Amy's Children Read Online Free

said to Gus and left the rocker. Gus sat and Lebby pressed herself against his rough old coat. He rubbed his bristly cheeks, first one and then the other, on the top of Lebby’s head. Lebby’s lips began to lift at the corners then stretch out. Mumma will see her new teeth, Kathleen thought, watching. Patricia left the couch and laid her body across Gus’s knees face downwards. Gus parted his legs so that she almost fell through, righting his legs in time to save her. She laughed and Lebby did too. Gus carried on the game of widening his legs when it was least expected he would, then clamping them together unexpectedly too. Above the beef she was slicing, May’s face softened with a quirking of her lips. Kathleen tried not to smile but couldn’t help herself.
    This is the last time I’ll come home, Amy thought.

4
    She did come home again when Lebby was nearly two and as shy as ever.
    That’s good, Amy thought, looking briefly at the legs dangling from May’s hip, deceptively frail, she thought, wondering if she should carry the memory away with her.
    She had saved her fare on the mail car to Nowra and there was enough left for a rail ticket to Sydney and a few pounds in case she did not get work straight away. She would stay with her Aunt Daphne in Annandale. May and her sister corresponded fairly regularly. “You know the address if you feel like a look at the Big Smoke,” Daphne said in one of her letters. But Amy decided not to write and warn Daphne of her impending arrival. It might set up a conspiracy between her and May to prevent Amy getting away. It might be hard to convince Daphne from a distance of her intention of ultimately setting up house for herself and the children.
    She had made up her mind to have nothing stand in her way. People staying at the hotel said Sydney was the place to be.
    Once on her afternoon off she had put on her blue dress and sat on the veranda with a traveller in soft goods taking a seat beside her. He had a wife Elsie and two young children living at Bondi. He told Amy they had only to walk along the tram route past a few shops and there was the sea. Amy saw it rolling in blue as the last rinse on wash day, and the sand fawn coloured like the inside of a shell. Amy thought immediately of Lebby’s neck but dismissed it.
    She waited in the hope that the man would say to come and stay with them (if she was not welcomed at Daphne’s) until she found somewhere permanent to live. But he smiled at his joined hands in his lap and she suspected he was thinking of the cosiness of his little home. So he was. “You should visit us in Sydney if you come,” he said. “Elsie would make you very welcome.”
    In bed that night she imagined the sea washing onto the beach with a sleepy laziness, not crashing in cruelly as it had done once when Gus and May took her and the boys to the coast for a picnic when she was ten. She had whimpered in her wet cold state and Gus had been disgusted at her screams when he held her above a wave and let it slosh over her feet. He had all but thrown her back to May and the picnic basket, having made great sacrifices, working nearly all night to get their old truck going to get them there.
    But the sea at Bondi would be different. The big waves too far out to be a worry, so gentle when they rolled onto the beach she could lie and let them wash over her. She went on to dream of a bathing suit, red perhaps, cut low on her back, which would be tanned a deep honey colour.
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    Gus left the kitchen when Amy announced her plans. “Gus!” May called, but he was gone.
    May was ironing and she put such urgency into her work all of sudden, Kathleen on the floor with her rag doll connected the ironing with the going away. She had a vision of Amy walking along the road with a great heap of ironed clothes balanced on her arm. She blushed at the foolishness of this when she saw there were many of Gus’s and the