Free The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland

sighed.
    “Don’t you have some friends I could leave you with?”
    Directly he spoke he was sorry.
    “You’re my only friend,” she lied.
    “Come on, we won’t stay long. We’ll get something to eat with Vanessa and head back.”
    She dragged her feet toward the truck.
     
    THEY DROVE OVER the railway tracks into a wide street and stopped in front of a house built of stone.
    A plumed middle-aged woman opened the door to him.
    “Hello, Mrs Humphries. Is Vanessa in?”
    “Grey. It’s … it’s nice to see you again. And this, of course, is your sister.”
    “Yes. This is Irene.”
    “Well,” said Mrs Humphries, and her eyes darted between Grey and his sister, unsure what to say next. “ Well, you’ve grown up since last I saw you, miss.”
    Irene nodded indifferently.
    Vanessa’s mother always received Grey with fraudulent welcome. He forgave her for it. There were plenty of reasons why a twenty-four-year-old weekday-night service station attendant was not an ideal choice to have calling on your daughter, and Grey was sympathetic. Probably she had heard too that his friends were reckless, and that half-truth made the fact of him even more difficult on the woman’s middle-class conscience.
    “Vanessa!’ she called in a voice that contained strains of warning and reprimand at once. She did not wait long enough for a reply before she went to get her daughter, to afford her one last moment alone with the girl and make certain the strictures of her leaving the house. She left Grey and Irene standing on the doorstep.
    A pretty, sandy-blonde girl appeared at the end of the corridor.
    “Well,” she said, “look who’s here!”

    “Thought I’d come by and see if you were doing anything.”
    “Hardly. Hey, Irene.”
    Irene whimpered a reply. Vanessa pulled on a pair of sandshoes.
    “Isn’t your brother handsome,” she said when she came out the door and took his hand.
    Irene looked up.
    “I don’t think so.”
    Vanessa’s mother tried to intervene, to impress one last order upon her daughter, but they were already down the stairs.
     
    “THAT’S IF I really go,” said Vanessa. “ But I suppose I will go. You can’t stay at home forever, can you?”
    “No,” Grey said.
    They were talking about an offer of work at a legal office in Brisbane at the end of the year. All young people left for the city eventually.
    They had only gone as far as that same pie stand at the turn-off to town. The pie stand and the Sundowner Hotel beside it were the only places open at this time of night. Vanessa could not stay out late, so there was no point in driving to find something better. The highway was long and this far west entertainment was not one of its concerns. After the Sundowner you would drive an hour before you found a cup of instant coffee at anywhere other than a service station.
    The smell of wet crops carried along the road with a wind from the southwest.
    “I’ll be finished at the end of the year,” Vanessa said. “I guess I’d like some time off after that, but then, I’d be a fool not to consider it.”
    Grey only half-listened. He was trying to remember how long he had chased this girl. Like most young people of the district they were acquainted early. They had kissed once as teenagers. But it was five years before she noticed him again: that night he found her right here, sitting crying under a highway lamp
after a run-in with a drunken boy at the Sundowner. He had asked if she wanted to be driven home. Back then she lived closer to him: at Fernvale, the next town south along the Valley Highway. She was called the prettiest girl in the district. Her sensual figure, sun-bleached hair and olive skin suggested vibrant health. And her habit–whether deliberate, he did not know–of unexpectedly touching boys’ arms when they were near her enhanced her charms. Grey put the habit down to a need to be constantly loved and considered. That feeling was so foreign to him that he did not regard it