The Paua Tower Read Online Free Page B

truth is, I can’t afford to keep you.’
    ‘I’d work for less,’ said Stella quickly.
    ‘Less? You’ve already taken a cut in wages,’ said Mrs Rhodes, putting the cup down.
    ‘I wouldn’t mind.’ Stella glanced at her fingernails.
    ‘’Fraid not, there’s nothing for it, Stell. Much as I hate to do it, you’ll have to go. Give you a week’s wages and a cracker reference and as soon as things improve you’ll be first back.’
    ‘Thanks, Mrs R.’ Stella didn’t look up.
    ‘Thanks? I certainly don’t need thanks. It’s a real heartbreak and I only hope you get something else, though that won’t be easy, as well I know. But what can I do? My back’s to the wall. The way this country’s going I might have to close the place down altogether in a month or so.’

    Stella, too fearful to go home, sat on the bench, her pay in a brown envelope tight in her hand. The youngest of four children, she lived alone with her parents. Her three brothers had all gone rabbiting down in the Mackenzie Country and not been heard of since. Her father, Doug, laid off from railway work a few months ago, hunched all morning over a single mug of tea or thumped about on the kitchen table trying to mend the lapping sole of aworn shoe, or sticking another patch on a bicycle tyre as the old bike slithered under his angry hands. Doug’s unemployment pay and Stella’s wages, along with leftovers from the tearooms, kept the family going.
    Poverty wasn’t new to the Morgans — there hadn’t been much to go around even in the good times. Stella remembered being chosen to be Titania, the fairy queen, in a school pageant. She had been eight or nine and had never before felt such happiness.
    ‘You can’t,’ said Peg Morgan, who was washing potatoes in a tin basin when Stella ran in to tell her the news. A small woman with pale eyebrows and a lined face, Stella’s mother wore a sack apron and a turban scarf around her head.
    ‘But Mum …’
    ‘Don’t “Mum” me. I’ve said it and that’s flat,’ said Peg, rubbing a potato with fierce energy.
    ‘Why, Mum? Why?’
    ‘Think we’re made of money? Hard enough to clothe you as it is, without costumes for some daft queen of the fairies.’ Peg’s face reddened, as it did when she was angry or embarrassed.
    In the end the headmaster had come round to the house. Peg had removed her apron, which was unusual in daytime, then got out the two best china cups and saucers from the cabinet and given him tea. Stella was sent into the hall.
    ‘But we’re not asking you to spend anything or provide fabric,’ Mr Davidson said. ‘As I told you, another mother has donated an old wedding dress and you’re welcome to use that.’
    ‘We don’t take charity, thank you very much,’ said Mrs Morgan, her voice as glittering as the good teaspoons.
    It was hopeless. Stella went into the backyard and crouched under a piece of corrugated iron that leant against the fence behind the dunny, as she wiped tears and mucus off her face. She would never let herself want anything so much again.
    It was a resolution broken a few years later when, on the day of Stella’s fourteenth birthday, her parents insisted she left schoolfor good. Stella, who loved books and stories and poetry, and had secretly dreamed of being a teacher, was devastated. Her tears and insistent pleadings had brought nothing but a hiding from her father and an angry tirade from Peg, who believed school for girls was a waste of time and money — made them cheeky, too: thought they were better than their parents. Stella had hid then behind the piece of corrugated iron, nursing her stinging palms under her armpits. Doug had given her ‘something to cry for’, using his razor strop hard on both hands.

    The big car stopped and a man got out. Stella looked up from her bench. He was large, with soft rounded edges to his face and body, and a neat moustache. He was also posh, very posh — trilby, petrol-blue suit with pale stripes,