Sunset Ridge by Nicole Alexander Page A

would bring. His mother would visit first, followed by Cook and at some stage his two brothers, but what of her? He lay quietly, remembering the feel of those lips on his forehead as streaks of smoky reds and pinks appeared beneath a washed-out blue sky.
    The blank square of the sketchpad sat untouched on the bed. Dave lifted the charcoal and drew a square, then a circle. He flipped the page to start afresh, his mind a whirr of images. A cloud came next and then the sky at dawn, except that it looked like a series of squiggly lines. He flipped the page again: a stick figure, a dog, a sheep with a cloud for a body. Another blank page confronted him. These everyday images stifled him. He dozed, his thoughts returning to his night visions. An image appeared behind his eyes: a chair, fractured, skew-whiff, as if someone had pulled it apart and then reassembled it in a series of boxes and squares. It was a chair but not a chair. Lifting the charcoal to blank paper, he drew.
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    Dave felt like a sissy placed in the middle of the veranda, especially because he was sure that Cook and his mother were holding a competition to see who could check on him the most. Hens pecked their way slowly across the front yard. A handful of poddy lambs frolicked in the tufted grass. Occasionally lamb and chicken would cross paths, and flapping wings and affronted bleats would break the silence that stretched out across the house paddock. The sky was a glazed blue, the stables a shimmering concoction of timber and iron. Dave stared at the hazy structure until it merged with the frill of trees bordering the paddock, then he retrieved the sketchpad from under the blanket and began to draw a chicken.
    â€˜What’ve you got there, then?’ Cook set two warm biscuits and a glass of milk by his elbow. ‘A chicken?’ She twisted her neck. ‘I never seen a hen what looked like that.’ Tucking the blanket tightly around him, she compared the hen on the paper with the real thing ten yards from the veranda.
    The charcoal hen’s body was comprised of many different-sized squares, some of which had been obliterated by blobs of crumbled charcoal. ‘I guess you’re right, but it’s not meant to be in proportion. I wanted it to –’ He considered sharing some of his strange night visions but thought better of it. ‘To be different.’
    â€˜I always knew that Miss Waites was a bit off in the . . .’ Cook tapped her head. ‘Teaching you boys rubbish like that. Argh, a woman that demands sheep’s stomach can’t be of normal thinking. You know what I mean? Stomach, she tells me; sheep’s stomach stuffed. I’ve told her on more than one occasion that we ain’t poor Scots in this household, no-sir-ee. We’re edumacated people and we eat accordingly.’
    Dave flipped the sketchbook closed and bit into a biscuit.
    â€˜That’s right. You eat that up. Of course, I can be forgiving a person’s differences on account of the fact that her countrymen are fighting in the Great War as well.’
    After Cook left, Dave considered what a strangely built woman she was. Thin-waisted and wide-hipped, she had stocky legs beneath a black skirt while her torso was thick and long. It was as if she had been stuck at the waist and then pulled beyond stretching point. Dave thought of the chair and the hen – what if he drew a woman like that? What if he drew Cook?
    A scatter of leaves tinkled the corrugated-iron roof as Miss Waites stepped smartly onto the veranda. She wore a long brown skirt and a cream bodice with puffed sleeves and covered buttons that ran from the waist to her neck. ‘David, how ar ye? Oh, you’re drawing. May I see?’ The governess flipped between the pages of the chair, hen and Cook. ‘Och! That’s guid.’
    â€˜Really?’ A residue of black dust from the charcoal was smeared across Cook’s image. David had relegated her to