A Waltz for Matilda Read Online Free Page B

face. The station had been too big, too empty.
    ‘I’ll be makin’ myself a drop o’ tea, afore we set off. I’ll bringone along to you, and a biscuit or two as well. Second-class carriage is the fifth one along.’
    ‘Thank you,’ she said again. She picked up her skirts, hefted her bundle more firmly under her arm, and headed toward the carriage. No more mornings hiding from the Push. No more Bruiser or Ah Ching. No more Tommy …
    She felt her breath catch. Impossible to think of not seeing Tommy. But he could come and stay with them. They had machinery on farms, didn’t they? Ploughs and hay balers and things. He could practise fixing things with one hand.
    It was warmer inside the train. She lay on one of the hard bench seats, so unlike the green leather ones she’d seen through the windows of the first-class carriages, pulling her skirts and shawl around her.
    Matilda slept.

    Rented a fence … rented a fence … rented a … rented a … rented a fence …
    She’d slept again after the train had left the station, the guard’s tea and biscuits warm in her stomach, and woken up hours later with the words in her mind. They didn’t make sense — who’d want to rent a fence? But that was what the train wheels were saying.
Rented … rented a … rented a fence …
    It was strange to have the world rush past you. She’d never been on anything faster than an omnibus before, the tired horses clomping up the road to Aunt Ann’s.
    Now the nearby bushes outside the train window blurred by, too fast to see. Things far away moved more slowly, as though itwas the world outside that was travelling at two speeds, while she and the train stayed still — except for the rattling.
    It was fascinating, seeing things she had read about but never seen. Trees with giant white trunks, not just a small park of them but seeming to go on forever; ragged children sitting on a fence and waving, then they were gone again.
    More trees; trees with rocks; trees with no rocks; trees and a small ferny creek; then trees and grass; then finally hard baked ground, a few trees holding thin limp leaves.
    How could anything live in a land as dry as this?
    Suddenly movement flickered. Those must be kangaroos. She had seen kangaroos in books and seen them close up, but never in a mob like a wave sweeping across the ground. She had never dreamed of a land so big, so flat. Its size and drabness were frightening: so different from the gardens she had known when she had lived at Aunt Ann’s.
    The other passengers in the carriage dozed or stared out the windows like her, except for one man in the corner, thin and intense in his shabby dark suit and tie, who was scribbling something in a notebook, unscrewing the ink bottle every time he needed to dip in his pen in case the rattle of the train tipped it over.
    Even the fat woman with the two small children was sleeping, one child in each arm. They must be hot, all crammed up together, thought Matilda.
    She was hot too. She wished she hadn’t put on all her petticoats, but it was easier wearing them than carrying them. She’d have liked to open the window, but when she’d done it before big smuts had blown in from the train’s smoke, and a cross man with no teeth had made her shut it again.
    The trees outside grew sparser. The grass became dust — brown dust, white dust, grey dust — with a few tussocks and theoccasional bald hump of a hill. Grey rocks were scattered across the landscape. It took Matilda a while to recognise that they were sheep, motionless in the heat.
    How long till Drinkwater now? She didn’t dare shut her eyes, in case she didn’t hear the guard’s call. He’d said they’d reach Drinkwater around four o’clock, but no one in the carriage had a watch. She craned her neck, trying to see ahead, but there were still no houses or even fenced paddocks with horses or vegetables or cows, just dust and trees and lumps of sheep.
    Suddenly the train began to slow. A sheep on the