The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories Read Online Free

love. A big, broken-hearted Yugoslav who had never been accepted by her husband’s solid, third-generation New Zealand people, and rejected by her own. No wonder she loved David.
    I sat up and we all stared at each other gloomily. To quit worrying about maths was so clearly ridiculous, despite the soothing nature of David’s remark, that we did not bother discussing it.
    It was, of course, an unending dilemma for us. No students had ever been so haunted by the desire to pass exams, or so we thought. We were at a district high school which served a small farming community on a northern reach of sea coast. Little talent flowered in Waituna, certainly not academic, nor, to any great extent, pastoral. The area had been established by pioneers whose descendants saw small value in change and, latterly, inadequately financed dreamers had moved in with them, occupying small pockets of land which the others had considered too rough to bother about. David’s parents, as I have said, belonged more or less to the first category; mine wholly, and Phyllis’s to the second, while Geoff’s father ran a wayside store outback, between the village and the next major shopping centre. They had a few cows as well, which Geoff milked before and after school, putting out a billy of cream each day, which annoyed the truck driver and brought little return.
    The four of us believed, with the immense satisfaction of the young, that we were special. Although the school had prepared University Entrance candidates for many years, no one had ever passed the examination, nor had anyone ever hoped that they would do so. This year, the four of us were thought to be good, and we were nurtured and cherished by our teachers like beings apart.It was this feeling of being different from the rest of the school which threw us so constantly together. Our conversation became too precious to share with other people, and I think we were passably disagreeable.
    But we were also unusually high-spirited, and this was not surprising either. We believed in ourselves, and longing to leave this indifferent countryside, we saw too, within ourselves, the means of our escape.
    Each morning we left from homes between the hills, places of love without aspiration, sometimes, as with Phyllis’s parents, inhabited at first with hope, later with despair. A few of the young people had had the internal resources to leave, a hard-won School Certificate, almost inevitably allowing them to pass thankfully into the shelter of teachers’ hostels, where they hung indifferent careers upon this convenient refuge. But University Entrance offered more, the bigger chance, the better prospect, and we thought we had it made. Well, most of the time, unless afflicted by the doubts produced by mathematical formulae or French verbs.
    Until the advent of Rad Barclay, that is, who had solved many things.
    Take French. Before he came, we had sat in a long room, with an ageing French mistress, a relic of some long-ago girls’ school, who made us sing Claire de Lune each morning before the lesson began. Geoff’s and David’s voices had broken and Phyllis and I would weep helplessly with uncontrolled laughter, and the old mistress, teaching only to supplement her pension in seaside retirement, would suck her false teeth so that they clattered on her gums. At the beginning of winter she left to tend her geraniums through the cold, and in her place came Rad, bringing with him visions not of a gaunt moon in an echoing room but a France of wine, sun, indelible blue skies and Scott Fitzgerald. Verbs became our catch tunes.
    He was always in our thoughts, and when we thought about him he usually appeared, which meant that he was usually with us.
    So that while we sat there, looking at each other, he did appear. I lifted my head and saw his trousered leg.
    â€˜What’s the matter, Magog?’ he asked me, too.
    â€˜Nothing,’ I said, hugging my breasts, and my body