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

full of spring fever, and longing and the need for everything to be over and I on my way, yet confused with wanting them all to be with me for always.
    â€˜There is,’ said Phyllis. ‘She’s worried about maths, and she’s mad, mad, mad.’
    Rad knelt beside me. ‘Poor Magog,’ he said. ‘You want a cloudburst, and much colour, and a palette and easel upon which to express it all, and instead you see rows and rows of figures, and little three-sided boxes, and spotted algebraics. It’s not fair.’
    This was his appeal to us, a kind of multi-hued way of talking, and a capitalisation of the most obvious parts of our natures. He was very clever.
    It didn’t seem fair either. As he knelt beside me, he ran his fingers on the ground, his flesh digging through the grass to brittle dirt, scratching his nails against jagged pebbles. His hand looked oddly out of place there, against the earth, he was not of our place, or our origins. He might stand against a curved horizon, and walk on salt-soaked marshland near the sea shore with us; he might go to the sea, and peer at the violet smudges of the islands on the edge of distance, but in doing so, he reminded us rather, that he was not at home here.
    He was from the city, a student teacher, which made him very young, maybe not many years older than any of us. His skin was pale sepia, and his lips, warm and full, betrayed his beginnings, or some of them. He hated them bitterly, deeply, believing that to be neither one nor the other, was a sin of parents against children. Yet his Maori ancestry was very slight, and it was to it that he owed his looks. Of all of us it might have been expected that he and David would be the closest, sharing a bond of mixed race. It was not so. David, the quiet one, trusted him less than the rest of us. Well, neither Geoff, nor Phyllis, nor I mistrusted him at all. With our French at his command, and our English splendid but orderly, we had much to thank him for. Teachers had to be versatile at Waituna District High, and so he taught us history as well. We thrived and that pleased the Head, and relieved him, for though bright, and precious in our hopes, we were also a burden on the system.
    So we saw a great deal of him, and he, being lonely, turned more and more to us, talking, always talking, full of ideas, and hate too. Hate for systems, hate for tradition and, quickly, hate for the rural class strait-laced little township, trailing through the valley towards the hills where the farmlands lay.
    It was hot enough to swim at Labour Day that year, and all five of us had gone to the sea. On the sand, by sunlit feathers of the silver spinifex, we lay, and Rad gave us coconut oil to rub on his back, then we rubbed it on each other and the liquid turned to golden globules in the midday sun. Rad talked about girls he had been with, and books he had read which were banned and should not be.
    We listened, peeling oranges, sucking the pips, and Geoff flung peel on to the sand. I jumped to retrieve it, and Rad said sharply, ‘Leave it.’
    â€˜Why?’ I said, stopping on my knees to look at him. ‘It’s untidy here.’
    â€˜I know. Leave it.’
    â€˜It spoils the beach,’ I argued.
    â€˜That doesn’t matter,’ he said, beginning to be angry. ‘It will rot, or thegulls will take it away. Tonight, tomorrow, a week, it will be gone.’
    â€˜So what?’
    â€˜So you jump up when we sit talking, enjoying ourselves, thinking naughty, naughty, someone is spoiling the view. You expend energy on things that don’t matter.’
    I had picked up the peel and, wrapping it, placed it back in my bike satchel. He watched me, coldly, and turned on his stomach, away from us, silent. The others looked at me, then him, not knowing which one of us to resent.
    That was when it really began, the continual tug between us, between the things that we had been taught to believe did matter,