Read Online When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett - Free Book Online

Some of the spines drew blood when they came up. I tried not to look.
    When he got to the end of my leg, he held my foot up and touched the scar near my ankle. It was jagged and white and it made the flesh of my leg dimple in where it drew the skin tight together.
    â€œWhere did you get this?” he asked.
    â€œI had an accident,” I said.
    He nodded. He didn’t ask me any more about it. He didn’t ask me and I did not tell him about how Dad would sit me on the petrol tank of his motorbike and how one time, when we were going up to the very back of the farm, I slipped down and my leg got stuck in some part of the bike—some moving part that I couldn’t see. But I could feel it, my skin ripping. I screamed out for Dad to stop, but he couldn’t hear me, or at least he didn’t stop, not until we got there, up the hill to the back of the farm. By then there was a ring of flesh scraped from my calf and blood seeping into my shoe.
    Dad told me not to tell Mum I’d done it on the bike. He told me tojust tell her that I caught my leg on the fence or tripped on the gravel. I don’t remember getting home to the dark brick-veneer farmhouse, but when Mum got home with my brother my leg was bandaged and I never even had to lie because Dad said, “She hurt her leg but it’s all fine now.” Mum never even looked at the bandage. She just walked into the kitchen and started cooking dinner.

    â€œImagine the scar is a picture that you like,” Bo said. “Like a tattoo. Any picture. It has been drawn on your leg and only you can see it. Only you can imagine what the picture is.”
    I looked for a long time, and I tried hard not to cry, because I couldn’t see any picture there. I couldn’t see anything.
    â€œIt must have hurt very much,” Bo said.
    â€œYes,” I said.

    When my leg was better, Bo said, “Shall we kill the cactus?” He had a big knife, one of his sharp knives from the ship.
    We walked down the back steps to the yard.
    â€œYou go first,” he said, and he offered me the knife, but I didn’t take it.
    With one swipe, he cut the cactus in half. Then in half again, and again.
    He killed the cactus, cut it up into little pieces. And later, when he had gone, I hacked into the earth with the pointy end of one of the cricket stumps and made sure that every root, every fiber of that cactus was gone so it would never grow back again.

BIRDS CALL DOWN THE MORNING
    Birds call down the morning
    I feel it lift off me, the weight of darkness
    It is a new day
    â€œThe light gets more every day,” Bo said.
    I looked out from the sunroom to the purple sky, and it was such a relief to see it—the light. The day coming.
    I sat close to Bo at the table, without touching. I wanted to tell him that I was afraid of the darkness. I wanted to tell him but I stayed silent.
    We were still.
    â€œYes, the light comes more and more every day,” he said again. “A minute in the morning—a minute in the night.”
    Minutes of time, two minutes a day.
    Two minutes and two minutes and two minutes, until the birds start to sing at 4 AM and I wake with them.
    I thought about before, my brother and me in that small attic room. Sometimes I could not tell if I was asleep or I was awake but we would be there in the dark and my brother would ask me if it was morning or night. I could not tell, and I was not brave enough to move, to get up and look behind the thick curtains. It was always so cold, the air, the room. The night pressing down on us both.
    I would wait and listen, wait to see if I could hear birds in the yard. I would strain to hear them in the silence, and finally they would come—a soft call. A wave would wash over me. It’s all right now—the morning is coming. We are safe.
    My brother and I would get up, get out of that small attic room, and we would put on lots of clothes to keep warm and go down to the kitchen.