Read Online Friday Brown by Vikki Wakefield - Free Book Online Page B

I’ve…’
    ‘Why are you here?’ Bree interrupted. ‘Don’t you have a nice white family who treats you good? ’Cause, to me, you look like you’re just trying on a bit of rough. Like you’re having some big adventure. What the fuck do you know about us?’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I meant it.
    ‘Cooee you in your too-tight shoes,’ she said, but not unkindly. ‘The squat’s a palace. It’s better than nothing. Better than getting pissed on while you’re sleeping in a doorway.’
    She was right. I just didn’t understand it. Vivienne and I clashed often, and I didn’t always get why she felt the need for perpetual motion, but I would never have left her. Not while she was living. Surely the family you had was better than no family at all.
    Bree stopped by a man reclining on a concrete slope beneath a bridge. He appeared to be asleep, or dead. She leaned over and touched him gently on the leg.
    This was the image I saw when I thought about homeless people. Pods of them, basking, lazy seals on a beach. Daytime sleepers wrapped in newspaper like giant parcels of fish and chips. Hands gripping brown paper bags, their belongings stuffed in shopping trolleys. Or no belongings at all.
    ‘Hey, Tom,’ she said to him. ‘Seen the others?’
    The man sat up, blinking. He held out his hand and she passed him a cigarette.
    ‘Nup. Park, probably. Giss a few extra, Bree.’
    She gave him a couple more. ‘Which park?’
    ‘The big ’un in the middle.’
    She thanked him and kept walking, long strides, with me trotting after her.
    ‘So where do you come from? In the country, I mean?’ Bree asked.
    ‘You know—all over. Small towns. We movedaround a lot, me and my mum.’ I stopped. I pretended to tie my bootlace because my eyes were stinging.
    When I looked up, she was waiting.
    ‘No, I don’t know. I’ve only ever lived here.’ She spread her arms, held out her hands like cups. Behind her, the blueish silhouette of buildings shrouded in smog, made miniature by distance and held in her palms. ‘What was it like?’
    I remembered every one of those towns.
    I told her about the best and the worst. The slow and sleepy places where weekdays rolled past like weekends and Mondays didn’t matter. Battered shacks perched on cliffs overlooking the endless, rumpled sea. Afternoons spent waiting on the docks, swinging my legs off a pier until boats rolled in with crates full of oysters and crayfish still gasping. Pulling fishhooks out of my feet because I never wore shoes, playing with other kids whose names I never knew. Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn’t see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I’d slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.
    And there were towns where Vivienne and I learned fast about survival on the fly, where travellers and workerswould flit in and flit out, leaving their money at the bar. It was possible to reinvent yourself in every new place and leave your sins behind. And in every town Vivienne left a sin behind—usually a man who wasn’t hers, often unpaid rent. Once we had all our money stolen from our motel room and another time we were turfed out of a truck in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. We walked the highway in pitch darkness until another truckie picked us up and set us down somewhere new. If I could have plotted our route on a map it would have looked like a child’s mad scribble on a wall.
    Bree listened, a faraway expression on her face. ‘I’ve never even climbed a tree,’ she said.
    ‘We moved around a lot,’ I said again. ‘We were free.’ I sat on a bench and unlaced my boots. Recollection