Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam by Peter Goldsworthy Read Free Book Online

unfair to their daughter to make plans that did not include her, that were beyond her.
    ‘I know what the book looks like,’ Linda said, as she continued to search the shelves. ‘It’s not part of the set. Olive-green binding — very old, a little tatty.’
    ‘Maybe it’s in the lounge.’
    But she tugged the book from some deep recess, blew dust from the pages, then turned immediately to the last page, and began to read: ‘It
is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.’
    They sat, silenced, sharing the same thought: that each would willingly, gladly, take the place of their small daughter in the tumbril. And yet they were powerless. They would have donated a kidney or lung to save her — they would have donated both lungs, they would each have sacrificed a still-beating
heart
— but their bone marrow, the only gift she needed, spread plentifully through their bodies, in far, far greater quantities than they would ever require themselves, was useless, even fatally dangerous to her.

8
    In the following weeks Emma slowly became aware, again, of the existence of that tumbril in which she was riding, of the fact that it had turned a last corner, and the square ahead, and all it contained, had come into view. Had some developmental threshold been crossed in her growth? A spurt in the imagination, or brain-size, which permitted her to clearly see the future, or the absence of future, for the first time? Or had she had come to sense, and be infected by, the desperation of her parents, which they always tried to shield from her? The attentions of her grandparents, fully briefed, finally, on the extent of her predicament, were a further cue. Her stoic, wise-owl manner vanished for longer intervals, and resisted jolting back to equilibrium. When she sat with her books, or paints, or drawing-pads, her gaze was often fixed to one side, defocussed.
    Morbid fascination fuelled her talk at meal-times: endless questions about bones, dust, ashes, cremation, coffins. She solemnly examined the blue-black bruises that appeared on her body, at times even measured those bruises with her school ruler in a parody of one of the earlier obsessions of her parents.
    As the end also became clearer to Rick and Linda, they resumed church-going, choosing to look pity in the eye, to stare it down. In part this return to the fold was still a search for the routines of normality, an attempt to travel backwards in time; in part it was a last desperate reaching out — not for miracles, perhaps, but at least for answers. Each Sunday at St Paul’s they huddled together in a back pew, in a far corner, wanting only a private, family worship, a communion between them and whatever God might haunt the old stone church. Privacy was not so easy: once again the Reverend Cummings insisted on intervening and mediating — translating — between them and that God. He asked for shared prayers from the congregation, mentioned their trials in sermons; and after Rick protested — politely, but firmly — began visiting them at home instead, uninvited.
    ‘Don’t forget the power of faith,’ he exhorted over innumerable cups of tea. ‘The power of prayer.’
    Linda had reached exasperation point.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘why that would help. And if it did — what kind of God would insist on it? Why should we have to
beg
for favours?’
    He sat back in an armchair — Rick’s leather armchair, appropriated — and pursed his lips and pressed his fingertips together. More at home in the pulpit lecturing his flock on issues of social justice — poverty, land rights, unemployment — he seemed lost in the world of personal, immediate pain. He might have been enacting a role, playing a part meant for someone older: a wise uncle, or grandfather.
    ‘I don’t want to sound glib,’ he murmured, ‘But if we knew all the answers — if knowledge was given to us on a plate —