Dear Miffy by John Marsden Read Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t nothing I could do about it.
    Ah, fuck it, I don’t want to think any more about that stuff, and besides my back’s hurting like shit tonight, if you really want to know. I’m gonna go get some of the magic pills, Miff.
    Bye,
    Tony
    Dear Miff,
    They keep coming at me with all this denial shit, Miff; I mean, what the fuck would they know? I don’t deny nothing, I know everything that’s happened to me and I know it was my own fucking fault and I know what it means. I just don’t need them to remind me of it every fucking day and night. Maybe they want me to be fucking grateful I’m in this fucking place, but I tell you what, I got news for them: gratitude ain’t in my fucking vocabulary, not me baby, so fuck you all.
    So what if I just want to dream about the past? So fucking what? It’s none of their fucking business.
    They reckoned that my uncle and aunt were going to visit yesterday but they never turned up, not that I want them to, anyway.
    So you know what I’m going to do, Miff? I’m going to live in the past just a little bit longer—in fact, for as long as I want.
    And you’re the past I want to live in, Miff.
    That’s not so bad, is it—to live in the past? Not when the past was like we had. So many good times, so many laughs. Geez, it’s a long time since I had a laugh. But that first Monday that we were together: that was the best day of my life, I reckon. The way everyone looked at us! Like they couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t either. Even with the teachers, man; they were spinning out, like, ‘This can’t be for real! Tell me it isn’t true!’
    Cos, of course, everyone knew how much we hated each other’s guts before that.
    You know what that hate time was like, Miff? It was a zone we had to pass through. And once we’d passed through it we were in a new area, one I hadn’t visited before. It was full-on, one-on-one, after that. Amazing. The world stopped existing outside us two. My uncle and aunt, my father, even my mum if she’d been there, they could be wherever they wanted, they could do whatever they wanted, they could have said any shit to me and I wouldn’t have noticed. You and I, we lived on an island that floated through the school, down the streets, through the shopping centre, an island like a little spaceship, and no-one else could get on it.
    No-one else had the passport or the visa or the tickets.
    First time I went to your place with you was, what? After we’d had about two weeks together? Second time was about ten days later. I didn’t really want to go again. You’d been hassling me trying to get an invite to my uncle and aunt’s. But I didn’t want that, either. I didn’t want us to be together at my place or yours. Just in the streets with you, that was enough for me, in the parks, in the wild places.
    But because I wanted to do everything right with you I gave in when you said to come the second time. ‘No-one’ll be there,’ you said. Well, I’m not going to give you a hard time about that again. Just because half your fucking family was there. At least your father was away, saving lives or feeling up little girls, or both. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d crashed the place.
    So, off we went, me talking more and more the closer we got because that’s what I do when I’m nervous, that’s the only time I talk, but just talking shit, and you talking less and less, because that’s what you do. It was pretty weird when I saw the cars there, shit. There was your mother’s Alfa and your brother’s BM and your sister’s Jeep. Like, that was a quiet day for you guys. Awesome. I don’t know why I didn’t piss off straightaway. Should have. I knew when I saw the cars that there were people home, and you knew it too, of course. I felt you getting more nervous—but you told me