A Lovely and Terrible Thing by Chris Womersley

Author:Chris Womersley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2019-04-15T06:34:51+00:00

Where There’s Smoke

Incredible what you find without even looking. When I was about nine years old, I was kicking a football around in the back garden late in the afternoon. I was alone, as usual – or thought I was – and the day was nearly over. It was late autumn. The air was still blue and smoky from the piles of burning leaves in the neighbourhood gutters. Shooting for goal from an impossible angle, I watched my football bounce into a tangle of bushes beside the high wooden fence that bordered our neighbour’s house, and when I crawled in to retrieve it I discovered a woman crouching there, damp leaves stuck to her hair like a crown. She clutched her knees, which were bare and knobbly where her dress had ridden up. I was too stunned to say a word.

‘You must be Tom,’ she said.

I nodded. My scuffed football was on the ground behind her. ‘How did you know?’ I said when at last I found my voice.

She glanced up at the old house, at the lit lounge room window, warm as a lozenge in the gloom. Soon one of my sisters would draw the curtains and the house would be absorbed into the falling night, safe and sound against the cold and dark. Realising I was clearly not the sort of child to run screaming and tell everyone about finding a stranger in his backyard, she took a few seconds to adjust her position, which must have been quite uncomfortable. ‘Oh, I know lots of interesting things about you.’

I heard Mrs Thomson singing to herself in her kitchen next door, the chink of cutlery being taken from a drawer. Having stopped running around, I was getting cold, and a graze on my elbow, from when I had fallen over on the bricks, began to sting.

‘I know that you love football,’ the woman went on, looking around as if assembling the information from the nearby air. ‘Aaaaand that you love Star Wars, that you’ve got lots of Star Wars toys and things. Little figurines, I guess you’d call them.’

This was true. I’d seen Star Wars four times, once with my dad and then with my friend Shaun and then twice at other kids’ birthday parties. In addition, I had a book of Star Wars, a model of an X-wing fighter, comics and several posters on my wall. The distant planet of Tatooine – with its twin suns, where Luke Skywalker had grown up – was more real to me than Darwin or the Amazon River.

I inspected the stranger more closely. She was pretty, with long hair, and freckles across her nose. She wasn’t as old as my mum, but maybe a bit older than my teacher at school, Miss Dillinger. It didn’t seem right that this woman was sneaking about in our garden and I was preparing to say something to that effect when she leaned forward, whispering, her red mouth suddenly so close I felt her breath on my ear.

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