The Best Australian Stories Read Online Free Page B

beach, which had become our favourite place, we elaborated on our mother’s story. The back beach was an unlikely refuge, open as it was to the elements, and with the added danger now of wild creatures who had landed there, and snarled and bitten, and perhaps escaped.
    We pretended that we saw them, behind bushes, leaping out. We took it in turns to be tigers, or my favourite, the black panther, who waited in shadows, who knew exactly where to hide. We frightened one another greatly, and with enormous pleasure. Our thin legs shook, our small faces ran with sweat. Our shoes got soaked from tearing off from danger the wrong way, towards the insistent, muscular shorebreak, forgetting till it was too late to avoid a soaking, though we turned, shrieking, up the steep part of the beach, frantic to outpace the incoming tide. We took our shoes off and tried, futilely, to dry them.
    When other children appeared, as they did from time to time, over the lip of the dunes, with a dog perhaps, or in groups of five or six, we headed farther on, into what, in our minds, was a true wilderness, where the beach narrowed and sandhills practically overhung the water, where big seas carved out the sand from underneath and made the tops collapse. We found a place behind the first line of dunes that we called the tree cemetery, full of what had once been trunks and branches, and were now turned to stone. We made a fort out of them, mixed with other branches, not so long dead, and dug small caves beneath the tea-tree, and ran in and out of temporary cavities that the sea had gouged.
    All through that autumn, the zoo animals were not far from our minds. I pictured them during the long hours I was forced to sit in classrooms, near the door and in constant drafts. The best seats, close to the fire, or in the back corner furthest from the door, were bagged by children I had no wish to challenge, not so much fearing defeat as impatient with a contest that did not seem worth the effort.
    The children we avoided on the beach did not want to include us, and we didn’t bother our heads with ruses that might have persuaded them. When winter came, and afternoons of sleety rain, they stayed indoors, while my sister and I donned our new plastic raincoats, with pleated hoods that my sister played with, folding and unfolding them. We pulled on the wellingtons our father had bought to save our school shoes, and headed out in all weathers, towards the adventures we’d stored up in anticipation.
    Once more, and only once, I recall our mother venturing outside to wait for us. This time we were running well before we got to our street, knowing we’d left it too late and were in for a scolding. Our mother had left the porch and was standing in the driveway, still and black, but this time like the stone trees, rather than a burnt one.
    I was punished as the elder, more responsible daughter.
    It was the middle of winter when we heard about the second shipwreck. Our mother had just come across the story herself, and became animated as she told us. Even then, I recognised it as the kind of legend that belonged in books. It concerned a pirate by the name of Benito Bonito, who had been forced ashore at Swan Bay some time in the years between 1810 and 1815. His ship had sunk, but he’d managed to reach the shore, carrying treasure, which he’d hidden in a cave.
    As legends will, this one had grown many arms and legs. Some said the pirate had later been captured in the West Indies and committed suicide; others that his son had found the treasure and re-buried it, along with three Greeks who were killed in a gunpowder explosion. Another version had Bonito returning for his loot and disappearing into the hinterland, where he took a new name and bought hotels and became respectable and legitimately wealthy; or that he’d set sail once again, only to founder on a northern reef, when this time his gold had gone down with him.
    Benito Bonito – my mother