The Vivisector Read Online Free Page A

kids stuffing on Mrs Burt’s cold puftaloons; Mumma used to say Mrs B. was a good soul who never ever would believe other people had enough to eat.
    Although they told you you must love others, you couldn’t always, not when they were all smeary. Mumma was Mumma. And Will was different, who shared the bed; Will was hopeless.
    Mumma said: ‘I could flop down, but have everything to do. Can’t you kids make yourselves scarce?’
    Pa had gone into the harness room to replace the box. Bonnie was whinnying from her stall. All the fowls, the cats, had scattered on seeing the kids return.
    Lena called: ‘Come on, Hurt, what do you say if we have a game of hoppy down at Abrams’s entrance?’ That was where the ground was level; there were no ruts like in the middle of the street.
    He couldn’t stand Lena in particular. She was four years older. There were the three miscarriages between, Mumma told Mrs Burt.
    ‘I don’t wanner play any hopscotch.’ He didn’t either. ‘Not with you. You’re not even lean. You’re the scrag end.’
    Lena burst. She came up and donged him one with her skinny hand: Granma Duffield’s without the rings; it had the string of a leather strap.
    He didn’t care, though. He kicked her thin shins, and she went off pretending not to cry because she was an older girl.
    Oh the Sunday evenings.
    Mumma said she ought to get the tea, but was going to sit for a few minutes at least. Which she did. In that old unravelled cane chair. On the veranda looking over Cox Street.
    All the while the kids were screaming playing ball skipping Florrie had dropped the rest of her puftaloon in the dust the voice of their niminy-piminy Lena had united with Elsie Abrams’s on the hopscotch court on the hard level ground at the livery stables entrance.
    He hung around Mumma, waiting for her to settle, and she didn’t roust on him. In fact he could feel she liked it, in the heavy evening light, with the three or four big leaning sunflowers, their petals gone floppy from the day’s heat.
    Several of the houses in Cox Street had neat pretty gardens, the houses themselves painted up. Not like our old place, he once complained to Mumma. With its once painted, now weather-beaten, weatherboard, and straggly self-sown sunflowers. But Mumma said they were lucky to find a place at that rental, and who would paint a rented home, even if they had the time, which she and Pa didn’t, for the laundries she took in, and the empty bottles Pa went round collecting to sell. So that was that, and it didn’t matter really, not with the two yellows of the sun and the sunflowers playing together, and the sticky green of the wilted leaves.
    He began to smoodge around Mumma. ‘Oh I’m exhausted, Hurt dear!’ She sighed, but laughed, and took him on her lap in spite of the next baby inside. ‘You’re too big.’ She wasn’t complaining.
    She liked him best, he hoped. But he wasn’t a sook. He could run, shout, play, fight, had scabs on his knees and twice split Billy Abrams’s lip, who was two years older and a few months.
    Now when he had arranged himself, and it was the time of dreamy, smoodging questions, he asked of Mumma: ‘What did Granpa Duffield do that was wrong?’
    ‘I dunno as you could say he did anything wrong. ’E was too much a gentleman.’
    ‘Is Pa a gentleman?’
    ‘Pa is different. Pa is a gentleman inside. Oh yes, Pa’s a gentleman! ’
    ‘Then he can’t be so different from Granpa Duffield.’
    ‘Well—Pa had no edgercation. Poor Pa was put to lumping bags of potatoes and onions for Cartwrights down in Sussex Street, to earn a crust for ’is own dad. Granpa liked to talk. He was so pleasant. He had a beautiful handwritin’. ’E could copy real lovely. And did earn a shillun here and there. But blew ’is cash as quick as ’e got it. And the remittance too.’
    The remittance was one of the mysteries you shared with Mumma. You would have liked to ask more about it, and how Granpa blew it, but you