Mike Read Online Free

track-suit. I was on my way out through the side gate when Riny called out to me. She was standing on the back porch with a steaming mug in her hands.
    â€œTo warm you up,” she said. I didn’t feel like coffee just then, but how do you say “no”? I took a sip.
    It was chocolate, hot and sweet and thick.
    â€œMy Ros used to swim. She made the State Finals one year.” Riny was very proud of her children and it showed in her voice. Rosalind was her girl. She had a boy too: Pieter. They were both in their forties now and neither of them lived anywhere near their mother. Pieter was in Canada, working for an oil company, and Ros — Riny hardly ever used her full name — had moved to Perth with her husband. Sometimes, when Riny talked about them, you could taste the loneliness in her voice. But she was still very proud of them.
    â€œHow was the water?” It was the obvious question, but she really sounded interested.
    â€œCold. But I enjoyed it. It’s been a long time. I’ve got a lot of work to do if I’m going to beat —”
    I pulled myself up. I hadn’t mentioned Shane Thomas to anyone, not Riny, not my mother. I’d come home the day before, to find my mother, who was off on a flexi-day, sitting in the kitchen having a drink with Riny, and it didn’t take a genius to figure that some of their conversation would have to have been about me.
    I didn’t want Mum to know about my problems; she was the type to take a day off and come up to the school to see the Principal and make things ten times as bad as they were already. You can see why I didn’t want to let Riny in on my plan. More secrets have been spilled “for your own good” than for almost any other reason.
    Besides, I was beginning to feel stupid about the whole thing. If I did decide to pull out and forget the idea, it was better if I didn’t tell anyone in the first place. And the way I was feeling that first morning, I didn’t think I’d ever be ready to take down Shane “the Pain”.
    But that was only the first morning.
    I did get better.

9
…AND LIZARDS
    Boundary Street suited its name. It was on the edge of the great suburban sprawl. At its back was the cluttered landscape of wider Sydney; the growing cities of Fairfield and Liverpool crowded each other to the east and south, and not five minutes away by car lay the expressway, which carried the endless streams of traffic to and fro between the inner-city and the exploding outer- West and the mountains.
    But if you looked forward, towards the south-west, the country beckoned. A low line of round, green hills, dotted with horses or cows or the odd small gathering of sheep.
    The street was a real boundary, and it shared a little of both environments. On the high side stood the older, established houses. They looked out over the fields and hills, with their backs turned on the growing chaos of brick and tile, as if by ignoring its presence they could put off the inevitable. On the low side were the newer houses, with their modern architecture and large-screen stereo tv sets (which shone their colours out at night between the gaps in their fashionable vertical blinds). These houses faced back towards suburbia and waited. For the unavoidable.
    Riny just watched the street and the fields beyond. And remembered …
    Pieter and Ros, at eight and ten, playing in the paddock where Michael’s house now stood. Catching skinks and keeping them in a plastic butcher’s tub in the garage; until the day they escaped and ran through the house like little hairless mice. She had screamed. But Tony just laughed and built a shelter for the tub in the backyard.
    Lizards. What a thing to remember …
    Her thoughts shifted. The boy was planning something. There was more to all this morning training than fitness. He was too … serious. Too old for his age. His mother was worried that he needed his father around more