Free Nine Days by Toni Jordan Page A

and I’d still be watching Connie Westaway dance. She circles the backyard, once, twice, thrice, faster and faster. She is the loveliest thing I’ve seen in all these weeks I’ve been away from the bush.
    She stops. The broom falls from her hand to the path—I imagine its clatter, wood on bricks. Mrs Westaway has comeoutside, talking fast, arms folded, head snapping from side to side. Connie walks in to the house, fast but not running, eyes ahead, not down. The broom she leaves where it falls. Her mother walks in behind her. The music has finished.
    Another knock and this time Mum opens the door. ‘Jack. What are you doing at the window?’ She comes in and stands beside me, looks down, then back at my face. ‘Your father’s already eaten. What is it you’d like for breakfast? I thought you’d fallen back asleep.’
    ‘Coming,’ is what I say. But maybe she was right and I had fallen asleep. Maybe I was dreaming.

    I have had many different sets of parents and lived in many different houses. This is something only my mates from boarding school understand. Fact is, everyone changes a little bit, all the time. We age and shrink and grow and soften and harden. When you see someone every day the changes smooth out, like when a young dog takes on a mob of sheep all by itself and you can’t remember the exact moment it stopped being a pup. But when you’re away, the changes aren’t smooth. When you come home from school after five months or from working on a station after nearly eighteen—it’s like different people in place of Mum and Dad.
    This visit, the old man can’t raise his arm above shoulder height because something went bung in the joint when he lifted a table funny last summer. Mum’s different too. She sniffs the air now, when she’s talking about other people. Thewomen who were always over for tea, knitting on their laps, the last time I was here. Not hide nor hair of them now.
    Both these things, the shoulder and the missing friends, they add up to something. Put together with the way they both puff while they’re walking up the stairs, the way Dad looks for his glasses when they’re perched on his head. Mum standing in the laundry, squinting at the socks, holding them up to the light after she’s taken them off the line and still every other pair rolled in a ball in my drawer doesn’t match. One black, one navy. One with a stripe near the top, one an inch shorter. I’ve told her I’ll pair up my own socks, and I smile when I say it, but still it wounds her out of all proportion.
    For of course we’re not really talking about laundry. We are talking about them growing old without family around. They think I shouldn’t have been so far away, working out west, even though it was them who sent me in the first place. With the war, they can hardly find able bodies for the shop. I’m only meant to be here for a visit but now that I’m back, I should stay.
    Out on the station, everything’s the same as it’s always been. The hills and trees and rocks. There’s always a kookaburra on the same branch, fish in the same bend of the river. Every time I come back to this house, it’s a different world.

    Sunday grinds forward. I chop some wood, clean my boots. I see sparrows in the yard: loathesome birds on a farm but still living, wild things. I watch them fly and I think good on them.
Go, you little brown buggers.
I don’t think of music or brooms or the way a skirt twirls. The movements of dancing ankles.
    By midday Mum’s been watching my every move for four hours so I tell her I’m off out for a bit. I walk to Bridge Road and in the reserve behind the town hall there must be over a hundred blokes just standing around, smoking or cadging ciggies, having a yarn. There’s a fellow in a sharp suit walking around selling raffle tickets but you’d have to be a real bushie to buy one. Someone has a football and there are jackets and hats slung on the fence while a mob of them run around kicking