Castaway (13 page)

Sam yawned hugely and looked at the schoolroom clock again. Still more than an hour to go before morning tea. He could hear his brother on the radio at the other end of the room, answering a question from his teacher, his voice rising with the effort to be heard through the static. The heat was mounting in the caravan that served as their classroom, and it was only 9 am.

Just as he was trying to decide whether to pretend to be sick, or simply to fall asleep over his desk, the door opened and his father’s tall figure compressed itself into the van.

‘G’day, Sam. Workin’ you too hard, are we?’ His father grinned at his sleepy face. ‘Where’s George?’

The governess poked her head round the radio room door. ‘Hi, Mac. We’re just finishing George’s lesson here – won’t be long.’

Mac nodded and looked back at Sam. ‘Reckon you could tear yourself away from your books for a bit and come and give us a hand?’

Sam had his books away in three seconds flat and was out the door and halfway to the ute before his father had finished speaking. He perched in the open tray back not quite believing his good luck as his father and younger brother George emerged from the caravan. George grinned up at him, and clambered into the truck with a look on his face that matched Sam’s. Their father gunned the engine, and they left the schoolroom behind in a cloud of dust.

‘What’s up?’ George shouted into Sam’s ear.

‘Dunno! Maybe they haven’t finished the muster yet. Anyway, who cares?’

The boys clung to the railing in the back and swayed with the bumps and the jolts. Sam, at thirteen, was tall and skinny. His hair was bleached almost white by the sun, and his grey eyes often disappeared under a deep frown. Sam was a worrier. If there was anything that could ever possibly go wrong, it would. Or so he believed. He worried about schoolwork, he worried about accidents, he worried about storms and cyclones and freak asteroids hitting his family’s house.

His brother George was totally the opposite. Nothing worried George, except maybe missing out on dessert.
He was two years younger than Sam, and had red hair and freckles and green eyes, but without the temper that is supposed to go with them. He was shorter and stockier, and wasn’t afraid of anything. When Sam was worrying about the Mir space station crashing on their house the year before, George was working out how much money he could make from selling bits as souvenirs in the event that it did hit their house.

But right now, having just escaped from a few hours of correspondence lessons, even Sam could find nothing to worry about …