Eyrie by Tim Winton Read Free Book Online Page B

while in the half-dark before reaching for the gamy towel. The dim outline in the mirror moved in sympathy. Not really in sync. An approximation.
    But when he turned for bed and stepped through the doorway there was a different form in the bedroom window, a shape too small to be his reflection, too distinct to be any kind of reflection at all.
    The size of a child. Naked in the strobing, distant light. Pressed against the screen as if held there by wind-shear alone. Bare arms aloft in benediction or flight. He was calm, those moments he lingered; the boy was calm and solemn and terrible.
    Then gone, like an unsustainable thought.
    Keely knelt on the bed before the suddenly vacant window. Nothing there but breathless night. When his pulse finally subsided he lay down and tried to sleep. But he could feel it returning. Not the image, but the dream. In wisps and fits and flashes. Settling upon him like a dread familiar.
    It was the boy. Gemma Buck’s kid. In the dream he was out on the balcony – Gemma’s, not his. And in the dream Keely was alone, wrapped in a towel in cool, cool air, impossibly cold air, not seeing the boy out there across the way until he moved. The child was three balconies distant. He was bare-chested, squatting on a milk crate, breasting the rail and dipping his head to it. His pale hair shone in the dark as he perched and bobbed, lapping dew off the iron like a thirsty dove.
    And that was it. All the dream that would come safely to mind. Even this much frightened him. He sensed that there’d been more than just squatting, but he didn’t want to go there; he was practised enough at shelving what could not be borne. But the logic of something worse beat on in him for minutes until he began to feel he’d assimilated it for what it was, a harmless bit of mental indigestion. He was fine. It was all good and there was juice left in the pills, current enough to tug at him so he felt himself leaching away towards delicious sleep. And yet he could feel the pale glow of the boy there, waiting. In the swamp of his ungoverned country. Perched, pigeon-chested. Too high. Unguarded. Only a straightened leg away from toppling.
    Keely clawed back, roused himself. Got up. Dragged on some shorts. Blundered through to the dim livingroom, jacked open the slider and stepped outside.
    All along the building the balconies were deserted. A few railings were still illuminated by blue flickers of television, but nobody was out there.
    The invisible sea revealed itself in throbbing boundaries – red lights, green lights, the distant pulses of the island lighthouses. The port thrummed, the town itself reduced to echoes and murmurs as the streetsweeper trundled out towards the marina.
    He went back in. But was too afraid to sleep. Which should have been funny given how much he craved it, what he’d swallowed to get there, how muzzy and ready he felt. He’d just lie here a while, ignore the leg tremors, wait it out.

D awn. Morning. Day.
    Didn’t take the bike out. Didn’t swim. Eyes like hot pea gravel. The flat was roasting but he holed up there all day. The building trembled with the comings and goings of others. All that purposeful Friday traffic. He tooled about on the laptop, googling aimlessly, squinting, holding his scone like it was an IED.
    His inbox was stacked with unread emails, most from bewildered or exasperated friends and comrades, though the most recent were many weeks old. By the boldface subject titles he could see solicitude taper away to hurt silence and worse. Two of the last, from people he’d promised vital briefings on the wetlands strategy, were simply headed, WTF? Piled in their aging strata, these unanswered messages were a miserable sort of archaeology, a register of failure. It was absurd and lowering to keep them like this. Sick to pull them up and survey them, scrolling down the list, pausing over one now and then as if daring yourself to open it. It was time to end it.
    He got up, strode to