Free The True Story of Spit MacPhee by James Aldridge Page A

the iron bottom. The little windows at both ends had been smashed, and he had to avoid the broken glass underfoot. What he saw now was the boiler almost back to its natural state.
    His original intention had been to cook himself some breakfast and afterwards to clean out the boiler. But there was nothing to cook. Although the stove was still there and the chimney still stood, the Coolgardie food safe was a twisted, empty wreck. Eggs and butter and jam and porridge and tea had all gone to the flames, and the kettle had lost its handle. He found a pair of old shoes his grandfather usually kept for working in the vegetable garden and, flopping about in them, he set about rescuing what he could of his grandfather’s equipment, and whatever clocks or watches were left. He raked out his grandfather’s tools from the mess of damp ash – the vice and clamps and the lathe and grinding wheel, and he put them into a box which he had found intact in the garden. But none of the clocks and watches in the process of repair were worth bothering about, although he found Mr Temple’s razor. He then set about emptying the water from the boiler with a bucket, and he was still at it when Sadie walked down the slope.
    ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she said.
    ‘Cleaning it out,’ he told her. ‘I can fix it up a bit if I can get rid of all this water.’
    ‘Your breakfast is ready at our place,’ she told him.
    ‘I’m not hungry,’ he said.
    ‘But you can’t fix the boiler now,’ she insisted, ‘so come on. My mother’s waiting for you.’
    ‘Is your father still there?’
    ‘Yes, but he won’t do anything to you.’
    ‘Well … I want to see my grandfather, and he’ll probably try to stop me,’ Spit said.
    Sadie sighed. ‘No, he won’t, Spit. Anyway you have to have breakfast.’
    It was sound logic, so Spit pulled his feet out of the old shoes and went up the path with Sadie. When he entered the kitchen, Jack Tree was at the table eating bacon and eggs. He looked up at Spit and said, ‘You’ll have to wash before you sit down at this table, Spit. You look like a blackfeller.’
    ‘Sadie,’ Grace said quietly. ‘Give Spit the towel I left on the couch, and then both of you come and get your breakfast.’
    Spit had never before washed under a running tap in a basin, and when he saw the colour of the water as it left his hands and face he tried to clean the basin too until Sadie said, ‘Never mind that. Just wash your face and hands.’
    Even so, the towel received a fair residue of the black and the grey from his face and hands. When he was seated at the kitchen table he looked boldly at Mr Tree and said, ‘What did you do with my grandfather?’
    ‘He’s still in the hospital. Where did you think he was?’ Jack said.
    ‘I don’t know. Are they going to let him out today?’
    Mr Tree shook his head. ‘Not today,’ he said.
    ‘What are they keeping him for?’
    ‘He’s too sick,’ Jack Tree said.
    ‘He’ll get over it all right,’ Spit insisted. ‘He always gets over it.’
    ‘This time it’s not so good.’
    ‘Am I allowed to go and see him?’ Spit asked.
    ‘You’d better talk to Dr Stevens about that,’ Jack said. ‘But your grandfather won’t be able to do much for you now, Spit, so you might as well get used to the idea.’
    ‘I don’t want him to do anything for me,’ Spit argued. ‘I’m going to fix up the boiler myself, and we can live in that.’
    Jack Tree – dressed for work in his collar and tie, and with his hair brushed and his face spruced – was in no mood for Spit’s nonsense. ‘You can’t do a damn thing to that boiler,’ he said to Spit, ‘so don’t even think of trying it.’
    Spit’s instinct to attack as the best means of defence sustained him. ‘Anyway I’m going to fix it,’ he repeated grimly. ‘I don’t care what anybody says.’
    ‘You can’t live down there any more,’ Jack Tree told him, ‘so you’ll only be wasting your time. Joe Collins