Read Online Rose Leopard by Richard Yaxley - Free Book Online

your father and I always wanted the best for you. I just … I don’t think Vincent fits into that category’
    The deep, resonant silence of two strong minds unwilling to compromise. Beyond my gaze I sensed the same stretch and tension as cat-gut.
    Kaz broke it first with a harsh and desperate whisper.
    â€˜What’s wrong with him? Eh? What’s wrong?’
    It remains an indelible moment in the coalition of our lives.
    Bernice, I imagine, must have half-smiled, hung a tea-towel on the oven-rail to dry and then swivelled with the same portentous menace as a returning cyclone.
    â€˜I don’t think he’s all there,’ she hissed, and I could hear Kaz catch each breath sharply. ‘I mean, do you honestly think he’s … stable?’
    There is an actor submerged within all of us, this trembling desire to turn life into a vast echoing stage, shadowy wings and a transfixed audience. I took my cue and stuck my silly, mad head around the corner.
    â€˜It’s true, Bernice,’ I rasped. ‘I’m not stable. But I am a little hoarse.’
    Even today — fourteen years on — we laugh about it. But not Bernice. Never Bernice.
    I punch more numbers into the mobile.
    â€˜Frannie? Vince.’
    More coolness. Speaking to Francesca, Kaz’s elder sister, is like walking into a fernery; there are fronds that dip and threaten, biting insects hidden in moist places. More than anything, she detests being called Frannie — which is, of course, precisely why we all persist.
    A quick summary: Francesca is amidships of her third marriage. This time, the lucky vessel is a stolid and dependable type named Terrence. Terrence does clerical work, adroitly enough to pull a hundred Gs per annum. They have one daughter, Amelia, who was ostensibly sired by hubby number one, an old windjammer called Leo. Blithe, insane and obscenely moneyed, Leo departed this earth weeks after Francesca had given birth. The chap in between I can barely remember. I think his name was Pedro, or maybe Pietro; she met him overseas on a Contiki Tour and he picked his toe-nails with a Swiss army knife.
    Amelia seems a pleasant enough girl, given her mother-Gorgon and the fact that she’s a teenager. Kaz likes her a lot.
    â€˜You have to respect someone,’ she once said acidly, ‘who was obviously conceived immaculatus. One thing about Frannie, she never liked getting dirty. So, history recognises Jesus of Nazareth and now Amelia of Peregian Waters. This family … we don’t know how lucky we are’
    Details, details. Francesca clucks, mentions Terrence’s Rotary function tomorrow evening, wants to speak to ‘someone in charge’. I can feel her blame for Kaz’s condition seeping down the phone-beams into my brain. Eventually she says, ‘I’ll get there as soon as is practical,’ shouts something about the dog to Amelia and clicks off.
    I am alone again.
    Thereafter, it all seems to spiral, like a fusion of colours — sad colours, angry, wild, unheralded, unrecognisable colours coming from places I do not know, all spinning through a vortex.
    Garten is at my elbow, muttering darkly about ‘deterioration’ and ‘liver failure’, kidneys that refuse to work. There is an anxiety etched into his eyes like the whorls of old tribal paintings. I see people hurrying, walls sliding up and down. Suddenly the air feels green, like bile.
    â€˜A helicopter is coming,’ he says in a curiously blank voice. ‘We’re flying to Brisbane. We need specialists, Vince; it’s a matter of saving her now.’
    Saving her? And specialists? But Doctor, they make me mad. They make me mad because they’re so functional and here, now, I’m feeling helpless and totally non-functional. I’m grey and I’m beige, wallowing between real colours.
    Jesus, colours … I’m remembering Brisbane, jacarandas in full purple bloom and that