
Author: John Marsden
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knew this wasn’t the end of my struggles, the end of my search, but here at least there was a chance of reaching it. Living at the Robinsons’, I might as well have been on the moon for all the hope I had of finding the answers I wanted.
    I don’t know how long I stayed awake. It was strange. The house, empty of people and furniture and life, felt more alive than any other house I’d been in. More alive than the Robinsons’. More alive than Ralph and Sylvia’s. More alive than my Adelaide grandparents’.
    I wondered as I lay there if maybe this house would only feel alive to me. Maybe to anyone else it would be more like a museum. A graveyard. Maybe this house came awake for only one person on earth. Maybe it had been waiting for me all this time.
    Gradually the feelings got more specific. At first I’d been looking at a painting from a distance. Now I was close to it, seeing the brightly coloured people, the warm petunias in a blue vase, the flames of the fire. I could hear the little sounds people make as they go from room to room. The shush of clothes against a door. The scrape of a foot on the floor. The push of air as someone moves along the corridor. Then the murmur of voices. A cough, a rustle of newspaper, the clink of a coffee cup.
    The voices were the most tantalising. I couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. I couldn’t distinguish a single word. It sounded like adults, the kind of conversation between people who’ve known each other a long time. A comfortable, easy conversation. A couple of comments, then silence for a while, then a few more sentences. I wanted to get up and join them. But I knew what would happen if I did. Suddenly I knew, with the certainty of memory. A great tingle ran through my body as my mind and my ears played out the scene.
    Dad would say, ‘Hello, young lady. I thought you were meant to be in bed.’
    â€˜I’m thirsty,’ I said.
    â€˜That’s not very original,’ Mum said. ‘Stay there, Phillip. I’ll get it. Now, Winter, one little drink of water and then straight back to bed, OK?’
    All those times I’d cried myself to sleep at the Robinsons’, it had been a kind of stifled sobbing. I never wanted to be caught. So the tears had seeped out like they were from a tap turned off hard, but still leaking slowly, reluctantly.
    Now I cried in a new way. I cried without restraint. I wept like a four-year-old, for the parents I’d lost, for the years I’d been without them, for the parents I’d never see again. My life stretched in front of me, and it looked lonely.
    Yet at the same time I knew there was nowhere else on earth I wanted to be. Here at Warriewood was as much comfort as I could hope for. To be in this house, in my own bed, in my own bedroom, to hear those sounds and to feel the live presence of my family from years ago, was like being held close in my mother’s arms. That could never happen again in my lifetime, but to have this hint of it, this reminder, seemed to take me back to a time that for twelve years had been beyond the edge of my consciousness, beyond the territory in which I had been living.

CHAPTER THREE
    L ucky it was a beautiful morning when I woke up. Otherwise I might have been a bit discouraged by the bare walls and dusty floors of the house. But I pushed the hair out of my eyes and went to the bathroom to check for hot water. I could have saved myself a walk. It was stone motherless cold.
    The time was around 6.45. I pulled on some old army trousers and a sweatshirt that we printed for the boarding-house revue at the end of last year. Then I went through the front door and down the hill, across the drive I’d come up last night with Ralph. The old fountain was still there but I thought there’d been a statue of a lady on it, a lady with an umbrella. She’d gone now, maybe folded her umbrella and snuck away to a new home, with a kid who would

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