Free Black Diamonds by Kim Kelly Page B

…’ she says. She and Mum get up with a scrape of chairs on the floorboards that grates right through me.
    Mum looks like she’s about to say something to her, but doesn’t, and there’s a look between them, like they’re having a chat without me. Excuse me for breathing. Francine Connolly. She steps around the end of the table, she’s leaving now, and she catches the toe of her shoe on the leg. And then she looks across and sees me.
    She says: ‘Oh. We should … Hmmm.’ She looks at Mum again. ‘I … think I should like to visit you again, Mrs Ackerman, if that’s all right with you.’
    Mum’s not expecting that but you wouldn’t know it unless you were looking for it. She says: ‘That would be nice.’
    They go to the door talking some rubbish about the camellias out the front. Then I hear her say, ‘Oh. I forgot my pencil box,’ and she whips back down the hall to grab it. She whispers to me: ‘Next Friday.’ And she’s gone.
    When Mum comes back she says: ‘Well, we have a house, then, ja. ’ Not yes, but ja. And she sits at the table staring at nothing for a second, then she whispers, ‘ Ungerecht, ’ and puts her head in her hands: unjust. Yep. Dad was never interested in owning anything, but this house is him; now it’s Mum’s, without him.
    Her back shakes once and that’s the only clue to her crying. And I want to shake the rest of it out of her, shake out everything that she’s never said.
    But Mum heaves up a big sigh and shakes herself out of it. She says: ‘This Francine Connolly. She’s … unusual.’ Raising an eyebrow.
    Too right, but I say, ‘ Ja, ’ and we crack. Mum knows, without me saying anything, everything I’ve seen, plus some. When Mum laughs it’s like rain on the roof.

 
    FRANCINE
    It’s Wednesday morning and unsurprisingly I haven’t made an appearance at Mass. Instead I’m sitting on the back step looking up into the fat white clouds brushing the tops of the gums. I am unrepentant, and wallowing in my dreadful secret. I as much as hurled myself at him. After almost making it through the whole ordeal with faultless decorum, and without paying him any particular attention. What must he and his mother think of me, being so forward, inviting myself back like the lady of the manor? Now I know what I am like. Desperate. When I’m not imagining a bleak future free of him, then I’m revelling in a future comprised entirely of him, which is fairly much all the time. It’s a terrific time-waster. It is torture. It is not reasonable. We’ve barely said two words to each other and that’s no exaggeration. All I am certain of is that the rope will drag me down Dell Street come Friday, and somehow that will clarify this mess. Perhaps he will make sure they are out for the day. If that’s the case, then that’s my clarification; if not …?
    Big stupid sigh at the trees. Mr Saunders’s quote has come and gone. I was not interested in his vision of well-designed, overpriced, so-uncommon-everyone-has-one-now, possibly Satanic loveliness after all. I shall have these messy melancholy gums, and I will get myself two apple trees to place amongst them to remind me of … the lowest thoughts I’ve ever had.
    But then, even as I’m miserable, ludicrous floods of hope sweep through me and I can see Him sitting in the trap with me as we go out to find these mythic trees, and we’re laughing just as we did that one perfect moment. Except he’s not inarticulate now; I can’t hear what he’s saying but whatever it is it pleases me. Then reality merges with fantasy and I think, could we go in the trap? It might be too hard for him to climb in with his leg that way. Then fantasy swamps again and I take the Austin instead. Could I learn to drive that horrible, spluttering thing in the next two days?