Read Alone on a Wide Wide Sea for Free Online

pictures on the wall, and a big cupboard. I remember too Mrs Piggy coming in and sitting with me, and I felt hot and heavy all over as if I was weighted down somehow. And once when she came she wasn’t alone. She had an Aboriginal man with her, a bushman with white hair, and he looked into my eyes and felt my face and gave me a medicine to take and laid some kind of a poultice on my foot. The medicine tasted so bitter I could barely swallow it. But whatever it was that he put on my foot cooled it wonderfully.
    As I got better Mrs Piggy would sit beside me playing her squeezy box and I loved that. All these memories may well not be memories at all. It was Mrs Piggy who told me afterwards when I was better, when I thanked her for looking after me, that it wasn’t her that had cured me at all,but a “black fellow” she’d called in. He’d saved my life, she said, not her. “And don’t say a word to Mr Bacon,” she said. “He wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t believe in their magic. But I do. There’s room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world – that’s what I think.”
    I’d spent the best part of a month in my sick bed in the farmhouse, so Marty told me later. He said that both Wes and he had agreed it would be almost worth a spider bite or a snake bite if it got you a month’s holiday in the farmhouse. I told them everything, about how well I’d been fed and looked after, about Mrs Piggy nursing me and how kind she’d been, and all about the bushman who’d saved my life with his magical medicine. And I told them too about the last thing Mrs Piggy had done the morning I was to leave the farmhouse. She came up to my room. I was sitting on the bed buttoning my shirt.
    “Here,” she said. “This is yours, I think.” And she handed me a tiny box, like a pill box. I opened it, and there was my key lying in a bed of cotton wool. “Hide it,” she told me. “And hide it well.” She said nothing more, and was gone out of the room before I could even thank her.
    I never referred to her after that as Mrs Piggy, nor did anyone else because very soon everyone knew how good aperson she really was, how she’d found my key, looked after it, and given it back to me. She was Ida after that, Ida to all of us. We all knew from then on that we had in her a true friend, but we didn’t know just how good a friend, just how important a friend she was to be to us. We had many more gruelling months to endure before we were to find that out. And now I had my key back I forgot all about killing Piggy Bacon. So I suppose you could say Ida didn’t just save my life, she saved his. Much good did it do her.
    As for my key, I did as Ida had told me, I hid it well. But I kept it close too. Right above my bed there was a window, and above it a wooden lintel with a narrow split at one end, but it was just wide enough. I pushed my key in deep, so it couldn’t be seen, making quite sure Piggy could never find it, and left it there. But it never left my thoughts. Every night before I got into bed I’d look up at my secret place. I told Marty – no one else.

“Only One Way Out”
    We could see it happening right in front of our eyes, every day, every night. And we didn’t do nearly enough to prevent it. There’s a lot in my life I regret, a lot to feel guilty about – too much. But I don’t think anything troubles me more than what happened to Wes Snarkey at Cooper’s Station. I still have dreams about it, and about him, all these years later. I should have seen it coming. I should have had the courage to stand beside him, but I didn’t. Nor didMarty, and nor did any of us, except Ida. At least Ida tried.
    It all went back, I’m sure, to that glorious day when Wes knocked Piggy Bacon down in the yard, then sat on him and clobbered him. Wes became our hero that day, but he also replaced Marty as Piggy’s favourite victim. He would bawl him out all the time, pick on him at every opportunity. Wes found himself chosen