Read Listening to Mondrian for Free Online Page B

kilometres, checking against the map’s scale.
    And now the fact that earlier had made Liv so desolate reverses its meaning, and she thinks: if a bloody great blast furnace can get out of the valley and start a new life somewhere (‘It’s people’s own decision,’ something says in Liv’s head ‘what they do with their lives’ ) then so can I, Fat Liv.
    Oh not tonight – or rather today, because it is after midnight and the wretched un-birthday is over – but one day. In a year, or maybe two. Liv will put on her runners and go! And in the meantime she will plan her journey.
    Gazing still at the map, Liv gets out the Harvest Table and traces her way through the litany of names till the continent alone is too small for her, and she is forced to flip to the back endpaper, where the whole world awaits her like an oyster (Liv giggles) lying open on its shell.
    Through the flyscreen, Liv hears Gramma start to call for Mum, and goes in. ‘Upsadaisy!’ she bosses as she lifts the bag of bones onto the commode.
    Stepping out onto the verandah while she waits for Gramma, Liv sees a spurt of flame, gold-blue, across at the ruins, and thinks she is imagining it until she remembers the gas stove. The thought makes Liv sniff, but it is not gas that she can smell, or the usual coal smoke of Lithgow, for the breeze that blows across from the blast furnace seems to carry a faint tang of salt.

L EADLIGHT
    It’s Mum on the phone that sets this off:
    ‘Marta, it’s Mum . . .’
    Before I can get to ‘Hi Mum, how are you?’ she starts the conversation again:
    ‘Marta, it’s about Maree . . .’
    Maree.
    Of course it’s about Maree.
    It’s always about Maree.
    And always has been.
    In the beginning there was Maree. And for ever and ever Amen there will be Maree too.
    As Mum talks away in my ear I doodle a design for the window of the east chapel, and imagine how the conversation might have gone . . .
    ‘Marta, it’s Mum . . .’
    ‘Hi Mum, how are you?’
    ‘Fine, love, and yourself?’
    ‘Great, Mum, just great.’ Then, bursting with excitement: ‘Mum, I got the St Paul’s job! My first window!’
    ‘Your first window by yourself! And at St Paul’s! Oh Marta!’ She gushes on for a while, says of course I’ve always been so artistic, asks what sort of thing they want . . .
    ‘Something modern. But pictorial. You know – storytelling. And cheerful, they reckon.’
    ‘Cheerful? I guess that means New Testament.’
    ‘The Crucifixion was hardly cheerful.’
    ‘Oh well, you can always leave that bit out,’ she suggests.
    ‘It is rather the point of the story.’ (Why, even in my imaginary conversations with my mother, do we always end up arguing?)
    But Mum (as always) talks over me. ‘What about the Parables? Or the Miracles? Now they’re nice . . .’
    ‘Oh yeah. Delightful. I could do everyone getting pissed at the marriage at Cana.’
    ‘Marta!’
    ‘Or perhaps the Prodigal, wasting his substance with riotous living. You know – unsafe sex, dirty needles, the full bit.’
    ‘Marta, really!’
    As my fantasy conversation gets wilder and wilder, the real Mum continues the real talking into my ear, and I realise that my doodle really is a picture of the Prodigal. Which isn’t surprising, I suppose, because – looking back – it was the Prodigal that got me into all this . . .
    It wasn’t till Maree left that the family started going to church.
    No, to say it like that is wrong. Once Maree left there was no family, just three peas rattling in a two-bedroom brick-veneer pod: Mum, frantic in a monotonous way, obsessive, driven; Dad, even more withdrawn than usual, damp-eyed, wooden; and me, genuinely worried, of course (Had my sister been murdered? Or even raped?), but also secretly enjoying having the bedroom to myself, and resentful that now Maree was gone she seemed to get even more attention than she had when she was there. (Dad and Mum would spend every Friday and Saturday night driving slowly