Free Sixty Lights by Gail Jones

precociously wilful and fierce; she brandished a magnifying glass and had a pyromaniacal stare. For want of words, he coughed.
    â€œWell, here we are then.”
    â€œCan I hold your elephant stick?” Lucy suddenly asked, bold as brass.
    Thomas glared across at his traitorous sister.
    â€œAnd would you like tea?” Mrs Minchin added.
    Thomas switched his glare to the purple woman. He was concentrated and preoccupied, formulating Brazil. In his head long-limbed monkeys swung loops on jungle vines and screeched “Gold! Gold!” There were waterfalls, panthers and quick carnivorous fish. Bronze Indians, neat and featureless, looked on contentedly. Not this grubby fellow, this phoney uncle, who was so unlike their lost mother and so outrageously unkempt.
    Over tea Neville presented Lucy with twelve violet glass bangles – six for each arm, he needlessly instructed – and to Thomas a small silver dagger, curved like the moon. Thomas instantly capitulated:
a silver dagger.
He had never been given so grown-up a gift, and was in a turmoil of mixed-up gratitude and distrust. Perhaps he would discuss Brazil with his uncle. Lucy had put aside the elephant stick and was sliding the twelve violet bangles up and down the length of her arms so that they chinked like twelve teaspoons against the sides of twelve teacups. From beneath her loose curly hair she smiled up at her brother. Thomas realised he had almost forgotten his sister’s smile.
    That night Thomas took the dagger with him to bed, and wondered half-awake what it must feel like to kill someone. Between the ribs, a deadly moon. (“Take that! Aargh!”) He held it up in the darkness and saw it faintly.
Silver.
Bronze Indians, brassy sister, this silver weapon: all his imaginings were flaring metallic. He saw himself as a hero, keeping Lucy safe in a treacherous jungle. Ned. A gun. Sailing ships. Horseback. Charging fast-motioned at the unknown future. He felt he possessed a private world, which would one day soon materialise and invite him to enter. From the kitchen floated the sounds of Uncle Neville and Mrs Minchin in friendly conversation. Thomas listened as he grew sleepy, but they spoke their own over-syllabled, long-distance language:
Calcutta, Mahableshwar, Bombay, Hyderabad.
While he, already journeying, prepared to dream of Brazil.
    Neville Brady was sleeping fitfully in his sister and brother-in-law’s bed, and woke in the middle of the night to see his nephew standing in the centre of the room. The boy was naked and held before him the Indian dagger he had received as a gift. For an irrational second or two Neville thought that the boy had come to murder him – his earlier antipathy had beenso undisguised – but then he noticed his automatic movements and vacant eyes, the thin body tilted slightly in its state of suspension. Neville rose and led the boy gently, guiding him by the shoulders, back to his own bed, and felt in this act, however gratuitous, a first intuition of the existence of paternal tenderness. He uncurled the boy’s fingers from the silver dagger, laid it on the floor, then lowered the child into the bed and pulled up the cover, smoothing and tucking it. Then, pausing again, he watched the boy sleep. The eyes were closed now, and the eyelids flickering. The face was pressed into the pillow at an awkward angle. The room was hushed – no wind outside, no-one astir – which made audible, just barely, the small boy’s breathing.
    â€œHonoria is dead,” Neville Brady whispered to himself. “My sister, my lovely sister, Honoria, is dead.”
    How large the night was. A black shadow, sucking him in.

18
    SHE WOULD LIE on her back in the world of scurrying alive things – slaters, ants, earwigs, grasshoppers – and she would look up at the hard enamelled blue sky, and feel the sun on her cheeks, and see it as a pink-veined coin through her closed-up eyelids, and she would