Swallow the Air by Tara June Winch Read Free Book Online Page B

frightened of a world that existed only in her head. Who was going to beat her mind? Dad wasn’t there anymore, but she still saw him, he still managed to haunt her. I remember the madness, the fear. Was he hiding underthe bed, Mum? Was he in the cupboards reaching out for your wrist? Was he under the house? Is that why you dug up the backyard? Why you became blank and told us nightmares instead of dreamings?
    Poor Mum.
    And now, I could let him go. Because only when I remembered, could I finally forget.
    I tugged on the drawstring of my hood and walked back to the truck. I waited until Pete threw himself up into the cab and rocked with the suspension.
    â€˜Bit outta control there, hey? Only in Darwin, bare-knuckle fights. Only in the Territory! Don’t worry; you’ll never see that again. So, where to in Darwin, which resort are you staying at my lady?’
    â€˜I’ll get out on the highway; I’ll be right on the highway, Pete. Gotta go back, I forgot something.’

The Block

    I’m in Sydney, in a pagoda sipping Japanese tea or a castle where I wait for a carriage made of baked pumpkin to take me from here to anywhere but here. I had pumpkin soup at a street kitchen yesterday but the taste was shit. I could do with a feed, a good feed. Sleep was fine, but that free food was a load of rubbish, no one ate there unless they were real desperate. It’s a weird neon place forever decorated as Christmas, a forgotten stretch of Pitt Street stone.
    I’d headed south that day, I remember, in the passenger seat of the backpackers’ station wagon, the foreign voices dousing the sunset colours of the Top End. The shiny bits of the car sparkling red like all the blood I’d ever seen or imagined. It was then that I knew Pete was right. I knew that I would never see anything like that again.
    The trip ended in the middle of this mad city.I arrived with my heart still hurting and my head still spinning. I realised I hadn’t cried at all since I’d left Wollongong. My eyes began to harden like honeycomb. It got easier to do, being tuff.
    I spun into the clogging traffic and muffled voices and tides of ironed pleats and searched for the nearest tree. These buildings were like a bed of sprouted nails; I dragged my fingers across them, smooth granite, marble, mirror glass, sandstone and pebble. Around and beyond the still life, for miles, was a crawling, prickly blanket of identical houses and roads.
    In the middle of the chaos I found Belmore Park, directly opposite the station. Lining its bitumen streams were massive fig trees with strong muscled roots that cradled strangers and split open the otherwise faultless lawn.
    In the centre of the park, through the scattered yellow-brown maples, is a little brick house, a hexagon with a parachute cover of mouldy tiles as the roof. The sign reads Belmore Park Depot, but people call it all sorts of names – the pagoda, the gazebo, or the first floor. I’d rather think of it as a castle, when you’re up there you feel as if you’re sleeping under the stars on thebattlements, a balmy night in some fairytale village in a cartoon, with its fancy steel stake fence that wraps around the rooftop. But the cartoons don’t scream and ambulances don’t ribbon the streets clean of its spilling blood, drunken businessmen don’t get rolled and the gangs from Chinatown don’t come to do deals. The cartoons have bullshit happy endings to make people hope, for a prince or a hero to save us from whatever it is, the dragon or the robber.
    I didn’t need to be saved; I wasn’t waiting for a stupid hero.
    But one came anyway, not in a costume, but wearing a purple t-shirt, and baring too-perfect false teeth.
    â€˜Hey, moguls, ya little cunts, ya up there aren’t yas?’
    I was awake already, lying on my side watching the branches dance. I propped myself on my elbows at the sound of her voice and dragged my belly to the