Free A Small Free Kiss in the Dark by Glenda Millard Page A

is on me and I can’t walk away.
    Billy curled his hands around his Hohner. I got ready for the magic. He closed his eyes and started to play. My feet slid into the stirrups, I took the reins in my hands and a shout burst out of me like fireworks. ‘Come away, Captain Moonlight, come away!’ My shout went up and over the Ferris wheel and down the other side. I felt the horse’s powerful muscles move and I thought of the leopard on Archimedes’s chest.
    Max and me didn’t see the grey clouds rolling in because we were having the ride of our lives, galloping over the grassy plains, chasing buffalo and elk and caribou and listening to the wolves howling in the mountains. But Billy did. After a while he wrapped his Hohner in a piece of rag and put it in his pocket. Then everything went back to the way it was. We got off the carousel to look at the other things in Dreamland before the rain came.
    We passed the House of Horrors and Sideshow Alley, where the tin ducks were, and then we looked at the Ferris wheel and the dodgem cars, but I didn’t feel like pretending any more; I wanted to do something real.
    Then Max said, ‘Have you got something we can eat, Billy?’
    Billy looked in his backpack but all we had left was a tin of sardines and some jelly snakes. ‘There are shops up there on the Boulevard,’ he said, pointing. Three flights of concrete steps with metal handrails ran from behind the station to the top of the hill, where we could see a row of houses and shops and more palm trees. ‘We’d better see what we can find before it gets dark.’
    I read the signs outside Dreamland. ‘Steep Gradient. 15 mins to Shopping Centre’, said the one pointing towards the steps. I knew Billy would have trouble. ‘You wait here, Billy, I’ll go,’ I said.
    It didn’t take him long to get back to being grumpy. ‘Since when did you start telling me what to do?’
    ‘I just thought, all those stairs . . . and there’s no one around. I’d be okay.’
    ‘You mean you haven’t seen anyone,’ he said.
    We ended up all walking beside the road that corkscrewed up the steep slope from Dreamland to the Boulevard. By the time we got there the rain clouds had moved on. I looked at the peacock sea and the violet sky. The tunnel where we’d sheltered from the rain with Albert Park was flyspeck-small and the rails were snail-silver. Further away still were the hazy outlines of the city, and warships in the docks. It had taken us roughly four hours to get to Dreamland, but I couldn’t help thinking it wouldn’t take very long in a tank or a plane, or even if you were a soldier who didn’t have arthritis in his leg, or a small boy on a suitcase to pull.
    ‘I’m hungry,’ Max reminded us as we walked under the palm trees to where the road was blocked with lumps of concrete and barriers of red-and-white mesh. I didn’t like this place. It was too quiet. But the others went under the barrier and I had to follow them past the houses with neat white fences, striped blinds and shiny doorknockers, and past a big hotel where you couldn’t see in the windows because of the reflections of sea and sky and us. I wanted to ask Billy where everyone had gone. Where were the people who owned the nice houses? Were they watching us, wondering which side we were on or if we had come to steal from them, or worse?
    Max walked in front of me with his hand in Billy’s. I didn’t want to be last, but the wheels of my suitcase made a noise if I walked fast. I almost wished for the sounds of war machines and bullets and bombs and shouting and matching black boots on the footpath. At least I could have breathed properly without worrying that someone would hear me. Instead, I walked slowly and breathed quietly and said nothing.
    There was no 7-Eleven store on the Boulevard, but further back we found a narrow street full of cafes and other shops. And there were people, soft-talking, soft-walking people, fluttering down the darkening street, in and