Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins by Robert Drewe Read Free Book Online

doing this were coming from some humid foreign place. The crickets by now were used to us and started up again their hot vibration. A whiff of hot gunmetal came off her, or maybe me. I felt like someone living another way of life so thought I’d better act like it. Pressed on her trigger again just where she said to and watched her colours change. Already longing for those birdcalls – the seagull, the parrot, the magpie carolling at the sun. Then pulled her back down on me and let her falling hair shield my eyes against the glare.
    This was in my law-abiding time, in the early stages with Mrs C.

I n the final stage with Mrs C, I made an appearance on her croquet lawn, burnt naked and caked in blood. Sizzled flakes of flesh and cloth flew off us all, spikes of our clotted hair snapped off. None of us was normal. Dan, tied on behind me, was making hooting noises in the wind.
    All through those days of thirsty hiding, of guzzling blood and lurching in fires, I’d pictured her juicy green lawn. So the four of us, doubling up on two charred and limping horses, waving shaky guns, appeared like a mad nun’s nightmare in the home paddock of Mrs C.
    This was a week or so after Hare’s men poisoned our dam with three strychnine-baited pigs and a decomposed roo or two, then set alight our hideout country to flush us out. A hot February drought, with the bracken and wattle undergrowth drier than touchpaper and all the streams lower than mud. Fires surged along the gullies and up across the ridge in separate bright gashes like cutlass wounds. As the main fire came up on us on the nor’westerly we fled our hut with a neck-bag each of dubious water and the four relief horses carrying hasty packs. Panic flowed in waves from horse to smoking horse and back. In the smoke and noise, Dan’s mare Erina stumbled and Dan led her on foot in giddy spirals until we found them half-buried in the silt of what had been Six Fingers Creek sucking river stones and with their hair on fire from the ash of weeping-willow leaves.
    Spewing in the saddle from bad water, shitting too, losing more moisture from our streaming eyes, we were scorched husks by the time we’d found a granite overhang to shelter under and let the main fire jump us. By the time I’d calmed Dan down from gibbering for mother and we’d kept ourselves alive a day, we’d drunk all the water anyway. The horses were colicky and mad from eating burnt feed but Erina was the maddest so while Dan was out to it again we cut her throat, not quite looking at each other, and drank the blood.
    This way we lasted another two days. In daylight we hid under rocks from the police patrols, at night we doubled back behind them across the burning hills. Even the blacktrackers couldn’t see in smoke, at night, and where we could we back-burned our tracks. By now we were the scorched and brittle texture of the bush around us. We nibbled the bodies of small charred animals – a spiny anteater, goannas – and vomited again. Steve and Joe chewed burned gumleaves to get the taste out of their mouths while Dan kept sucking rocks like they were toffees. It took an hour just to raise the spittle but then I ate my chinstrap. When at last we found another cave we killed two more horses to celebrate. We fell on their hot necks, pressed our faces in as if they were the iciest mountain streams.
    Blood was the only food we could keep down. We drank six horses dry before we saw the croquet lawn three days later and guessed we’d live.
    Coming close to Mrs C’s property, we took the chance the bushfire had forced her husband and eldest son and men out mustering. Her Chinese laundry girl spotted us first but fled to the lavatory at the sight of these spirits of murder victims. Certainly we were a charnel house on legs. I – the scorched beast-creature in front – croaked after her, ‘Get the missus!’ and as the horses tottered to the water trough we peeled off their backs like scabs and pushed our snouts