Sealed by Naomi Booth

Author:Naomi Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

VI

WE’RE going out tonight,’ Pete says. We’re sitting on the verandah eating breakfast. Pete is stuffing toast and peanut butter into his mouth, talking while he chews. The sky is clear and whitish-blue beyond us. The storm has cleared and everything in the garden looks fresh. There’s that warm smell of earth, after the rain; an almost animal smell, like clean, soft cat fur. ‘Petrichor.’ My mother’s words in my mind again.

‘Are we?’ I say.

‘Yeah. Paulie and Mara are having a barbie tonight. Be a good way to meet some more of the locals.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Maybe you’d have a better time without me.’ If I go I won’t be able to stop myself from quizzing people, from asking them about any suspected cases and about the risk of fire here. And Pete will go ape. And then there’s the barbie itself: blackened, carcinogenic, unprotected meat; formaldehyde fumes; people smoking.

‘You’re coming, Alice,’ Pete says. ‘I’m not having you hiding yourself away, becoming some kind of maternal recluse. You liked Mara, right? And you’ll want friends when the baby’s here.’

‘Right,’ I say.

* * *

Pete works all day and I mill about the house, listless. When I get too hot I step out onto the verandah. It’s even warmer out here and my back’s killing me, so I take a short circuit around the garden. Moving around seems to make my back feel easier. I trail my fingers across the leaves of the plants in the borders, searching for something that feels cool. I should probably water them; I’ve got so used to the water-curfews in the city that it didn’t even occur to me. Maybe I can keep things alive out here, finally learn the skills that my mother tried to teach me before everything died back in the city? The vivid violet bush, here at the bottom of the yard, is a jacaranda, I know that much. Next to it is something I don’t recognise. I squat down. It’s a small, scrubby bush, with dark leaves and tiny pink flowers. The pattern of the petals is real delicate: five cerise leaves with a lighter centre, intricate as a snowflake. The leaves at the bottom of the bush are turning yellow and crispy. I should do something for it, work out what it needs. I’ve kept some of my mother’s old gardening books. They’ll be in one of the boxes in the living-room, I can picture us packing them up with the other books. I waddle back inside and fish around in one of the half-unpacked boxes we’ve left stacked against the wall, a placeholder for these bookshelves Pete’s going to build. I find them under a stash of Pete’s old comics. Mum loved gardening. We only had a small patch out back, but she made the most of it. Our place was built in the 1950s, a two-bedroom lower maisonette on what was then a shiny new public-housing estate. I know we were lucky, just the two of us in

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