Page 51 of Down the Track
‘Yeah, so I’m always worried I’ll never get to see him, because his dad could so easily hog the holidays and I’ll be just … not even in his life.’
‘You think?’
Jo turned to face him, bringing up her knee so she was sideways on the pew. ‘What do you mean?’
Hux shrugged. ‘Your current arrangement sounds a bit like boarding school. Dad for term time, mum for holidays—you just need to make the holidays good enough for him—Luke—to enjoy them.’
‘Boarding school?’
‘I went to boarding school in Yeppoon for Year Eleven and Twelve. Most of the kids do around here, unless they do senior by School of the Air, because the local school taps out at Year Ten. Best two years of my life.’ A slight exaggeration, but still. He had loved boarding school.
‘What was so good about it?’
‘Everything. No sisters. Sport all weekend. Cooked breakfast every day. Swearing manfully. Someone else doing all the laundry and ironing. Meatloaf and gravy.’
She snorted. ‘Meatloaf and gravy?’
‘And then when the holidays came around, Mum and Dad were so happy to see me, they let me do anything I wanted. It was awesome. Boarding school was a really happy time for me, but you know what it didn’t do? It didn’t wreck my relationship with my oldies.’ A big part of that had to do with the fact that Yeppoon was so far away from Yindi Creek that no-one there ever asked him about Jess. But that wasn’t the whole part.
‘Your parents were together, though.’
‘What I’m saying is, boarding school didn’t make me any less close to them, even though I was only with them on the holidays. In some ways, it made us closer, because they weren’t the ones who were having to rag on me to pick up my clothes or do my homework, which I can assure you was what they did constantly when I was in Year Ten.’
‘Hmm. So Craig gets to be the bad cop and I get to be the good one? Well, thank you for giving me that perspective. I hadn’t thought about it like that.’
Hux stretched his legs out and Possum lay down beside his boots and propped his neck up on Hux’s ankle. It was quiet out here. Peaceful.
TYSON: Say something, mate. You’re never going to get a better time than right now.
‘So, how was Turkmenistan, anyway?’ he said.
‘It was Argentina,’ she said. ‘And it was good.’
‘I missed you.’
She blinked. ‘I really don’t think that’s true.’
He frowned. ‘Why are you so sure it’s not?’
She said nothing. Just like she had back then, too. Before she’d laughed. And said goodbye. And he’d been so surprised, sohurt, that she actually meant to leave that he’d gotten mad.
‘I guess,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I guess … I didn’t think you would miss me.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because no-one ever had.’
CHAPTER
20
On Thursday morning, Jo bolted from deep sleep into wakefulness, the squawk of her phone’s alarm bringing her dream to an abrupt halt. Fragments were all that remained, like random images from microfiche trapped in an endless loop. She’d been dreaming of a science lesson, perhaps. From high school, in the lab with ply benchtops and Bunsen burners spaced evenly alongside utilitarian sinks and gooseneck taps.
Weird.
She had a lot on her mind, worries aplenty, including a million and one disquieting thoughts about Hux—had he been telling the truth all those years ago? Had heactuallymissed her?—but none of them revolved around high school science.
Last thing she remembered from the night before was reading through the article she was mocking up for when (if!) she had anything to report on her Corley expedition, and she’d definitely only meant to rest her eyes for a few moments … then had somehow managed to flake out on top of the covers. Thank heavens she’d set her alarm, but it would’ve been great if she’d remembered to get out of her clothes, because now she felt like a very crumpled version of the proverbial death warmed up.
