Read Online Surface Tension by Meg McKinlay - Free Book Online Page B

copy a picture square by square onto a new grid. No matter how careful I was, they always came out slightly wonky.
    “That’s not how it works,” Dad said. “You can’t just break something down into parts like that. This is art, not construction.” He tossed the photo onto the table and leaned back in his chair. “I tried to explain to him – what I like to do is look at the photos, capture the essence of the thing, then put them away and just work from the mind’s eye, from the hands.”
    “That explains a lot, actually,” Elijah said. When Dad first started doing heads, he had done one of him, which ended up looking disturbingly like a cross-eyed ferret.
    Dad whacked him lightly on the shoulder then sighed. “I just don’t think Finkle really understands the artistic process.”
    Hannah’s jaw clenched a little. “I’m sure he doesn’t, Dad. But he means well. Just do your best, would you? We’re all working hard on this.”
    She pointed at the centenary book. Elijah had been working his way through it slowly and had just reached my page.
    “Ah,” he said. “Welcome to New Lower Grange!”
    “Yeah.” I flushed.
    He flicked back and forth quickly. “Bit surprised I don’t get a mention. Defenders of the forest, heroes of the tree – carrier of the poo.”
    “Elijah!” Mum frowned. “Yuck.”
    “Yeah, it was.” He grinned. “I made sixty bucks, though.”
    “No one needs to remember that,” Hannah said. “They weren’t heroes. They were feral weirdos.”
    “Typical Finkle-spin!” Elijah countered. “They were cool. And they were right. That tree was a landmark.”
    “Trees grow,” Hannah said. “Besides, they have better ways of spotting fires now.”
    “Yeah, well, I liked the fire tree,” Elijah said.
    “Me too,” I said.
    “Come off it, Cassie,” Hannah said. “You never even saw it. That tree was dangerous. You could fall right through the pegs if you weren’t careful. I can’t believe they let anyone climb that thing.”
    “And I can’t believe you were too chicken to climb it.” Elijah gave her a scornful look. Then he turned to Mum. “Remember when she got about halfway up and was too scared to move?”
    Mum nodded. “Oh, yes. Because I was at the bottom, being told off by a family of Japanese tourists. They asked me if Australian mothers normally let their kids do such risky things.” She smiled. “I didn’t know what to say.”
    Elijah went over to the bench and filled the kettle with water. “Yeah, and I couldn’t get down because I was already up and she was so hysterical she wouldn’t let anyone past.”
    Hannah folded her arms. “I was ten, Elijah.”
    “Yeah, and I was eight. I couldn’t believe it. But that wasn’t the best bit, was it, Mum? Remember how that guy went up to his car …”
    I tuned out the rest of what Elijah was saying. I knew the story. I’d heard it a hundred times. About how an English tourist got a rock-climbing harness from his car and went up after Hannah. He put her into the harness and told her she was safe now and she climbed all the way down like a monkey even though he hadn’t clipped her to anything at all.
    It was supposed to be a lesson on the power of the mind but when Mum told Hannah later, she just started crying all over again.
    “It was so funny.” Elijah reached up into the cupboard for the jar of coffee.
    “Well,” countered Hannah, “what about the time you were coming down the tree and that bucket of … stuff … tipped all over you?”
    Dad laughed. “Yeah, and remember when …”
    I sighed and leaned back in my chair. That was my cue to switch off –
remember when?
Once they started telling stories there was no stopping them. They would bounce back and forth across the table for hours. Serve and volley. Volley and return.
    And there was never anything for me to do, nothing for me to add, because all of them had happened before I was born, in a place I’d never been.
    The only family story