Read Dark Roots for Free Online

task. As she bent down to get another pippy out of the bag she’d exhale, licking her lips. It was the sound Matthew made when he took the first sip of beer. The same craven absorption.
    Can’t we go for a walk, Lornie, let’s just go for a stroll on the beach. Lornie, we can listen to a bloody pub singalong any time. There were big cracked bamboo chairs on this verandah then. Pinching your legs through the fabric of your dress. Don’t rip this, will you, Lornie, or you’ll break my heart , your mother had said, pinning the alteration under the waistband to her good dress from out of the trunk, refolding the crease with fingers suddenly deft and stroking. This silk comes all the way from Siam. Your younger sister watching silently from her homework on the kitchen table as your mother methodically stuck pins back into the pincushion. You, slim as a reed in the kitchen with shaved legs stinging, smelling the woody smell of Siam.
    Come on, Lornie, don’t be a spoilsport. I’ll carry your shoes for ya. You’ve got to be home soon anyway.
    Grey sea churning in the trough. There were teeth in there, gnawing at stones and shells. The sea moaned like a dog with a bone, licking it this way and that. Goosebumps on razor rash. Mustn’t get this dress dirty. Up in the pines you step flinching on small sharp pine cones, and as you lie down it’s a stupid thing but you’re thinking of the violin again, the rosin dark and crackling on the bow, sifting into white powder as it strokes the strings.
    Now you’ll be for it. But you don’t realise, with the house so busy with the new baby, your mother walking carefully up and down the front room as if she’s the one barefoot on pine cones, wrapping the shawl around its head and singing a crooning, exhausted song, its livid scream like a seagull. Tiny hands pummelling that blue-veined breast as you try not to look. You don’t realise until you’re by the pier at low tide squatting down beside the rocks, smashing a pippy with a stone, saliva flooding your mouth and making your throat wince, picking out crushed shell and sand to gobble that meat. Rocking on your feet with the urgency.
    They have glossy magazines here at the hotel now, on low tables made of bamboo lashed together. Smoked glass tops supporting those bubbly glass bottles, polished trochus and nautilus shells, and the magazines have perfume sachets inside, inviting me to experience some wholly new scent. Are you sure there’s nothing I can get you? says the nice young girl who works here, leaning over me like a nurse. She wants me to come in. She wants to close the double glass doors against this wind — sand is getting onto the rugs, no doubt. From inside, you can look at the palm trees tossing and clacking, leaves streaming out like flags. They’re looking threadbare now, these trees, like moth-eaten taxidermy exhibits, something in the worn-down section of the museum where nobody visits. No, I’m fine here , I tell her. I listen to the dog growl of the ocean, retrieving everything I throw in.
    Why don’t you wear that silk dress, Lornie? I don’t know what’s got into you, young lady . What’s got into you is a nautilus, a starfish, a curled seahorse. Fingernails like tiny pink clear shells. Clamped onto the wall of you, and the suck and roar of your blood only making it cling more determinedly.
    It’s Matthew you’re here to see on a grey Friday night, you can hear him there in the pub. The wind pushes clouds around, so that moon casts intermittent shadows. You lean against the palms and bend and snap pieces of frond, folding up lengths like concertinas. Breasts aching. He’ll come out sooner or later to urinate in the back garden. Don’t say piss, girls, you sound like you were brought up in the shacks. When he comes out you see he’s drunk, coming down the grass like he’s on board a pitching boat. When the men go