How to Live Forever by Colin Thompson

Author:Colin Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2004-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Footsteps approached, the handle turned and the door opened. There was a little girl about five years old standing there.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Peter.’

‘I’m Victoria. I’m five,’ said the little girl. ‘How old are you?’

‘Ten.’

Behind Victoria a woman came down the hall. She was about the same age as Peter’s mother and there was something about her that made him think he’d seen her before, though he couldn’t pinpoint where.

‘Who is it?’ she said.

‘Peter,’ said Victoria, ‘and he’s ten and he’s got a bandage on his hand.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I think I’ve got the wrong house.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ said the woman. ‘But I didn’t think you’d be here till next week. Come in.’

‘But –’

‘It’s okay. Come in.’

She led Peter down the corridor into a room overflowing with furniture. Peter wanted to run. He felt frightened, though he couldn’t say why. The woman turned, took his hand and pulled him into the room.

‘Your father isn’t here,’ she said. ‘I suppose you know that already.’

‘Yes,’ said Peter softly.

Victoria grabbed Peter’s other hand and pulled him over to the sofa.

‘You can sit here,’ she said.

‘How is Len … ?’ the woman started then, correcting herself, said, ‘Your grandfather. How is he?’

‘What?’ Peter began.

He could not stop looking at Victoria. Like her mother, Peter was sure he’d seen her before, but unlike her mother, he knew where. She was him. He saw her face every time he looked in the mirror. Her eyes were the colour of his, her hair too, and the way it fell on her forehead. He was a boy and she was a girl but, nevertheless, she was him five years earlier.

The sudden realisation was terrible. Victoria had to be his sister. But his father had left them ten years ago.

No.

The woman was Victoria’s mother.

No, no, not possible, except there she was, and now Peter couldn’t see either of them properly because his eyes were full of tears.

He pulled his hand away from the little girl’s and ran out of the room. In the blur, he knocked a table over and heard glass break as he ran towards the front door with the mother and daughter calling out to him. He ran round the gallery seeing nothing. People stood aside as he passed them. Some smiled and tried to talk to him but he was crying so hard he couldn’t see them. He ran up stairs and more stairs until he was back on the ninth level. It was a gloomy place, the perfect place for misery. His heart was beating hard and he was out of breath. He could run no further. He sat on the step in front of a boarded-up door and wept.

It seemed like his father had vanished again. So maybe it was children that made him run. First Peter and now Victoria.

Never in his saddest dreams had Peter imagined this. The book, the Ancient Child, his father, and even his grandfather’s illness, were all too much. He wanted to go home and curl up in his own bed with Archimedes on the pillow and go to sleep.

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