The Long Way Home: Utopia Bay: A Flower a Day, #1

By Jessi Hammond

Gary has lived on the streets for three months. It's not his choice - his Gran is in hospital and the streets are safer than living with Mum and his creep of a stepfather.

Then one day Gary finds a bunch of silk flowers in a skip bin. Those flowers, and what he chooses to do with them, will change his life.

 

Utopia Bay is a small town on the east coast of Australia. This is one of its stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Jul 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393257066

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About this book

Utopia Bay is a small town on the east coast of Australia. This is one of its stories.

Gary has lived on the streets for three months. It's not his choice - his Gran is in hospital and the streets are safer than living with Mum and his creep of a stepfather.

Then one day Gary finds a bunch of silk flowers in a skip bin. Those flowers, and what he chooses to do with them, will change his life.

The Long Way Home

One

One

Gary found the flowers out the back of The Reject Shop.

They were in the big yellow skip bin in the alley which ran along the back of the Fell Street Shopping Centre, almost hidden beneath a mess of clear plastic sheeting and cardboard. Gary had spent enough nights on the streets of Utopia Bay over the last two months to know plastic sheeting and decent cardboard were gold, almost as hard to find as clean water. He pulled the cardboard out and leaned it against the bin, then reached in to pull out the screwed-up ball of plastic.

Beneath it were the flowers.

They weren’t real, obviously, Gary thought as he reached in to pick one up. Some kind of silky-smooth cloth stiffened to keep its shape. There were a lot, maybe forty or fifty or more, all different kinds. He recognised roses and sunflowers, the bright cheerful face of a frangipani and the long, cone shape of lupins. They’d all been in Gran’s garden – he’d helped her plant the frangipani tree three years ago.

Gran.

Sadness hit him and he pushed the feeling away. He’d lived with Gran since he was nine years old. His Dad, Gran’s son, had died when Gary was three, and Mum had gone, according to Gran, even more odd from grief than she had been. She’d found a new group of friends and had married one of them when Gary was seven, a man who pretended to like Gary in front of Mum and made his life hell behind her back. Mum wouldn’t listen – she kept telling Gary not to tell lies, and not to be so ungrateful.

And the creep kept feeding her prescription drugs and making her even more loopy.

It had taken Gary almost two years to tell Gran about the verbal and physical abuse the creep was dishing out.

It took Gran, and her lawyer, only two days to gain full custody of him.

In the six years since, Gary’s life had totally changed. Mum and the creep had called him stupid and thick, but the teachers at his new school had worked out in the first month