Nine Days Read Online Free Page A

behind her. The waythe sun bounces around the road, off the walls. I blink for a second, quick. To fix it in place.
    ‘Are you walking back to Rowena Parade?’ she says.
    I nod. The arm on the wall, it doesn’t feel like moving.
    ‘Now?’
    My stomach gives a flip. If I say yes, does that mean she’ll want to walk with me? How will I manage not swallowing for the next five blocks? I’ll drown in my own spit. And what if my legs forget how to be, like my arm has? I shake my head.
    ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Never mind.’
    Then she waves, and she’s gone before I can say anything clever that Annabel Crouch would remember in five minutes’ time. I lean over, hands on my knees, and it takes me another five minutes to stop breathing in a pant.
    She won’t forget that in a hurry. Scintillated, she was. What is her father thinking, letting her walk around the streets anyway? If I had a daughter like that, a girl with Annabel’s hair and Annabel’s smile, the last thing I’d do is let her walk in lanes and talk to the likes of me. And I’d never let her dance with Francis, not on your nelly.
    So before long my throat’s remembered how to swallow of its own accord and now I’m thinking
what are you doing out of school early, Annabel
and
I love dancing, what is your favourite dance Annabel
and
I believe you’re an only child, aren’t you Annabel
and
Can I walk you home
and
Your hair is like fairy floss.
Bugger.
    I own the lanes, mostly. I know the web of them, every lane in Richmond. I know which houses have a ‘to let’ sign on the front so they should be empty but there’s a light at theback which means a two-up school’s moved in. I know the corner on the other side of Coppin Street where you can peel back the corrugated iron and get at the Hagens’ apricots. And down towards the river, the damp dog-leg where weeds grow as high as your hip and where the beetles meet in summer and you need to dodge the rusty tins and rabbits’ guts and I know which cat rules the stretch behind the fisho where he throws the heads but would you believe it as I come into the lane across the other side of Lennox Street I’m thinking about Annabel Crouch and smack.
    I walk straight into the four stooges, lounging on the corner like it’s somebody’s front room.
    ‘Well, if it isn’t Westaway Junior,’ Mac says.
    ‘Yeah,’ says Cray.
    So. The day has finally declared itself. It’s peeled off one fancy leather glove, slapped me across the face with it and thrown it on the ground. Now I’m the one who’s got to pick the ruddy thing up. On-bloody-guard, d’Artagnan.
    ‘Hello, my little fish-eating friend,’ says Jim Pike. ‘Are you doing errands for your ma like a good cat lick? Tell you what. Just to show we’re all friends here, all for the mighty Tiges, I’ll give you a ha’penny to shine my shoes.’
    ‘Hello Pike. I can see your shoes are a bit on the shabby side but no thanks all the same. I don’t know where your ha’penny’s been.’
    We’re in the widest part of the lane, with bits of corrugated iron on either side and bluestones sloping to a channel in the middle, filled with muddy water and other stuff that doesn’t bear thinking about. Leaning against the fence is aboy I don’t know. He’s smoking, shirt pulled out of his pants and socks down, no jumper. The kind that won’t let on when he’s freezing. He throws his ciggie in a puddle and it hisses and smokes. He says, ‘Who’s this one when he’s at home?’
    ‘This, Manson my old pal, is one Kip the drip Westaway, the baby brother of Saint Francis,’ Pike says. ‘He’s the most famous shit shoveller in all of Richmond. Straight from a cushy scholarship at St Mick’s, suit and tie and pious expression, to his current position at the rear end of a horse. It’s a wonder you haven’t heard of him back in Sydney.’
    ‘He cried when he left school. Like a weeping statue of the virgin,’ says Mac.
    I know crystal where they heard that from.