Free From Under the Overcoat by Sue Orr Page B

No more.
    I found some photos of my father in the bottom of an old packing case. There was one of him reading to me at night — Mum must have taken it. I never mentioned those photos to Mum. I felt panicked, looking at them, frightened that my real memories of him were fading so fast I wouldn’t recognise him again.
    I ended up not keeping a lot of my own stuff. It felt as though one part of my life — my kid years — were over and a new start was just around the corner. I had no idea whatthe new start was actually going to be, but when Mum and I locked the yellow front door for the last time and walked down the garden path, the photos of my father were in my bag.

WORMS
    O n the way back from the Easter surf trip, Jack Cleveland wrote off his old man’s new Beemer. It was on the tight bend at the start of Pukehina Beach Road, where it meets the main highway back to Te Puke. There’s that old gravel dump on the bend. Cleveland overtook Cru Davis right there, lost it in the loose metal and rolled the car down into the river.
    Cleveland was okay because of the airbags but Kyle Henry, who was in the back of the car, got smashed up. His longboard was on the roof and it got munted. Snapped completely in half.
    The first I knew much about the crash was the next day, when school went back. The guys on the surfing trip weren’tthere that morning. They’d gone to see Kyle in Tauranga Hospital. But everyone else was talking about the accident.
    Someone whose father was in the fire brigade said it’d taken half an hour to cut Kyle from the wreck. The rescuers had to go super slow in case his back was broken. Or he had internal injuries.
    Our house is on the main road. I’d heard the sirens both ways. The ambulance went past just after eight o’clock and didn’t come back ’til after ten. It would have been more like an hour to cut him out, I said to a few people, reciting the ambulance times. I liked having a definite fact to contribute. At interval I met Ryan Mishefski at the tuck shop. Ryan was my mate. He and his aunt had shifted to Te Puke a year earlier, at the beginning of year ten. His parents were dead — another car accident — so there was just the two of them. They lived down the road from us.
    ‘You hear about the accident?’ I said. ‘About Kyle?’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Ryan. He was kicking a McDonald’s hacky sack. He was a quiet kind of guy. I think probably because of being an orphan, being sick of explaining what had happened to his family.
    ‘Sounds like Kyle’s pretty smashed up,’ I said.
    Ryan was standing on his right leg, holding his arms out from his sides for balance. His left leg was suspended out straight in front of him, the hacky sack in the hollow between his left shin and the top of his shiny black school shoe. He could hold that pose for as long as he liked. Like some sort of skinny origami bird.
    ‘Kyle’s not the only one who’s going to suffer,’ he said.
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘We’re fucked, too, now, aren’t we.’ The hacky sack flicked off the toe of his shoe, over his head. His eyes followed the ball skywards. He swung his leg backwards and somehow caught it behind him, in the crook of his knee. He was the man at hacky sack. ‘That’ll be the end of the Easter surf trips.’
    ‘Bullshit, man. One accident’s not going to change anything,’ I said.
    ‘You wait and see. Cleveland’s stuff ed it up for everyone. The school’ll get involved and it’ll be called off by the parents.’
    ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘They’ll get over it. The next one’s a whole year away.’
    ‘Bet you,’ said Ryan. He shoved the hacky sack in his pocket.
     
    THE SURFERS HAD GONE to the hospital in a minibus arranged and driven by Brian Cleveland, Jack’s old man. Brian was the big-shot real estate agent in town. The guys scuff ed back in through the school gates at lunchtime with their heads down, hands in their pockets, not saying much.
    During the afternoon, though, details started