Brothers and Sisters Read Online Free Page B

following behind.
    It’s so sunny outside. Our squints have the effect of smiles as we stand facing each other on the hot concrete of the car park.
    ‘I’ve got yesterday’s washing in the car. It’s all beautifully clean and pressed.’ She looks rueful. ‘I’m really very good, aren’t I?’ Then she tilts her head so that her hair shines. ‘What would you do without me?’
    ‘I really don’t know,’ I say as I pull her to my chest. I close my eyes tightly, squeezing the moisture from them. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say as I kiss the top of her head. Her hair feels as soft as duck feathers as I stay there, resting my nose and lips upon her crown.

PALEFACE AND
THE PANTHER
    Robert Drewe

Anthony’s skin was so white, almost translucent, you could see the veins fanning out from his temples into his rusty curls. The vulnerability of those electric-blue wires shocked me; sometimes his skull looked like a physiology poster. At the same time, the eggshell frailty of an orphanage or illness seemed to cling to his body. When he had his shirt off for the bath or beach there were those eerie neon veins again, beaming out from inside his chest.
    I tried to paint him a few times but I find children difficult. They come out either too sentimentally cherubic or Hollywood demonic. In oils Anthony looked like a changeling, with a wily old face. And I couldn’t resist the veins—maybe I overdid the cobalt. Anyway, the paintings met with strong disapproval from the Miller sisters, pale redheads too, who maybe had Renoir and innocence and velvet suits in mind, and they were destroyed before I could reuse the canvases.
    Even in real life he didn’t appear a normal West Australian boy, neither tanned nor sunburnt, not freckled or peeling, more like a vitamin D-and-protein-deprived European waif from yesteryear. Just off the boat , as they used to say. Dickensian poorhouse. But he wasn’t sick or poor, just pallid and thin. And he was actually a fourthgeneration Sandgroper, and only half orphaned, and now that a temperamental flush masked his veins, and his curls were unravelling in the summer humidity, he was the image of my father.
    It was Anthony’s birthday party, and in the cricket game taking place in a municipal park of buffalo grass sloping down to the river, a match he had insisted on, he’d just been clean bowled for the third time in a row.
    It was torture to watch. He was trying out his new Slazenger cricket set, my present to him: a cricket bat, ball, pads, gloves, stumps and bails which came in a nifty PVC bag with the Slazenger panther emblem leaping in full horizontal stretch the length of the bag. It was expensive but I’d wanted to give him something sporty and manly, something we could do together and maybe shift the gender balance a little. Make him not so milky-pale and veiny. He was always surrounded by women and I felt guilty for not paying more attention to him in the past couple of years when I was living it up. Painting hard, yes, but also playing hard. The usual recreational activities. Anyway, if his flushed cheeks and boisterous eagerness to test the cricket set this afternoon were anything to go by, he loved the gift.
    But now he was clean bowled again, and he refused to leave the crease. Even as he flailed around, his glowering, determined face—my father again—seemed to say, Are you all mad? Why should he go out? What idiot would swap batting for bowling or, even more ludicrously, fielding? Batting was the whole point, wasn’t it? It was his birthday and his new cricket set and he was the most important person here, especially today of all days.
    Not surprisingly, the fifteen party guests fielding in the park this January afternoon were losing concentration and patience. Of course the birthday boy had been allowed to bat first. Uncle Brian was bowling underarm, and had substituted a tennis ball for the hard cricket ball—and, what’s more, had bowled him out three times already.
    All over the