Fire Song by Libby Hathorn Read Free Book Online

proper, as if she were screwing someone’s neck. The dago’s neck, really. Although the basket was heavy, Ingrid loved taking the washing out to Grandma Logan’s garden and up the yard to the clothes line, just short of the apple orchard, with Blackie getting up to greet her and Pippa trailing behind her, hoping for a leg-up into one of the trees.
    ‘Want an apple, Pippa? Say, “Yes, please, I’d like an apple!"’
    She didn’t say a word, but she nodded.
    ‘Then wait a mo, Pip.’
    Ingrid lowered the clothes prop, that big forked stick Uncle Ken had made for them, that wonderful time he’d visited them in the Blue Mountains. The prop always made her think of him, and then of Daddy as she brought the line down not too low, but low enough to spread out the sheets without letting them touch the ground. Then she raised the line triumphantly, up and up to the full height of the prop, where Mum’s white-as-white sheets whipped and flapped against the blue mountain sky.
    Thinking about Mum’s anger, she decided she really should not go to Mr Fratelli for help, but to his son, who was still her good friend. Their place was on the other side of town. She could run there right after she had bought the tobacco and papers. She could fill the billycan with milk on the way back. Then she’d have to run fast on account of Mum waiting impatiently for her ciggies, and the time she’d already taken at the police station. She hesitated. There was no knowing what Mum would do when she was angry, if she had to wait too long. And getting to Dom’s…
    She faltered. Maybe she should just do the shopping and get home.
    Or then again, there were Ruth Klein’s parents. Mr Klein and Mrs Klein lived real close by, in a tiny wooden cottage down Hat Hill Road. Mrs Klein said she loved the name Hat Hill, it was so strange an image to conjure up. And she liked the way Australians used English. They have such a sense of humour here, she’d say, as if where she had come from there hadn’t been very many laughs.
    ‘Maybe not many laughs for the likes of her,’ Mum snapped, when Ingrid told her.
    Mrs Klein even commented on the name
Emoh Ruo,
when Ruth told her about it after her first visit. ‘How endearing!’ she said, smiling broadly, as if it was funny to spell a house name backwards, but also something else – quite nice.
    Ingrid helped Ruth the day she arrived at school, scared witless and already looking different in her funny foreign dress and with her brown lace-up ankle boots, the likes of which had never been seen in the Blue Mountains. It hadn’t taken long to like the girl, but her first impression wasn’t the best.
    ‘What about those funny brown-rimmed glasses she wears. They’re so ugly!’ Eileen Featherstone had breathed, as soon as Ruth entered the classroom.
    ‘My mother said she’s a Jew-girl,’ Robyn Smithers had whispered after Mrs Marks introduced her. ‘Everyone, this is Ruth Klein. She’s a new girl all the way from Austria, a country far away in Europe. Who knows where that is on the map? Of course you do – near Germany. It’s one of the places where the war was waged and when it was over, many people had to seek new lands.’ Mrs Marks’s voice always went a bit shaky at this, because, like Mum, she had lost an older brother in the fighting.
    ‘Welcome, Ruth Klein. You can take a seat next to – ’
    Don’t let it be me, Ingrid remembered thinking at that second. But of course it was.
    ‘Next to Ingrid Crowe and she’ll help you on your first day. Won’t you, Ingrid?’
    ‘Yes, Miss.’ Her face felt hot, because she really didn’t want to be saddled with any new girl, and especially one in such an old-fashioned looking dress, weird boots and boring glasses. But she’d taken to Ruth the moment she sat downand Ingrid could hear her short frightened breaths, as she smiled in that nervous new-girl way. Ingrid had felt that same rush of something she always felt for Pippa, whenever Mum got mean