Read Online Pig Boy by J.C. Burke - Free Book Online

carpet.
    I pick the blanket up off the floor and drape it over her. All you can see is some hair, half a leg and a swollen foot stuffed into a faded blue slipper.

 
    CLEOPATRA666, THE LIAR, SAID SHE wouldn’t be online tonight. But she is. She’s playing Halo with Falcon. She’s a prick tease. Right now she’s probably strutting around in her tight little suit with her M16, unloading on anyone that gets in her way.
    Last night she told me she thought Falcon was a jerk-off. That’s probably what he’s doing at this exact minute, jerking off with one hand and playing her with the other. Whatever. I’ve got important things to do.
    It’s been twenty-four hours since I opened the wardrobe again. That’s another thing I organised last night while waiting for Cleopatra666 to show up. I took out all the clothes I might need in the next few weeks and stuffed them under my bed, which means I won’t have to open the wardrobe at all. But I stupidly left Archie’s fatigues in there and tonight I need to wear them.
    A fine piece of fishing line lies across the gap where the wardrobe doors meet. I stuck it there last night, pasting it down with my spit. Until I get a padlock, it’s my only way of knowing if the wardrobe’s been opened.
    Carefully I remove the nylon thread. The space between the doors is tiny but behind that crack is where it all starts to go wrong.
    The black gym bag and my schoolbag lie untouched on the left-hand side of the wardrobe. I don’t even turn my head in that direction. On the right, down the very end and packed up in a suitcase so Mum will never find them, are Archie’s fatigues.
    They were hanging on the clothesline when he left. From my bedroom window I watched the sleeves rise and fall in the breeze. It was like Archie waving goodbye before a hunting trip, calling out, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come, Damon?’
    His clothes sit on my lap now. I bury my face in the fabric, hoping to find just a trace of him. But I don’t have time for pain, so quickly I chuck them on the bed and start to undress.
    The pants don’t fit and I can’t button up the shirt, but still it makes me feel in control. It makes me feel like I could take on anything.
    I stare into the wardrobe, at the five coathangers draped with clothes that I’ll never need. There’s the suit Mum bought me for Aunty Yvonne’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I only wore it once and that was in the shop. We didn’t end up going to Adelaide because Yvonne never offered us a bed at her house. ‘I’m not forkin’ out all that money when me sister can’t even give us a place to stay,’ Mum’d said. But I think the old girl was scared of aero-planes. I remember her saying to Pat after the dust had settled and she’d stopped screeching around the house about her Mrs La-Di-Da sister, ‘Flyin’ up in the sky, like, that’s for them rich and famous, not me.’
    The space between each coathanger is the same. I know because I measured it out last night, from the tip of my middle finger to the notch at the end of my elbow. Fifty-two centimetres exactly.
    I check the measurements and, satisfied, close the wardrobe, lick my finger and paste the thread back across the doors.
    There’s something else hidden in my room. The other exercise book squashed between the mattress and springs. I push the doona away so I can reach in and pull the book out. The coiled shapes of wire springs are imprinted across the first few pages.
    There’s no list of names here, just the jumble of words plus the beginnings of a plan I scribbled down when I got home that day. My finger brushes across each line. Again I have the feeling that I want to wrap my hands around Pascoe’s throat and shake him until I feel his weight collapse. It’s his fault that I have to do this, not mine.
    I close my eyes and start to count; promising