The Family String
Contents (25)
For Roslyn Johnson.
Singular. Sparkling. Missed.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CHAPTER 1
It was me who heard Mum calling first. It was Saturday morning, so Mum had still been in bed when we’d headed for the tree house at the bottom of the garden.
‘Shhhh,’ I said to the other two. ‘We must have missed the first call.’
We had been singing ‘April Love’ by Pat Boone in the tree house loud enough to drown out a World War I warning claxon, never mind my mother calling from the back door. We froze, and I heard Caleb take in a deep breath so he could hold it until otherwise instructed. Ruthy quietly opened her notebook, pen ready.
‘What kind of day will it be, Dorcas?’ she whispered after a moment. ‘Can you tell yet?’
‘Caleb! Ruth! Dorcas! Where are you? I’m warning you. Don’t make me come down there to find you,’ we heard Mum shout, insistent.
I could just see her through the branches of the enormous old olive that held up our tree house in an upturned leafy hand. You had to see what she was wearing, as well as hear her voice, to be sure what kind of day it would be. She was standing in the doorframe in her stained pink candlewick dressing-gown, one of the two pockets torn and flapping sadly at her side, already looking tired at eight in the morning. Untamed auburn waves exploded around her pale face. My dad described her complexion as ‘peaches and cream’, but there was no sign of colour this morning. If it was a good day, she would have been wearing her gold quilted housecoat and her matching gold Jiffies. The cowlick at the crown of her head would already be forced into submission by a whoosh of Taft hairspray.
‘Cross,’ I said. ‘It’s a cross day, Ruthy.’
Ruthy immediately leaned over her book and wrote the date and the word ‘cross’ by it. She used a gum leaf as a bookmark and snapped it closed. Ruthy never questioned my assessment. As the oldest living at home, and now on the way to my twelfth birthday, I had the most experience of Mum’s moods, and was pretty much always right, particularly as it could be said I was often the cause of the bad ones. Besides, our older brother Daniel had anointed me as the mood-sayer before he left, and none of us disagreed with Daniel.
He was now boarding with a church family in New South Wales and doing God’s work with his local youth group. At seventeen, he wasn’t old enough yet to be a member of the Arranging Brethren of the Christadelphian Ecclesia, which was our church, and more important than almost any job, even school principal or the premier of South Australia. In his new youth group, he led a team of doorknockers on weekends, a merry band who cheerfully received each inevitable refusal to discuss the relevance of the Bible to their lives.