Something in the World Called Love by Sue Saliba

Author:Sue Saliba
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742282350
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2008-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Winter

and as autumn ended everything moved a step closer to its fate. one windy saturday early in june kara wrote her speech to simon which she’d memorise before calling ‘the meeting’. simon pushed and heaved a bookcase into his room downstairs, since with the arrival of winter he was looking forward to buying more novels and snuggling up in bed to read them. and esma, at her bedroom window, noticed the glass covered by ivy and knew that she must tell kara, she must say the plan was impossible to execute.

it wasn’t fair.

it was a matter of ethics,

she told herself, clutching her cold hands

and almost believed the lie.

for it wasn’t really morality that stopped esma from going along with kara’s plan. it wasn’t really that she believed it was wrong to throw simon from the house. well, that was partly it,

but there was something else.

chloe.

chloe must not move in.

don’t be ridiculous, she told herself, trying not to see the dried-out ivy suckers that clung to the glass. it isn’t anything but feeling uncomfortable with things not being the way they should be. that’s it.

and she went to her desk to write it down, so convincing did it sound to her right then, right there in the solitude of her bedroom.

‘i’ll tell kara that’s what it is,’ she said, extending her moment of confidence.

but then she felt reality seep in.

as if kara might be convinced by something so vague,

so nebulous. she’d ask for examples, points, specific and known words

and esma could produce none,

none that might not lead to the truth.

and the truth, she determined, would be left veiled. from kara, and even from the shell of herself.

for now she stared at the ivy soon to cover that entire little square of the world outside, winter settling in, not yet bright with blue skies and sunshine that would mark every winter in the future. a kind of upside-down happiness to say nothing lasts forever. not the rain, or the trees, or the only planet anyone ever born had known.

and esma shivered because it was true, the world wouldn’t stop still, but all the same

she was stuck.

‘i can’t let chloe move in and i can’t speak the passion of why. there has to be a third way – that’s it.’ and then, close to a possible solution, she was interrupted.

a knock at the door.

it should have been kara, completed points in hand and memorised in her head, but instead it was samantha, come up the stairs quiet as a mouse when esma was in one of her incompatible extremes.

‘esma, simon’s been pulling all those boring old novels out of boxes in his room and look what i found. after that great letter you wrote against the puppy farm, i know you’ll love it.’

it was a photograph of simon’s grandfather, moustached, framed, nursing an arctic fox.

‘what’s he doing? where is he?’

‘he’s in the yukon. he went there in the 1920s.’

‘what for? to trap foxes?’

‘no. he didn’t trap them. look, see the bandage on its

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