A Small Free Kiss in the Dark by Glenda Millard

Author:Glenda Millard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Young Adult, JUV000000
ISBN: 9780823422647
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2009-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

10

The ballerina, the

baby and the brave

Red is for danger.

Red was the colour of the ballerina’s coat.

The next time we saw her she was sitting in the Chariot of Peace. We knew she was there because the baby was crying. Billy and Max and me heard it when we came back from looking for provisions.

For a day and a half after we’d been to the beach, the rain hardly stopped. Most of the time it bucketed down, and even if Max had made up his mind about his special outing we couldn’t have gone. Most of the time we couldn’t see any further than the roller-coaster but we could still hear muffled sounds. Whenever the rain let up we’d look out the skeleton’s eyes to see what was happening up on the hill.

Weapons of Max destruction change scenery fast. They flattened the palm trees on the Boulevard so the roots scraped against the sky and the leafy tops were pressed flat into the ground like gigantic prehistoric fish-bones. Loaded trucks crawled up the corkscrew road and soldiers stacked sandbags where the palm trees used to be. At night the lights came on in the hotel but during the day, even when it wasn’t raining, you couldn’t tell if anyone was watching from behind the shiny windows.

When the rain finally stopped we needed to find food. But first Billy bent a flap of tin on the back fence and made a secret entrance, so no one from the hotel could see our comings and goings, even if they had binoculars. We never went under the big teeth again. We walked along the boardwalk beside the sea, until we were out of sight of the hotel, before we crossed the road.

The supermarket was a lot further away than the shops behind the Boulevard. The front doors were boarded up, but the glass was smashed and it was easy to get underneath the planks. Inside it smelt disgusting because of the food rotting in the fridges and freezers. The shelves were almost empty, but there were a few people inside. I wondered where they came from. Were they like us, living somewhere they thought no one else would think of, or did they have homes to go to? They didn’t look up when we came in, they just kept stuffing things in their bags like they were in the Great Supermarket Scramble or something.

We’d decided to hunt for canned or dried food because we knew we weren’t going to find fresh things any more. Max found cans of something that looked like dog food, but it was for people.

‘It’s meat substitute,’ said Billy.

‘Has it got dead horses in it?’ Max said.

‘No. No horses, dead or alive, no donkeys, no sheep, nothing with four legs or even two legs. Only legless things go in this stuff,’ said Billy. He squinted his eyes up and tried to read the small writing on the side of the tin. ‘It’s made out of nuts and . . . other things that are good for you.

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