Girl Next Door – Read Now and Download Mobi

Name: Girl Next Door
ISBN: 9781864714586

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See, what happened was, our lives were going really well. My mum got a promotion, I enrolled in an A-list school, and then my Dad had this great idea to start an empire. But now he’s ‘gone to the country’. What does that mean? Is it the same place they take old, sick dogs? Has he joined a cult? It’s been two months now, and I still don’t know what it means. Declan, the boy next door, says that my dad’s in hospital, but everyone’s dying as far as Declan is concerned. Now there are strange people living in our spare rooms, and all my stuff is on the lawn. I’ve tried to raise it with my mum, but she talks to me as if I am a four-year-old – when she talks to me at all, which is less and less lately. Hello! Can somebody please tell me what’s going on?

About the Author

Alyssa Brugman is the author of Being Bindy, The Equen Queen, Finding Grace, Solo, and Walking Naked, among others.

Author

Alyssa Brugman

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This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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Published

2009-02-01

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9781864714586

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Table of Contents

GIRL
NEXT
DOOR

Alyssa Brugman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

The Girl Next Door

ePub ISBN 9781864714586
Kindle ISBN 9781864717136

Original Print Edition

A Random House book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by Random House Australia in 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Author: Brugman, Alyssa, 1974–
Title: Girl next door / Alyssa Brugman

ISBN: 9781741663389

Target audience: For secondary school age
Dewey number: A823.4

Cover and internal design by Blueboat
Cover photographs by Getty Images
Typeset in 13/20pt Adobe Garamond by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

For Chrissy, who makes it all possible

1
BELT-TIGHTENING

'I could die tonight. This might be the last time we see each other. I just want you to know what an important friend you are to me.' Declan blinks at me with moist eyelashes and sighs. 'I never saw Buenos Aires.'

'After I finish school I'll take a year off and go to South America in your honour,' I tell him, patting his forearm.

We're sitting in the narrow alleyway between Declan's house and my house, where nobody can hear us. It's about ten minutes to dinner. Well, until Declan's dinner. My family doesn't do that meal any more. My mum car-pools into the city with Declan's dad, and he's some kind of hot shot, so she's usually home late. She's home tonight though. She has an appointment.

A car pulls up in front of our house. A thin man in a short-sleeved shirt checks himself out in the rear-view mirror and then gets out.

'There's a man walking up your front path,' Declan says.

'Yes, I can see that.' He would be the appointment, I'm guessing.

Declan flicks his head. He does this a lot because he likes to wear his hair over his eyes. He's bleached and dyed it so many times that it's brittle and coarse. He thinks it makes him look mysterious. I think he looks like a terrier.

'I'm dying and you've already lost interest. You're already too busy with Mr . . .' He's searching. 'Mr Pathwalker.'

'You never know,' I say. 'You might make it through tonight, and the next night and every night, and then we could go to South America together.'

Declan eyes me suspiciously. 'Will you promise to look after my cat? Because if you don't, when I die I will haunt you!' he warns.

'Of course,' I answer. 'I've told you a hundred times.'

I'm not really an animal person. We had goldfish a while ago, but I wasn't all that good at feeding them regularly. I'd prefer to be haunted by Declan than by Chairman Meow – or the goldfish. They would be so mad at me.

'Jenna-Belle!' Mum calls from inside the house.

'What?' I shout over my shoulder. We wait. My mother is expecting me to go in there to see what she wants. She calls me as if I'm a dog.

'WHAT?' I yell again.

Still nothing.

'Declan could be dying!' I bellow. 'Don't you even care about that?'

'Declan is not dying!' Mum shouts back.

It's true. Declan's not dying, he's just an emo.

'I have to go.' I stand up.

Declan doesn't say anything. He's too busy checking his pulse.

Inside, the man from the car is standing in the foyer with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. We have one of those entry foyers with the staircase winding up and a skylight at the top. The vast space and the tiles make your shoes clack and echo through the whole house, so if you're going to sneak out you need to do it through the back.

He's looking at the ceiling. Maybe he's thinking about the roof space. I've always liked roof spaces. Declan and I spend a lot of time in my roof. When I go to people's houses I always wonder if there's treasure up there.

When I'm an A-lister I'm going to make a habit of leaving treasure in people's roofs, like the way Oprah gives her audience cars.

'Bryce Cole is here to look around,' my mother tells me. 'He might take the room.'

I have a vision of him hefting our lounge room on his shoulder, like Atlas, and strapping it to the roof of his car, which isn't as dumb as you might think since Mum has sold just about everything else, and then it registers that she means the spare room. Bryce Cole might be moving in.

'This is Jenna-Belle, my youngest,' she tells him.

He offers me his hand. 'Bryce Cole.' He's not looking at me as though he only sees a jigsaw of girlie bits the way some men do, with their eyes flitting from one part to the next. He's just looking at my face.

I'm trying to think of any dictators in history with two-syllable names. When you share a bathroom with an adult they can get a little despotic, as if they have more right to it than you, even if you were there first.

I used to have big barneys with the woman who had Bryce Cole's room before. She would scream that she paid, and so I'd scream back that she paid for the room, she only had use of the bathroom. So there. Her name was Penelope Sullivan – four and three syllables – so she was obviously Napoleon Bonaparte reincarnated.

I'm doing well with Bryce Cole until I remember Pol Pot.

Pol Pot springs to mind because Declan did an assignment on him for history. He read on the internet that Pol Pot was a dope fiend and that's where the expression 'pot' for marijuana came from, but I don't think that's true. I'll have to ask him what mark he got.

I'm not sure if Bryce Cole can be Pol Pot reincarnated because I don't know if Pol Pot is dead yet, and even if he is, I'm pretty sure he was raining atrocities on his people after Bryce Cole was born. You can't be reincarnated retrospectively; otherwise we'd all be fair game. Who could sleep knowing you could wake up and be someone else? Everyone would be irritable and jumpy and there'd be even more wars.

Bryce Cole doesn't look like a dictator or a pot head. He looks kind of normal. I bet he runs a carpet shop, or delivers photocopiers or something like that, but it's hard to tell at first. He'll be the third flatmate we've had (not including Annie who lives in the granny flat).

I'm beginning to suspect that adults who get to a place in life where they need to rent rooms in other people's houses are all a little kooky. I'm not talking about the uni-types. Mum won't have them because she believes they would corrupt my brother and me – nor backpackers, because Mum thinks they'll steal our stuff and disappear. I'm talking about proper adults with frown lines, who listen to Radio National. They wear shapeless clothes in drab colours, and have the types of haircuts that don't need any styling, which is why I question their need for so much bathroom time.

Maybe it's a bowel thing.

We live in a monster house – I'm talking truly ginormous, with a billiard room, a bar, a media room and a foyer. It's a house with wings.

It's not as big as Jasmina Fitzgibbon's house. Her dad is some kind of billionaire property developer and they have a helipad and a ballroom with a grand piano in the corner. I appreciate that her dad travels a lot by helicopter, but I do question whether they host so many balls at their house that they need a special room for them.

The Fitzgibbons have staff. We don't have staff. Jasmina also has a stepmother who's about twenty-three. Jasmina tells us stories about the dumb stepmother all the time and it's funny because it's such a cliché and I thought she made half of it up, but then one day I saw the stepmother in real life when she came to pick up Jasmina from school and she looked exactly the way Jasmina described. At the time I was so glad that my dad was still with my mum and that they're the same age and that my dad doesn't have a pathetic comb-over – not that there is a non-pathetic comb-over.

Tanner Hamrick-Gough has a house that's about as big as ours, but it's olde worlde with ivy on the walls, and a garden that people take photos of and put in magazines. Her house is a genuine contender for having treasure in the ceiling. It has secret doors and passageways – well, just one off the library, but it's so cool. If I wasn't so mature and chic I would definitely want to play a game of smugglers, or vampires, or something like that.

Okay, I have thought about the secret room a little bit. Except I wondered if their cleaner goes in there and vacuums, which would make it less mysterious.

Tanner Hamrick-Gough's mum and dad are still together, and they're so old that they both have comb-overs. They live in Dubai for half the year. Tanner lives most of the time just with her older sister, which sounds as though it could be a riot, except the sister is doing a PhD in ancient Polynesian nose-flute music, or something like that, so you can imagine. She's not exactly an A-lister.

I used to feel all smug because our family had a giant house without a ballroom, which is just tacky, and my parents had a functioning marriage and two full heads of hair and were actually in the country most of the time, and if they weren't then my brother and I were with them on holidays, and my brother Willem is a cadet, which is annoying, but much less annoying than a nose-flautist.

But now we're eating two-minute noodles and canned soup. We don't run the air conditioner any more. I caught Mum dyeing some clothes to make them look new again. She'd already put a lock on the phone so we can only receive calls. And we're renting out our spare rooms.

She bought our school shoes from Vinnies. There were two ways of dealing with that. I could have been mortified, but instead I put on my face that Mum calls 'bolshie' and showed them to everyone at school and told them they were 'vintage'.

We're tightening our belts.

See, what happened was, our lives were going really well. About a year ago, or maybe a little longer, my mum got a promotion, so she was earning all this extra money, and then my parents had a great idea that Dad would start his own business, but the mortgage broker said that banks don't like to lend you money when you're just starting out on your own, so they should borrow it now (as in, then), while Dad had a long record of full-time employment.

They borrowed as much as they could, because Dad was going to earn much more money when he was his own boss. We moved from a big house into the monster house. My brother and I were enrolled into snootier private schools. Dad bought a new car for his company, and then he quit his job.

. . . Except he didn't make more money than he would have if he'd kept his old job. To start up his business he had to pay workers' compensation insurance, indemnity insurance, superannuation, income tax and he had to register for GST. I know all this because in the beginning, when it was exciting and new, they told me everything. Dad said I was witnessing the birth of an empire.

For the first six months or so he was up early, in his office with a mug of coffee in one hand and the phone in the other. Then he started getting up later and later, until eventually I'd come home from school and he'd be lying on the lounge in his boxers watching the Lifestyle channel with a packet of chicken chips balanced on his belly.

This went on for a few more months, and then one afternoon I told him I was witnessing the birth of a fat, lazy slob. Then I saw the employment section of the newspaper open on the coffee table, and I felt bad, because it looked like he was trying.

But you know what? He didn't get angry. It was so freaky. I was expecting him to give me a lecture, but instead he cried. There were tears rolling down his cheeks, and he was making small whimpering noises like a puppy, but the whole time he kept watching this guy on the television transforming an old patio into an 'entertainment deck'.

He cried for ages and then when Mum got home from work she sat me down in the kitchen and told me I was going to have a little brother or sister. Of course, there was going to be a gap between the time when she had the baby and went back to work where she wasn't going to be making any money, so we'd have even less than we had before her promotion. (Back when we had a house that we could almost afford.) She explained this to me in small words. The 'little brother or sister' conversation was the moment she started talking to me as if I was a four-year-old.

After that, Dad 'went to the country'. Jasmina and Tanner and I considered what 'gone to the country' might mean. Is it the same place they take sick dogs? Is it code for 'shacked up with his old secretary'? Is he in a mental institution? Rehab? Has he joined a cult? Is he a bigamist with a whole separate family? Any of those would be a good explanation. It's been two months now since he left, and I still don't know what it means.

Mum hasn't called the police. Willem keeps talking about 'when Dad comes home' as though it's a sure thing. Declan says that my dad's in hospital with cancer and they don't want to tell me because I have delicate self-esteem. Everyone's always dying as far as Declan is concerned.

He's onto something with the self-esteem thing, though. My mother has an obsession with it, as if it's a religion or something. Actually, she thinks of it more like oxygen. You don't want your self-esteem levels to get too low or you might pass out.

Back in the old days, when we had meals, and pay TV, and friends, before Mum was pregnant and my dad disappeared, Mum thought you could buy self-esteem. You'd go to the shopping centre to stock up on self-esteem the same way you do when you're low on rice or pasta sauces. We'd go to the Estée Lauder counter and get a makeover, then head upstairs to the shoes. Next, I'd get a pedicure while Mum had her nails infilled, and voila!

Maybe she still thinks you can buy it, but she doesn't say anything because we've got no money, and even mentioning it might make me feel bad about myself, which would lower the self-esteem reserves even before the starvation kicks in.

Instead she says nothing, or compensates by showering me with compliments, even when she's angry.

I'm really disappointed that you didn't pack the dishwasher when I asked you, Jenna-Belle, because you're a strong and beautiful person, with high standards and a responsible attitude.

I don't know why she thinks I have low self-esteem anyway. I'm pretty happy with myself. If I'm absolutely honest I'd have to say that I'm a bit of all right. But maybe it's Mum's rationalisation to herself for me turning out to be not quite as pretty, or clever, or good at sports as she was hoping I would? Maybe she thinks that if I had higher self-esteem I would be a maths genius and a leggy sports queen who never gets sweaty, and then she would feel like a success as a parent?

I've tried to raise this with her, but she still just talks to me as if I'm a four-year-old. That's when she talks to me at all, which is less and less lately. Hello!

2
EMBARRASSING

Here are the three most embarrassing things that have ever happened to me in reverse order. Actually, no. First I'll say an embarrassing thing that happened to someone else in my presence.

Back when my mother first applied for me to go to The Finsbury School she agreed to host a fundraiser, which involved putting on lunch for the ladies, holding a silent auction and getting a speaker – someone who'd done a solo round-the-world yacht trip, or hopped up Mt Everest on one leg, or door-knocked for the Red Shield Appeal in the western suburbs.

It was unusual because Mum didn't get involved with the parent groups or alumni much at our other schools. She did when we were in primary school, but then I think she got burnt because neither Will nor I was the Dux, or in the top ten. We didn't get any sporting colours either, or even one of those courtesy awards they give to suck-ups. At Finsbury though, that stuff didn't seem to matter. Getting in was the important bit.

At the time, Tanner, Jasmina and I had a friend called Sapphire. She said she couldn't come to the fundraiser because she was working that weekend, and we all looked at each other because none of us worked. We might go into our parents' work and play around with the photocopier and flirt with office boys, but that's not really the same as . . . well, most jobs anyway.

So when the caterers came to set up their kitchen in our cabana, I was so horrified, because there was Sapph in an apron and a black-and-white chequered hat. She obviously didn't know that it was my house either. We tried to make a joke of it. It was embarrassing, because I wasn't going to offer to help unless I was going to get paid for it, and she couldn't stop working and just hang out, so basically I had to sit there and watch her working until the others arrived. When Sapph came around with the trays, we'd talk about everything except how Sapph was serving us as if she was our slave, but after a while I noticed Tanner holding out her glass for Sapph to fill. Tanner and Jasmina never said anything, but from then on at school they would do stuff like hand Sapph their rubbish and say, 'Be a doll and clear this away, would you, Sapph?'

Nice.

Anyway, back to my list.

Number three. In year five I was asked to represent my school at a creative arts day. It was exciting because I didn't have to wear my school uniform so I wore my jeans and my favourite t-shirt at the time, which said, 'thumb-wrestling champion'. Is thumb-wrestling macho? I thought it was a unisex sport, like equestrian, except much cheaper.

I didn't know anyone else there so I kept quiet and sat by myself. At little lunch a girl came over and sat next to me. She was weird, teasing me and smiling all the time, and then she said her friend had sent her over to tell me that I was cute.

So I asked who the friend was, and she pointed to a girl. She was grinning and giggling with her friends, which was weird, but then I realised that they thought I was a boy.

I was so embarrassed. I could have pretended to be a boy for the rest of the day (although I still wouldn't have gone out with her), but the teacher kept saying my name.

Jenna-Belle is not a boy's name. There was no mistaking it – even in this day and age when most parents give their kids a surname for a first name, and then hyphenate their two last names, so every kid in the class sounds like a firm of chartered accountants.

Number two. I made a joke about hairy nipples. I don't know why. I thought it would be funny. Declan would have laughed. Anyway, Jasmina said, 'Women can't have hairy nipples.'

Jasmina is always spoiling good jokes because she can't suspend her disbelief. That could be because her life is like bad reality TV.

I said, 'Yes, they can.'

Then she said, 'How do you know?'

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

Penelope Sullivan was only at our place for about three weeks and yet I know that she has hairy nipples, because one time I was waiting outside the bathroom, as per usual, and she was wrapping her towel around herself as she opened the door, and I got a glimpse of fuzz. Another time she was getting changed in her room with the door open. She swung the mirrored door of her wardrobe as I was coming down the hallway, and for a second she was reflected – all naked, pallid and podgy with unfortunate hairy parts.

Accidentally seeing people naked is part of sharing a house with them, but I couldn't say the word 'accidentally' because I had discovered that 'accidentally' at this school was short for 'accidentally on purpose'. As in, I 'accidentally' bought these chips while I was at the canteen (because, of course, nobody at Finsbury eats carbs).

I couldn't say, 'I accidentally saw Penelope Sullivan's hairy nipples,' so in the space where I was searching for a word that actually meant accidentally in this company, Jasmina Fitzgibbon raised her eyebrow.

I was all ready to say, 'Oh no, it's not me! I don't have hairy nipples,' but that reeks of the old 'the lady protests too much, methinks', so I let it go. We all sat there staring out into the quad until eventually the conversation moved on to other things.

I thought I'd got away with it, but then two days later I walked into French class and someone had written on the board:

Jenna-Belle a les mamelons velus.

Classy. I had to admire it.

By chance. Unexpectedly. Unintentionally. These are all words that would have prevented this extremely embarrassing incident.

Number one . . . Actually I'm not ready to talk about that yet. It's still a bit raw.

At school I was called into the bursar's office. He said that he'd sent letters home and had been trying to phone my mother. He'd asked her to come in today, but she hadn't returned any of his calls. He really wanted her to attend this meeting because – unfortunately, regretfully – he was sad to have to tell me that they hadn't received any payment for my tuition, even after they had been generous enough to negotiate a payment plan.

'You're going to have to talk to my mum about that,' I mumbled. What exactly was he expecting me to do about it? I didn't even get pocket money any more.

The bursar folded his hands on his desk and nodded. Outside in the office I could hear fingers tapping on keyboards, cheery receptionists taking telephone calls and a photocopy machine going ker-chunk, ker-chunk, ker-chunk. I hoped he was going to say something soon because he was freaking me out.

I was going red, and then I was embarrassed because I was red. It wasn't up there with being mistaken for a boy, or the hairy nipples business, but at the same time I was mad that he was making me suffer. This was something I didn't have any control over, and frankly, if I had a choice between meals and tuition at The Finsbury School, I'd pick meals.

Eventually he spoke and I watched my folded hands in my lap. The bursar really hoped that my parents could come up with some way to resolve this soon, because I was a valuable member of the school community, and he was worried that too much time away would mean that I would lose touch with the social circles in which I was moving – such a nice group of girls. Nice group of girls? He should ask Sapph how nice they are. She's developed a rather nasty stress-related case of eczema, which can't be good for her career in hospitality. Social cohesion, the bursar reckoned, contributed positively to academic success – an area in which I could use some help.

Okay, so now I'm povvo and dumb.

See, this was why my mum needed to be there. She would have buffered the bursar's comment by telling me I had great posture, or outstanding hand-eye coordination.

'You're kicking me out?' I asked.

'Jenna-Belle, please understand that you are welcome to return just as soon as your parents resume the payment plan.'

The idea of not going to school appealed, but at the same time it sent a fluttery bird feeling around my neck. School is all I've ever known. Not going to school could be like the Christmas holidays, but even then, I get a bit bored at the end of them and look forward to going back to school. Besides, I think it's the law. The police might force me to go to a public school. I'll probably get stabbed three times and be on crack by lunchtime. They might as well take me straight to jail.

'Maybe you have an uncle, or grandparents, who would be willing to cover your tuition for the interim?'

It's a bit late for that. My mum is an only child and I'm pretty sure all the uncles on my dad's side have been hit up already. I tried ringing each of them when Dad first disappeared and they were not just blasé, but plainly unsympathetic to my plight, which was a lesson to me in not dissing your relatives.

One day, when I'm an A-lister and they want to invite me to their parties, or introduce me to their friends, I'll be all, I'm sorry, do we know each other?

Back in my classroom, Tanner asked what I was called into the office about and I didn't know what to say. Jasmina said, 'Is it because your family is . . .' She and Tanner exchanged a glance. '. . . vintage, since your dad left?'

My guts sank into my stupid, ugly, scuffed, old shoes, because I'd been thinking I was getting away with it.

Recently they've been doing this thing where they stop talking when I come into the room. But I remember them doing it to Sapph and they never really were talking about her, they just wanted to make her paranoid, so whenever they did it to me I'd just pretend that they were organising a surprise party for me. It's not working now though.

Well, I thought to myself, at least I don't ever have to come back here again.

When I arrived home I gave Mum the letter and she read it, frowning. She raked her hair a few times and then she handed it back to me. I didn't want her to hand it back to me. I wanted her to take it and deal with it. When she handed the letter back she made it my problem.

Her suggestion: 'Go anyway. It's not like they're going to march you out the gates.'

'Mum!'

'You listen to me,' she said, finger waggling. 'When you have The Finsbury School written on your résumé certain doors will open to you that otherwise would not. You will rub shoulders in the playground with people who will be useful to you later on in life.'

Yes, they'll remember me as the girl with the scuffed shoes and hairy nipples.

'You'll thank me, Jenna-Belle. Besides, looking so lovely in that uniform out there in the community is good for your self-esteem.'

'What would be good for my self-esteem,' I said calmly, holding the letter out, 'would be having an adult deal with the adult things.'

She huffed twice and then she spluttered, 'Well, I can't deal with it now, okay? I just can't. I'm doing the best I can!' Then she ran to her room and slammed the door.

I'd read in her What to Expect When You're Expecting book that rapid mood swings, along with flatulence, are commonplace, but now I'm left standing in the kitchen with the letter in my hand.

Willem wandered through the kitchen and snatched it out of my fingers.

'Oh man, you got kicked out? Seriously? We had this talk at my school but they said my marks were good enough that they'd give me a scholarship, and I haven't even being doing that well, so you must really suck!' Then he poked his tongue out.

My brother wears boots, fatigues, tight black t-shirts, and plays paintball with his friends. He says 'oh-seven-hundred' and thinks that makes him Jason Bourne. I've watched all those movies and Matt Damon never pokes his tongue out.

'Shut your face,' I said.

It turns out Mum was wrong. They can march you out the gates.

I crept back into school the next morning, and cruised the halls until the bell rang for rollcall. I debated whether or not to go. I went. The first class was maths. I sat in my usual seat. I was worried about what to say to Tanner and Jasmina, but as it turns out, I didn't have to worry about that.

The deputy principal came to the door of the classroom with the roll in his hand and asked to see me. He didn't even shut the door, so when he told me off in the corridor everyone could hear. He said, 'I understand the bursar made it quite clear to you that you must pay in order to attend this school.'

I didn't say anything.

'Now get your bag, I'm calling your mother to come and collect you.'

When I went in to collect my stuff from my desk I didn't look up, I just let my hair swing over my face, but I could feel them all watching. They may as well have been chanting, Vintage! Vintage! Vintage!

My mother still wasn't taking any calls from the school, so they rang the house and someone agreed to collect me. I assumed it would be Annie from the granny flat, who's listed as an alternative responsible adult on my file, but it wasn't, it was Bryce Cole. You know, the guy who moved in ten minutes ago.

I would have rung my mum from the payphone at school, but I didn't have any money and I was scared to ask the bursar or the deputy for change. It would be a tad indelicate.

The choice was possibly being murdered and dismembered by Bryce Cole, or staying at school and certainly being frowned upon by the bursar, the deputy and all the ladies in the front office for the whole day until the bus came, because they weren't going to let me back into class. No learning for free at The Finsbury School. They probably wouldn't let me catch the bus either. Not that I wanted to anyway. Pretty much all the girls at Finsbury are bitchy brats like Tanner and Jasmina.

So I picked potential dismemberment. Besides, if Bryce Cole really wanted to murder me, he could do that at home. I hopped in the car with Bryce Cole, and instead of taking me home he took me to the racetrack.

3
PUNTING

The guy at the gate tells me that I have to stay in the immediate vicinity of my guardian, and then we enter a den of vice and iniquity.

You see ads for the races with all the women wearing chic designer dresses and big hats, waving around glasses of champagne and smiling through the most bleached teeth imaginable, but then in the movies the races are always really dodgy and run by gangsters and tax cheats, kind of like one of the balls at the Fitzgibbons'. So I was expecting it to be more evil and foreboding. I thought there would be swaggering blokes in suits spouting double entendres, or just single entendres – like on The Sopranos. And maybe pole dancers. There are always pole dancers in the cop shows.

It's not like that, though.

Running along one wall is a bar. Behind it is a barmaid, but she's very much dressed, in a white shirt, waistcoat and bow tie. She stacks beer glasses on a tray.

In the middle of the room there are high, round tables surrounded by stools. Four blokes, each sitting at his own table, rustle through newspapers, or consult slips of paper. Two of them nod to Bryce Cole as he saunters across the room, but nobody says anything.

Tanner Hamrick-Gough talks about her parents' yacht club all the time. She goes on as though it's really cool to be in a bar, and that all these guys hit on her all the time, but I wouldn't want any of these guys to hit on me.

It's not like I haven't been in a bar before. We go overseas and stay in a resort at least once a year, and they always have cocktail bars, but they do lame stuff like the macarena, or have talent quests, or play bingo. They pretty much do the same stuff in the bar as they do in the kids' club.

Along the opposite wall there's a bank of televisions each showing races – mostly horses, a few dogs, and highlights from a boxing match.

In the far corner there's a betting booth. Another older woman sits inside it, staring into space. There's a board above her with red pixelated text and numbers scrolling across it, like the session times at the movies, except I don't understand what any of it means.

On the other wall there's a set of fold-out doors that open onto a lawn area. A few men stand out there smoking. The lawn slopes away and beyond a fence is the track itself.

Nobody notices me at all.

Bryce Cole buys me a hot dog and a soft drink, and a beer for himself, and then he perches on a stool in the middle of the room, flicking through his race guide. He jots some notes in a small pad he pulled from his breast pocket.

I eat my hot dog, sip my drink and wait. So far he hasn't spoken a single word, other than 'hey' when I got in the passenger side of his car, but it's not as though I'm in trouble. It's more as if he's thinking about something else. I would have thought that he'd at least ask if I was sick, or why I was being sent home, but I don't think he cares. It's almost as though he's forgotten I'm here.

I wonder what's happening at school – whether everyone is talking about me being kicked out. People must get kicked out for not paying all the time, except I can't remember seeing it.

Last year a girl in the year below us left the school abruptly. She was whisked off in the middle of the day and two nights later they said on the news that her father had embezzled millions and fled the country. A few years ago, before I started at Finsbury, a girl left because her dad was the minister for education and the media went nuts about him not supporting public schools. There were photographers at the gates taking pictures of her being picked up in a government car.

Another girl turned out to be some daggy 1980s popstar's love child, not that it had anything to do with leaving the school, but people did talk about it, and it was in the newspaper. There are plenty of daughters of famous people at Finsbury.

My family doesn't rate gossip at that level. We're not even having a spectacular meltdown – just a slow leak, which we're all pretending isn't happening – but that isn't going to shield me from Finsbury narkiness.

After an hour has passed Bryce Cole slaps the race guide on the table in front of me.

'Who do you like in race one?'

I pick up the guide, flick to the page entitled 'Race One', and then read the list of names. It seems to me that there are three types of horse names: if people want you to think their horse is going to win, they call it something like 'Ima Winner'; if they have more confidence that it'll win despite the name, they put together a random selection of words; and in the last category they're so confident, or have so many horses, that they just shove together a series of letters in any order.

Makybe Diva. Phar Lap.

I select one that looks like random words.

'Esca's Foxtrotter.'

'How much?' he asks.

We stare at each other.

'How much money do you want to put on her?' he qualifies.

'Ten dollars?'

'On the nose?'

Then I nod, because I have no idea what that means and he's staring at me as though it should be obvious.

Bryce Cole stands at the door for a moment, hands on hips, taking in the fresh air, and then heads over to the betting booth. When he comes back he hands me a slip of paper with my horse's name on it.

By some secret signal, all the blokes move across to a spot in the corner where they can see the racetrack and the telly simultaneously. There's a click through the speakers mounted on the wall as a microphone is switched on. In the distance I can see the horses loading into the starting gates. It's much clearer on the television. A few men bundle one of the stragglers in. Then the race caller starts through the speakers, just like they do on the television.

'Set. Racing. My Delight is slow out of the gates, but Pageantry makes a solid start. Esca's Foxtrotter moves out wide. Berry Blessing stretches into the lead early, followed by Hidylow. Talking Magic is back on the rail. They're peeling off – Pageantry about mid-field. Berry Blessing drops back, followed by My Delight, and Esca's Foxtrotter is two lengths behind.'

The room has been silent, and then the man with ears like jug handles who's standing next to me yells, 'Go, you bastard!'

'Round the bend Pageantry, the showy chestnut, takes the lead, followed by My Delight and Esca's Foxtrotter.'

'Run, you bastard!' from Jughandles.

'. . . Berry Blessing bursts out wide and she's too good for them. Berry Blessing followed by Pageantry. My Delight and then Esca's Foxtrotter comes in fourth.'

I don't think you get any money for fourth.

Bryce Cole heads back to the booth, and when he turns away he stuffs a roll of notes into his breast pocket. Everything returns to quiet. The blokes shuffle papers. The barmaid wipes down the beer taps. Other fellows step outside for another smoke.

Maybe Jasmina or Tanner will ring me tonight to tell me what happened. I don't think so though, since they've been freezing me out like they did with Sapph.

Unless I turn out to be someone's love child. That would be tops. It would also explain why my dad left. Who was really big in 1994? Maybe Tex Perkins. That would be cool. It would be great if he had a studio in the house, and then all these famous musicians would come to our place all the time. John Mayer would be over one day and fall completely in love with me, and keep pestering me to marry him, and I would be like, John, just back off will you? You know Daniel Johns and I only just broke up.

Except Tex isn't really my mum's style. That guy who plays Niles Crane on Frasier would be more her cup of tea, but I think I read somewhere that he was gay. Actually, Declan's dad reminds me of Niles Crane a little bit.

I watch a harness race on the television. On another screen two presenters are talking about a drug scandal in Hong Kong. They introduce a vet who talks forever about different hormones and how long they last in the bloodstream. Bryce Cole seems to care. He's made a note in his little book.

'Who do you like in race two?' he asks me.

I peruse the list. Thinking of Berry Blessing, I'm looking for one that sounds like a yoghurt. There are none, so I pick one that sounds as though it should win.

'Mr Perfect.' How can I lose?

'Ten dollars on the nose?' he asks.

I nod again.

Mr Perfect comes in sixth of nine horses. There's another long interval where there's much talking on the television about the Hong Kong horse and the hormones. One of the presenters describes it as a 'tragedy', although from what I can gather the horse is still alive. It's not even sick – it's just not allowed to run in the race today. I guess tragedies are relative.

Races three and four, I lose again.

'Who do you like in race five?' Bryce Cole asks me.

I study the race guide for a moment and then I hand it back to him. 'Who would you pick?'

He rubs his chin. 'I'd put my money on Luxury Kasten. Or maybe Travlin.'

'Why?'

He points to the page. 'This figure here shows you how many starts the horse has had, how many wins and places. You can see he's had six wins from eight starts, but that's not enough, because he might have beaten a goat in someone's backyard, so we look at this number, which shows how much money they've won. You can see he's won some dollars. Here are the track conditions in which he's won. Horses favour different conditions. There's the trainer's name. You get to know who's who after a while. Then you look at who's riding him. Luxury Kasten has won more races in the past, but this guy riding Travlin is a very experienced jockey.'

I nod, feeling stupid for having only looked at their names before.

'So we've picked number three and number five. Now we go and have a look at them.' Bryce Cole leads me across to the lawn, where we can see the horses parading at the front of the building. 'Have a good hard look at them and tell me which horse wants to run today.'

I stare at them. They're all brown, skinny and leggy.

'They all look the same.'

'Are you sure?' he asks me.

I narrow my eyes, staring at them. I'm waiting for one of them to call me telepathically – to say, 'Pick me! Pick me!' They don't, but then Travlin turns his head my way. He's not looking at me exactly, but it's a sign.

'Number five,' I say decisively.

'On the nose?' Bryce Cole asks.

'What does that mean?'

'That means you're betting that it will win.'

I chew on my lip. 'You mean you can bet that they'll lose?'

Bryce Cole laughs. 'No, you can bet that they'll either win or get a place, or you can bet that they'll get a place, but not win. Then there are quinellas, exactas, or trifectas, but . . . How about you bet win or place? That's anywhere in the top three.'

'Okay,' I say.

'Rightio.' Bryce Cole leaves me on the lawn. As the horses canter towards the starting gates I go back inside. Bryce Cole buys me another drink, and I hear him order a plate of chips for us to share.

Perhaps Sapph will ring me, now that I'm the new outcast. I'm sure she'll have heard it in the corridors. She won't ring me, though. I should have made more of an effort with her after the fundraiser incident. I don't even know why I didn't. I never had a problem with her working. Besides, I bet she would have had the chance to meet lots of cool people at all those A-list parties.

'Why do I even care about any of those girls?' I say out loud. 'Finsbury is so completely over.'

Bryce Cole glances across the table at me, but he doesn't ask. He stares at the television again.

All the blokes move over to the magic spot.

'How do they know to do that?' I ask.

Bryce Cole points to the red scrolling sign above the betting booth. It blinks:

Race 5 <1 minute

Soon they're racing and I lean forward, watching the television with new interest. Jughandles is bellowing again, but Bryce Cole stays in his seat calmly eating his chips.

'Waugh's Pride is well back there. Travlin hugs the rail, and Scouts Honour is beside him. Kara Spear is wider, Luxury Kasten a narrow leader. Great finish coming up, it's Luxury Kasten and Travlin – but Travlin leads them. It's number five, Travlin.'

'We won!' I say, jumping up and down. I'm tugging on Bryce Cole's sleeve. 'We won!'

Bryce Cole is grinning at me. He wanders over to the booth and when he comes back he peeks over his shoulder and then hands me two twenty-dollar notes.

'I won forty bucks?' I ask, slipping it into my uniform pocket.

'You won eighty, but you owed me forty for the first four races.'

'Really? That's fantastic!' I'm smiling so much my face is going to crack. 'How much did you win?'

'About seven hundred,' he says, popping in another chip.

My jaw drops. 'No kidding! How much have you won all up today?'

He shrugs. 'Maybe four thousand.'

Of course, what I didn't ask was how much he'd lost.

4
THE
C-WORD

We're having another garage sale. Declan is sitting on a lawn chair next to me with his hat over his face. The lawn chairs are for sale. I'm under a market umbrella – also for sale.

I had no idea just how much stuff we had until we started putting it out on the lawn for people to pore over. The cupboard in the hallway was packed with things I didn't even know we owned. Mostly bits and pieces Mum bought on sale – linen, kitchen appliances, stationery – all still in their boxes. The kitchen cupboards were full of knick-knacks – scented candles, coasters, vases, jigsaw puzzles, picture frames – the sort of stuff you receive as gifts, but never use, or buy for other people but never get around to giving. Selling that stuff was easy. In fact, after the first garage sale I thought our house was better – lighter, fresher.

Then with the second garage sale I chose stuff that I liked, but probably wouldn't use again. Books that I'd had for ages but hadn't read, equipment for sports I'd attempted and then abandoned, clothes that didn't really suit me, computer games that we don't play any more. Mum put out all the prints she had on the walls, old pots and pans, and our pool toys.

The third one was harder. Mum made me put out all my books, all my bears except for Albert, and all our toys that had been in boxes in the garage.

Mum sold the indoor plants and put out all of her CDs. She'd already sold the stereo on eBay, along with Will's Wii, Dad's squash racquets and our iPods. She can't sell stuff on eBay any more because our ISP has been cancelled.

I miss email, but mostly I miss Messenger. Facebook too. That was my standard thing when I got home from school. I would fire up my lappy and just lie on my bed and chat, or look at people's photos, and in the background I would flick through the channels on my telly, which lived on a shelf in my wardrobe. Mostly I would just leave it on E or Fashion TV.

Mum's already swapped the bar fridge for a secondhand cot. It stands there in the middle of one of the spare rooms – just a cot by itself. When I looked at it closely I could see little teeth marks on the rails.

It's so weird to think there'll be a baby. I don't think I've ever seen one up close. I hope she doesn't expect me to babysit.

Mum put most of Dad's clothes out too, and what didn't sell in the first garage sale she took to Vinnies. I didn't like the way she did that – kind of unspoken and discreet, as though he's dead. I managed to keep one of his t-shirts – an old, daggy one with holes around the collar and cuffs that he used to wear when he was working in the backyard. I stuffed it in the back of my cupboard.

This time we've put out just about everything we can't eat, or aren't wearing right at this second. It's as if we're living in this bizarre limbo-land, like when you're moving house and you don't know where anything is and you're camping in your own house, except I do know where all my stuff is. It's at other people's places. I realise I should be upset about it, but I keep expecting that at any minute Mum will take us shopping and we can get new stuff.

We used to do that a lot. Mum and I would head into the city and shop while Dad and Will went out skydiving or making rafts by weaving reeds and earnestness together, or whatever Will's latest survival project was.

She also used to take me to her day spa, where we'd have a hot stone massage, a facial and a manicure. We haven't done that for a long time. Come to think of it, Mum hasn't been around much – even on weekends. She's always working, and when she's home she's selling things, or ignoring the piles of bills on the kitchen bench. Sometimes she cries.

There are two couples here already, arms folded, picking their way through our stuff. One fellow is flicking through the box of CDs. A lady drives up our street and slows as she rounds the cul de sac, deciding if our bits and pieces are worth getting out of the car to look at. Apparently not.

So far we've sold a Dinnigan dress of my mother's for eighteen dollars and a vacuum cleaner for fifteen dollars, and haggled over a stick blender. I wanted seven dollars, but the neighbour from four doors down only wanted to pay three-fifty. Annie from the granny flat bought a pinch pot I made in year seven for fifty cents.

An older woman stares intently at a canvas my brother and I painted when I was about three. She's hoping it will be by someone famous and we won't know how valuable it is, but in the end she decides it really is just a finger painting. There's been some interest in our clothes dryer and my funky silver pedestal fan, but so far, no takers.

It's pretty humiliating. I'm glad Declan is with me.

'So three days this week I put on my school uniform, and then after Mum went to work, Bryce Cole and I went to the track. Twice it was gallopers and the other time we went to the trots. So far I'm about even, but he's promised to teach me how to do a quinella next time. Do you have any idea how much you get if you win that? It's amazing! I don't understand why there aren't more people doing it.'

Declan jiggles his knee. 'I think I have cancer.'

'Don't use the C-word, it's bad luck.'

'That's not the C-word,' he snorts.

I keep my eye on two young boys who've just arrived on bikes. They're looking furtive. 'Why do you think you have cancer?'

He shifts in his seat. 'I have a dry mouth. I'm thirsty all the time. I'm so tired.'

'Maybe you don't drink enough water? It could be hormones. It's a boy thing. Will never gets out of bed before noon,' I counter.

'Will sleeps late because he's up all night arguing online.'

This from a boy who has a sign on his bedroom door that says: Can't talk now. Someone on the internet is wrong.

'We don't even have the net any more. And he wasn't arguing, just shooting stuff,' I say.

'I've lost five kilos,' he continues. 'I get blurred vision. I could be going blind. Do you have any idea how scary that is? What if I had a car accident?'

'You don't drive yet,' I say. 'You could get your eyes tested.'

I met Declan the day we moved in. The moving truck was parked outside, we'd just stepped out of the car with the goldfish in a bucket and the first words he said to me were, 'I'm dying.' I believed him! I even got teary. He was so pale and thin with dark all around his eyes – but when I looked more closely at him later I discovered it was all make-up.

Declan wears foundation. He calls it his 'lotion'. He buys the really expensive men's range stuff at the Clinique counter in Myer, which is just dumb because if he's going to be non-gender specific as a statement, then he should be happy to call it foundation and just buy the cheap stuff at Coles.

'Get me a drink, will you?' I ask.

He glares. 'I have cancer and you don't even care.'

'We don't have anything to drink at our place. And I have to watch those little kids stealing our stuff.' I point to the boys, who have their backs to me. One peeks over his shoulder.

'Oi!' I shout, standing. They jump on their bikes and pedal furiously. I can't tell what they've stolen. I guess it doesn't matter. I don't even know what we have left any more.

'If Bryce Cole makes so much money betting on horses then how come he hasn't got his own house?' Declan asks.

I don't know the answer. I look up and see Declan's mum staring at us from her lounge room.

'Your mother so hates me,' I observe.

Declan's mother is twitchy and insane. I don't think it's fair that she hates me, so I do my best to add to her insanity by randomly tilting the pictures on the wall, or de-alphabetising her books-by-the-metre when she's not looking.

Declan sees her too. He stands up. 'That's it. Let's drink beer in the roof.'

Annie from the granny flat agrees to take over the garage sale.

Sometimes Declan and I sneak into my roof space and drink his dad's beer. We don't like beer, so we have a few sips and then leave the rest. We're sure that if we try hard enough we can learn to like it, and then we'd be cool at parties, if ever anyone invited us to one and we needed to drink beer.

There are about fifty open beers in our roof space. We've lined them up in the lowest part so we don't accidentally knock them over (really accidentally – not Finsbury accidentally).

Declan and I sit there in the dark on boogie boards we've balanced over the beams. If Mum knew they were up here she'd make us drag them down and sell them.

'Try imagining that it's lemonade,' Declan suggests.

I close my eyes and take a big gulp. The beer Declan has brought today is light and very cold, but still sour. 'It's okay,' I say. 'What about if we put cordial in it?'

'We can't take cordial to the party,' Declan says. 'That would not be cool.'

'We could bring it in a hip flask.'

Declan holds his nose and drains the bottle. He places it on a new beam – the empty bottle beam. 'It's not so bad. Now your turn.'

Declan holds my nose for me, and I squeeze my eyes shut, imagining 7Up. I scull as much as I can, but only get halfway. Then I swallow wrong and start coughing. I'm trying to cough quietly because no one is supposed to know we're up here. In the semi-gloom I can see Declan shaking his head.

'Do we have to learn how to drink beer?' I complain. 'No one is going to invite me to any parties. Not any more.'

'You could be my date.'

I laugh. 'No one is inviting you to any parties either.'

He doesn't answer and I feel bad. Declan never talks about any of the kids from his school – not anyone specific. When I picture him at school I imagine him at the edge of a group of guys who let him hang around because his mum volunteers at the canteen and can get them free stuff. But he hardly ever goes to school. He avoids it, so it could be worse than that.

In my mind's eye I can imagine other boys challenging him to fight, knowing he'll back down, but doing it just to show him up. He hasn't said anything. It's just a feeling I get – like, why did he choose to be friends with me instead of Willem?

We sit silently until my beer goes warm.

'Declan, are you really sick?'

He's tugging at his shoelaces. I can't see his expression.

'It might not be cancer exactly, but it's something. Nobody believes me.'

'I believe you,' I say.

He scoots over on his boogie board and kisses me on the cheek. 'Finish your beer, Jenna-Belle.'

5
POLITE

The fee for dinner at Declan's is having to eat with his parents. Most of the time I can convince him to make me a toasted sandwich before they have their sit-down meal, but sometimes Declan thinks if he has to suffer, I do too.

Declan's mum really uses all those knick-knacky domestic devices. She hands out paper serviettes in a little paper serviette dispenser and has condiments in a special silver condiment rack that spins. She has matching coasters and placemats. She floats camellia flowers and candles in a decorative bowl in the middle of the table. Declan's mum prepares each meal as though she's being judged in the North Shore Mother of the Year award.

She serves the meal on platters as though it's Christmas time. First she brings around the appetisers – figs wrapped in crispy prosciutto. When we each take one she waits for us to tell her how much they rock.

Then she sets down the main meal – separate platters of preserved lemon veal cutlets, minted broad beans and brown butter mash – and serves Declan's dad. She sits down and instead of eating she twists and fidgets at the jewellery on her wrists and fingers as though they're shackles. My mother used to do that with her jewellery when she was anxious – before she sold it all.

Sometimes when I catch Declan's mum out of the corner of my eye I think she looks a bit like my mother except ten years older. It's not even her features, it's more the way she carries herself – as if you could balance a pineapple on the top of her head and it wouldn't fall off. It would look silly, but everyone would be too polite to ask about it.

Thinking of Declan's mum brings something else embarrassing to mind. There was this one time – way back when we first moved in – when I came home from school and neither of my parents were home. They'd given Willem the key, because he was supposed to be the mature one, except he had gone to a friend's house, but still I knocked on the door, just in case. Nobody answered, and then I went around the back and knocked on that door. Still no one home.

There was no way to break in because we have grilles on the windows and a super security system to protect all those kitchen appliances and jigsaw puzzles I was talking about, plus all the stuff my parents bought five years interest free – most of which Mum has since sold, even though we haven't paid for it. But anyway, I was so mad that they'd given Will the key and I was locked out for two whole hours.

I didn't have anything to do. So I started growling and throwing myself against the back door like they do in the cop shows, and screaming and crying.

I did that for ages and then from behind me Declan's mum says, really quietly, 'I don't think they're home.' And then she just stood there watching me be completely humiliated. As if I'd be throwing a tantrum like a three-year-old if I thought someone was watching.

That's the way she always looks at me, all the time – as if she's caught me doing something weird in private, which is another reason she reminds me of my mother. There was this thing about the laundry, and my mum.

Declan's dad is a proper North Shore dad. He drinks designer beer, plays golf and is some kind of hot shot executive. Over dinner he asks Declan about school. He wants to know about sport and what subjects Declan is going to choose for next year.

He encourages Declan to do mock trials, and play cricket. He wants Declan to be a blokey old-boy. It's strange because he's not a big, blokey man either. He always suggests that Declan talk to Will about joining the cadets. He should swap sons with my parents. Declan is never going to join cadets. He's not going to do mock trials, even though he loves arguing. Declan is not a joiner.

It's painful that they don't know Declan at all. It's painful because they're not real. Every conversation is like the courteous banter you have with someone you've just met and will never see again. It's a bus stop conversation. They look like a family, but it's as though they've just come together to do an advertisement for the tableware.

Usually I just keep my head down and eat as much as I can without stretching the bounds of neighbourly courtesy.

Declan's dad doesn't notice that his wife hates me. Usually he doesn't seem to notice me at all. Tonight, however, he suddenly turns his attention to me. 'How are you doing at school, Jenna-Belle?'

My mouth opens and closes like a goldfish's. Declan smirks. Has he dobbed? Is this a test? What does he know?

'To tell you the truth, I think I could do better,' I tell him, sneaking my hand across the table to grab another dinner roll.

'That's the spirit!' Declan's dad saws at his veal.

'It would be "the spirit" if Jenna-Belle vowed to do better. Technically she's only confessing to being lazy,' Declan says.

I mouth shut your face at him and slip the roll into my pocket.

Declan's dad hasn't finished drilling me. 'I've noticed you have a new house guest. Is this fellow a friend of your mother's?'

Declan's mum and dad are both staring at me, waiting for an answer as though it's really important. Declan's mum rests her cutlery on the edge of her plate and places her fingers softly on the edge of the table, as if it's a piano. She's sitting really straight.

I think he's asking if Mum is sleeping with Bryce Cole. I don't really know how to answer, because I'm not sure if we're pretending that the people who rent our rooms are guests. I don't know why he's asking me anyway. Surely he can ask Mum in the car on the way to work?

Now I'm wondering if the car-pooling must be really awkward for them both, because when we first moved in, Declan's parents and my parents had drinks and a few barbecues, and the occasional card game. They seemed to get along. And then all of a sudden they stopped the socialising. But the travelling to work together didn't stop. Could it be that my mum and Declan's dad have been driving to work together all this time secretly wishing to get out of the arrangement, but too polite to say so? Is the car-pooling the pineapple on everybody's heads?

'He's um . . .'

What can I say to Declan's mum and dad about Bryce Cole?

'I don't know much about him,' I reply.

6
SHORT
ODDS

It's Monday and Bryce Cole and I are at the track. It's a nice day, but so far we're the only ones here. I have a soggy caesar salad and Bryce Cole has a steak sandwich.

'Why don't you have your own house? How come you rent a room?'

'Why do you rent one out?' he counters.

I'm sipping post-mix lemonade through a straw. 'It's because interest rates went up. We were fine before that. Dad says it's always worse under Labor. He said last time interest rates were seventeen per cent.'

Now that I think of it, that might have been the very last thing I remember my dad saying before he left. We were out at dinner. We still went out for dinner together once a week. There was a restaurant down the road called Zazzoom, with bamboo in pots, brown walls, white tablecloths, and timber venetians. They were playing the same music that you get in a day spa – Portishead on Prozac. They served the meals with a kind of hushed flourish, as though it was a religious experience.

Willem had brought one of his friends from school, and I remember thinking 'football scholarship', because he was bulky and he had no table manners. He kept picking steak out of his teeth and pointing with his fork.

A couple that Dad knew from golf came over to the table and they were talking about politics. That's the only conversation I remember from that night. Dad and Mum weren't talking much and I thought it was because they were embarrassed about Will's friend.

To tell you the truth it actually took me a few days to realise that Dad had left. When you live in a monster house and everyone has their own space with their own stuff in it, and you eat when you want to instead of eating together, you can go for a few days without seeing each other. Also, when I asked 'where's Dad?', Mum responded with something cagey and distracted, but she had been cagey and distracted for months, so that was nothing new. She stopped going to yoga. She hadn't seen or even mentioned any of her friends for ages. Then I overheard Will asking too, and she said the 'gone to the country' thing.

Then Will got shirty. 'Where in the country? Why didn't he ask me? I love the country. I could have gone too. Why wasn't I allowed to go?'

Will has a friend at school whose parents have a macadamia plantation and sometimes Will and his friend go there to play soldiers.

'You don't like the country, you just like shooting stuff,' I said.

Will's face went red, mostly because he told me in confidence about them shooting bunnies, and he knew Mum would be horrified. 'I do not! Shut your face, Jenna-Belle. Were you there? No, you weren't, so what would you know?'

Will had every right to be mad because he does love the country, and he genuinely would have wanted to go there with Dad. I was just being a pest, because it's my job as a younger sibling to prepare him for the rigours of the real world. And by the time we'd finished arguing Mum had left the room.

Bryce Cole watches the television for a while. 'I had a house when interest rates were seventeen per cent.'

'Is that why you lost it? Because of Labor?'

Bryce Cole turns to me. 'I paid forty-five thousand for my house. How much did your parents pay for yours?'

I shrug.

'You're the maths whiz,' he says. 'What's seventeen per cent on forty-five thousand compared to seven per cent on a million and whatever?'

I've reached the bottom of my glass, so I tip the ice into my mouth and wonder why he thinks I'm a maths whiz.

Today is the first day we've actually talked about anything and Bryce Cole seems kind of shitty. I won't ask him anything again.

I wonder if it's because I've mentioned my dad. Usually Bryce Cole watches the screens and places his bets, and we don't talk about anything at all. I like that. Most adults think they need to fill any silences by giving you advice.

I stopped going to my dad for advice when I was about three, because he has a scientific brain and he does this thing where he tries to find a solution even before you've finished telling him what the problem is. It drives me mental. Most of the time you just want someone to listen to the whole thing, because after you have said it out loud, you usually know what the solution is. Plus my dad wants me to have made decisions about stuff like my career already so that he can tell me to do something different. Annie from the granny flat is an advice champ too – even better than Dad. She lives in the granny flat to save money so that she can go to Cambodia once a year and build huts for people. That sounds generous and worthy, but really she just likes telling people what to do and the Cambodians have to be polite about it, or they don't get their hut.

Annie's place wasn't always a granny flat. It used to be a cabana next to the pool. It had a sink and a bench around the barbecue, so it really wasn't that difficult to turn it into a proper kitchen. And there was a little bathroom as well. Mum was worried about someone coming in and running up the bills, so it has its own power and phone lines. I think it's probably illegal, but it makes quite a nice granny flat.

When she first arrived I thought Annie and Mum were going to be good friends, but it only took a week of Annie telling Mum how to run her life for Mum to get sick of it, and about the same time for Annie to get tired of feeding us. They don't really like each other, but they cooperate to get things done – kind of like people who've been married for thirty years.

There must be some point in a marriage when you decide that it's just too hard to change. I wonder what the magic number is? I guess it didn't work like that for my mum and dad, though. They've been married for sixteen years. Willem is sixteen.

I wish someone would tell me what's going on. If they're breaking up for good then I could start getting used to that idea, but this limbo-land really sucks. And also I'm getting pretty mad at my dad, because he should be missing me, shouldn't he? He might be breaking up with Mum, but that doesn't mean he's leaving us too, does it? What did Will and I do wrong?

Bryce Cole teaches me how to place a quinella. I put twenty dollars on Waylayer and Play Nice in a maiden race. He said it was a good one to try because there are only six horses in it.

Soon the other regulars saunter in and take their tables. Jughandles heard me call him Jughandles and now he doesn't like me. He grumbled something about me not being at school and I told him I had chickenpox. He asked me where my spots were, and then we had this moment where he panicked while he waited for me to react as though he'd said something dirty to me. He's one of those jigsaw body-part, eye-flit men.

I can't have chickenpox forever, though. I'll have to ask Declan for a cool disease I could have. Meanwhile I have umbrage up my sleeve if Jughandles gives me grief.

'Set to go. Dedicated started well, but not as well as Waylayer. Roll'em is three away, they turn at the four-fifty. Dedicated has moved up quickly. Waylayer being tackled by Play Nice out wide.'

'Go, you bastards!' I yell.

'Gospel still at the back of the field and La L'Amour before him, Play Nice won't pick it up and Waylayer is money. It's Waylayer and Play Nice, Dedicated and Roll'em. La L'Amour and then Gospel finished at the tail of the field.'

'I won! I won! How much did I win?'

Bryce Cole shrugs. 'Hmm, let me see. Close to four hundred dollars.'

'Wow!' I'm jumping up and down.

He looks around nervously. It occurs to me that none of the others ever give away whether they won or lost. They shout during the race, but never afterwards. Also, the lady in the betting booth is staring at us and frowning.

'Sorry,' I whisper.

'I know it's exciting. Just keep it down, okay?' He walks away to collect our winnings. The betting booth lady has words with him. She's looking over at me. Bryce Cole nods.

When he comes back he's looking at the floor. 'She says I'm not allowed to place any more bets for you.'

'Just one more,' I say. 'Please? Not straight away. I'll wait till I see one that really wants to race.'

'Okay,' he says. 'Just look sad.'

I hang my head and Bryce Cole sends a thumbs-up to the lady in the booth. She scowls.

I wait until race six. I fill in the time trying to teach Bryce Cole a game that my family used to play called Joke Jeopardy, which is where you say the punch line and everyone else has to guess what the joke was. He's hopeless. He just says, 'I give up.' Even with the why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road ones, which are easy.

I wait almost all afternoon and then, when the betting booth lady is not looking, I scour the book. In race six there's a gelding that has won five out of six races and placed in the other race. A great jockey is riding. He's won over thirty thousand dollars, and he favours the conditions.

Instead of slouching on my stool with my head on the table I head out to watch the parade. My horse looks calm, but alert. He's shiny and fit. All the others look mad, slight, sweaty, or like old nags.

'Bee Shore. That's the one,' I tell Bryce Cole.

'The money's not good,' he murmurs. 'I don't like it, JB.'

'I want to put the whole four hundred on the nose. I have a feeling.' I'm grinning at him, with my best trust me grin.

I take the best spot, where I can see the television and the winning post. If I win I'll get over a thousand dollars. I don't even know where to begin spending it. Actually I do know. I'll get a new mobile phone, because, I mean, seriously! Who doesn't have a mobile phone? It's ridiculous.

'Bee Shore runs the favourite. They're away and racing. Milken Honey began well, but Pair A Dice retains the lead, and then Miss Dependable. Further back is I'm Willing and Boogi Woogi has dropped out. Pair A Dice leads by a head, Bee Shore's a little over a length away, Miss Dependable around third spot, followed by Milken Honey. They're running out to the bend.'

Jughandles roars in my ear. 'Run, you bastard!'

I'm stifling a roar myself. I glance over at the betting booth where the lady watches me. I yawn, but she looks away. Bryce Cole's lips are pursed.

'The leader is Bee Shore, followed by Pair A Dice, then Miss Dependable, and Milken Honey. Bee Shore still a narrow leader, Pair A Dice three wide. Miss Dependable looking for a way out. She's slipped through, but it's going to be Pair A Dice. Pair A Dice then Miss Dependable. Bee Shore runs in third.'

I'm staring at the television. I can't believe it! All the numbers were right. He should have won it easily. I don't understand how he could have not won, when he gave all the signs.

The blokes shuffle away from the magic spot and back to their seats. I feel a hand on my shoulder. It's Bryce Cole. 'Come on, kiddo.'

'Pair A Dice looked like a donkey,' I say. 'I had a feeling.'

Bryce Cole offers to buy me another soft drink.

'How could you let me put all that money on? Now I have nothing! It's not fair. You always win. Why didn't you stop me?'

'I don't always win,' he says.

On the way home we listen to the radio. Bryce Cole is rubbing the stubble on his chin and it's making a scratchy sound.

'That's how I lost my house,' he says. 'I was sure. I had a feeling. You can't be sure of anything, ever. The best you can hope for is really short odds.'

I think about my father and how he bet the whole lot on his empire.

7
NOTICE

Declan and I are in the alleyway between our houses.

'Can I feel your boob?' he asks, scooting closer.

'Why would you want to do that?'

'All the guys at school were talking about boobs today. I said I had felt yours, so now I need to do it so it will be true. I don't think it's properly a lie if I do it within twenty-four hours.' He hooks his arms around his knees.

'You want to feel my boob so you can tell your mates? Correction – they're not even your mates – just some guys. You want to feel my boob for people you don't even like! This is peer pressure. You're pressuring me into letting you exploit me sexually.'

He frowns. 'I'm not exploiting you sexually! I just want to have one little squeeze!' He puts his hands up in defeat. 'Fine! Forget it! I don't even want to any more. Make me a liar. It's not like it would hurt you. I thought we were better friends than this.'

'Declan! That's not fair!'

'Pllleeease? I'm just going to put my hand on it for two seconds.'

I squirm for a moment. 'Okay.'

Declan reaches for the hem of my shirt.

'Over clothes,' I say quickly.

He inches closer and then puts his hand on my breast – cups it. I'm looking in the other direction. Chairman Meow is washing himself on the back step. He's giving me a disapproving look. He thinks I'm a skank. Chairman Meow has never got over being given a joke name. He's an angry young cat.

It's been more than two seconds. 'How much longer?' I ask.

'Does it feel good?' Declan wants to know. 'Because one of the guys at school said that girls moan in ecstasy when you feel their boobs, and I've seen it on the internet.'

I shrug. 'It feels okay. I'm not in ecstasy though.'

'Why not?' he asks. He reaches out with the other hand.

I move away. 'You said one boob.'

'How come you didn't moan in ecstasy? Doesn't it turn you on?'

I sigh. 'Declan, you don't get it. If a girl really likes a boy then it doesn't matter what he does – whether it's feeling your boob, or when he says "pass the tomato sauce", you moan in ecstasy. When you say "pass the tomato sauce", it's all about the sauce.'

'Oh.'

'And as for those girls you've been looking at on the internet, you do understand they get paid to do that stuff, don't you? It's not real.'

We sit silently for a moment.

'How's the cancer going?'

'How's the gambling addiction?' he snaps back. He gets up and stalks down the alley.

'Declan,' I call after him.

'Shut up, Jenna-Belle. This could be the last time we see each other. Do you know that? I could die tonight and then think how sorry you'll be.'

'Why would I be sorry?' I call after him. 'I just granted your dying wish!'

The screen door slams behind him.

I go inside and stare into the empty fridge for a few minutes.

Bryce Cole wanders down the hallway. 'Fight with your boyfriend?' He grins at me.

I'm supposed to squeal and object, but instead I just curl my lip.

Declan has a crush on me, but it might just be because I'm convenient. He's not very experienced with girls. I tease him about that, but the truth is I don't know much either. I've always gone to girls' schools. It's like the beer thing. We're practising on each other, except I haven't told him, or he would dare me into doing stuff more often. Everybody pretends that girls aren't interested, but I'm probably as curious as Declan is – almost.

There was this boy who had a piano lesson after mine when I first started high school, and I would stand on the doorstep of the piano lady's house and we would flirt with each other. When I climbed in the car my mum would sigh and huff, all How come it took so long? Didn't you see me waiting here? because she's so passive-aggressive, but she was the one who wanted me to play the piano. So I gave piano boy the eye, and waited for him to ask me out, but he never did.

I do wonder about how far I should go with Declan, because I know I'm supposed to wait for that really special guy, but in all the movies there is always the hot, dangerous guy, and then the guy who's loved the girl all along, and he always ends up being the right one. So I could just skip the hot, dangerous guy part and be with Declan, who is literally the boy next door.

But then maybe it's a conspiracy, and all the chick flicks are written by a syndicate of guys like Declan on a mission to get chicks to be with them. Or alternatively, there's a secret syndicate of girls-next-door who want to keep all the hot, dangerous guys to themselves. Who knows?

Mum comes in and puts her house keys on the kitchen bench. She's flicking through the mail. She drops the unopened letters on the table one by one. I recognise the logos in the corners – Telstra, Energy Australia, David Jones, American Express, Sydney Water. She finds one that interests her and runs her thumb under the lip. She tosses it on the counter. It's her driver's licence renewal reminder. Her licence is out of date. She opens the last letter. While she's reading, she presses the button on the answering machine.

Beep. Hi Sue, this is Melanie from accounts receivable . . .

Mum presses fast-forward.

Beep. This is Jason calling about your Visa card statement . . .

Beep. It's Melanie again . . .

The phone cord is all tangled up beside the answering machine. Mum tries to untangle it, but it just gets more knotted, so she slams the handset back down and picks up the last letter.

'Beep. This is Mr Morris from The Finsbury School . . .

Mum's finger hovers over the fast-forward button.

I'd like to talk to you about a complaint we've received from the Australian Jockey Club. While Jenna-Belle is temporarily not a student of this school we would certainly appreciate her not attending gambling venues or bars in The Finsbury School uniform.

Jughandles! You bastard!

The Principal and I consider this a matter of great concern and urgency. My number is . . .

Mum presses fast-forward again and the machine emits a long beep – end of messages. She stares at me.

'They must have the wrong student,' I blurt.

She holds out the piece of paper. I'm not taking it – not this time.

'We've been sent a section fifty-seven two B of the Real Property Act. It says we have to repay our loan in full or vacate the property within thirty days. It's just a piece of paper that came through the post.' She stares at the page. 'I would have thought something like that would be on bright red paper, or that you'd have to sign for it. Something. You can't be ambushed like this in the normal mail.'

'They can't kick us out!' I tell her. 'What are they going to do? Flush us out with a SWAT team?'

'They send the sheriff,' Bryce Cole says.

I have a vision of Clint Eastwood on our lawn, eyes all squinty, picking his teeth with a paspalum stem. Behind him is the bearded posse with shotguns and spotty horses.

Are you ready to vacate? Well, are ya?

All I can think about is the beer in the roof space. Now the sheriff is coming. They're going to sell our house with a ceiling full of half-drunk beers. They'll wonder why we did that. How embarrassing.

This could be a stress response. I should be worrying about where we're going to live, or the fact that Mum knows I've been going to the track with Bryce Cole. I'm not really worried though. They're not going to kick us out. Not really. We'll build a fort.

Dad will come back. He'll have won lotto. He'll give the sheriff the money in a briefcase, like in the movies. Okay, maybe not like a movie, but something will happen. Mum can go down to the bank and talk to the manager, and if we have to, we can just move back into a smaller place.

Sheriff-schmeriff. They can't come in and remove us forcibly. We live in the first world. We have civil liberties. I learned about it in legal studies.

Bryce Cole slips his fingers into his breast pocket. He unfolds a wad of notes and counts them onto the kitchen bench in front of my mother.

Four hundreds and six fifties.

Mum puts her hand over them, but she doesn't say anything.

'Rent in advance,' he says. He slaps his hip pockets and the car keys jingle. 'I was going out to get some takeaway Chinese. Would you like some?'

Mum is sitting very still with the piece of paper still held out in one hand and her other hand resting on the notes on the bench. She looks stiff, as if she's a shop mannequin.

'Thank you. You have no idea what a difference this will make.'

'I have an idea,' he mumbles, and then he leaves.

I can see why porn is bad, how drugs are bad, and why drinking is bad, but I don't get how gambling is like that. It's not dirty. It's fun. No one gets hurt, or sick, and no one is being exploited. Everyone who's there makes their own choices about how much they can afford to spend. If you're not willing to lose it then you just wouldn't bet it in the first place. What's the big deal?

8
GHOSTS

It's after ten when Bryce Cole gets back.

'Did you actually go to China to collect this meal?' I ask him as he sets the plastic bags down on the bench.

He cocks an eyebrow at me. 'You should reserve your smart-alecking till after you've been fed, don't you think?'

My brother comes out of his room to eat. I imagine him being drawn by the Chinese food smell as if he's in a cartoon, where the scent is a grey, wafting line that grabs you by the nose.

Most nights we lean against the kitchen bench eating cereal, or something microwaved. Mum can't sell the microwave because it's actually built in to the cupboard. Tonight we stand around the dining room table. Mum sold the chairs. She would have sold the table too, but you have to take the legs off to get it out the door, and she's just not that handy. It feels almost as if we're a proper family except that it's Bryce Cole instead of Dad. Dad would be making us tell him about our day and then complaining about me talking with my mouth full, but Bryce Cole doesn't say anything, except after Will eyes the last spring roll, he says, 'I'll wrestle you for it.'

Will starts to size him up, and then all the lights go out.

Mum fumbles around in the kitchen drawers for a moment and then strikes a match. She stands a candle on the kitchen bench. Bryce Cole breaks up his six-pack of beer. He hands one to Mum, but she shakes her head and pats her tummy. He passes it to Will instead. Mum doesn't protest. He holds one out to me, but I wrinkle my nose. They take the beer and candles into the lounge room.

When I put the leftover Chinese in the fridge, the light doesn't come on, and I can't see, but it doesn't matter. I'm not going to knock anything over, because there's only milk, jam and margarine in there anyway.

After I've rinsed the plates I join them in the lounge room. We sit silently in a semicircle around the empty TV unit.

The last time we had a blackout was on a Saturday afternoon. Dad rang the electricity company. He said you should always be a squeaky wheel. He said to get what you want in this life you need to be proactive.

The lady from the electricity company said they had scheduled work to do and that it would only be a few hours. Dad got really mad, because he thought they should have let us know in advance. The lady from the company said that if you let people know then that just gives them something to complain about. He was purple with rage when he got off the phone and he marched around the house pointing out all the things we couldn't use.

Mum, Will and I had jumped in the pool. Dad came out every few minutes to report on the electricity not being on, but by the time we got out of the water the power was on again and Dad was flicking through the Foxtel channels, trying to pretend there was something important that he wanted to watch. He had it on BBC World News, but when he thought we weren't listening he switched over to Everybody Loves Raymond.

Bryce Cole takes a sip of beer, and then he settles into his chair. He's not a squeaky wheel. He goes with the flow.

'Who knows a ghost story? Willem?' Mum prompts. She isn't a squeaky wheel either. She sees a glass half-full – even if it's actually an empty glass.

'I'm not telling any dumb story,' Will mumbles.

'Don't look at me,' I say quickly.

Bryce Cole is scratching the stubble on his chin again. 'Did you know there was a horse who carried almost seven kilos over his weight-for-age to win the Melbourne Cup? That was in 1930. In 1932 this same horse travelled from Australia to San Francisco by ship, and then by road eight hundred kilometres to Agua Calientes in the hot Mexican summer. Full winter coat. Runs on a dirt track, with a heel injury and steel bar shoes. Can you imagine it?'

Mum lies on the lounge listening. The candlelight makes wavering shadows on the walls. Will wraps his arms around his shins and rests his cheek on his knee. Bryce Cole takes another sip of his beer.

'This horse didn't just win. He came from last place to two lengths ahead, and clocked the track's best time.' Bryce Cole shook his head. 'Big, red thing bought for one hundred and sixty guineas. Must be the greatest athlete this country has ever seen. Can you see him in your mind's eye? Eating the track. Leaving the others in the dust. He wants to run. He'd burst his big old heart for you. Can you imagine it?'

I close my eyes. I can imagine the tall, ugly horse, chewing on his bit, ready to run, and it sends goose flesh up my arms.

'Yeah yeah, we learned about Phar Lap in year three,' Will says. 'That's not a ghost story.'

'Yes, it is,' Bryce Cole replies.

'How is it a ghost story?' Will scoffs.

'Phar Lap's dead, so he's a ghost,' I say.

It's gloomy inside the house. Outside there are puddles of light from the streetlights filtering through the trees, and glowing rectangles in our neighbour's houses. I sigh. The blackout is just our place, then.

After a while, Bryce Cole says, 'It's not enough to be dead. He also has to haunt us.'

9
HYPO

Declan is sitting at his kitchen bench with his hands over his eyes. His parents are out, so I can show him the surprise I've been promising.

I'm rattling around in the fridge. It's so full that I have to take things out and rearrange them to fit it all back in again. It looks so fresh and good. I see so many things I want. I'm even eyeing off the leftovers. When I'm finished there are two tall glasses on the bench.

'Okay, you can open your eyes now.'

Declan stares at the glasses. He lifts one to his lips and takes a tiny sip. 'You mixed the beer with lemonade.'

'That, my friend,' I say with a flourish, 'is a shandy! It's a real drink that you can order at a bar. At the track today I was telling Bryce Cole about how we don't like beer and he bought me one of these. It's nice, isn't it? Nicer, anyway.'

'Yeah, but it's still the wuss's option, isn't it? It's like the grown-up version of a fire-engine.'

I stare at him and then I take the two glasses and tip them down the sink. 'You are so determined to ruin everything. You know something, Declan? You're a great big fun sponge – you suck all the good energy out of the room, and what leaks out of you is stinky, wallowing misery.'

'I'm SICK!' he yells. His hands are shaking with rage. He's blinking rapidly.

'Yeah? Well, I have some problems too, in case you hadn't noticed. Maybe once in a while I might be the one who needs some support!'

Declan thumps the bench with his hand. The tremor has moved up his arms. 'Okay, Jenna-Belle, how about I pay for everything when we go out somewhere? How about I just give you two or three meals a week for six months! Is that supportive enough for you?'

'It hasn't even been six months!' I shout. It probably has, though. 'Besides that's not the support I want from you. It's not money. There has to be emotions in it, or it doesn't count.'

'JUST SHUT YOUR . . .'

And then he falls off his chair onto the ground.

Of course he's faking it, but he hit his head really hard on the tiles.

'You can get up now,' I tell his fake-unconscious body. 'You think a shandy is a wussy option? Passing out to win a fight is way more pathetic than that. Declan?' He's not getting up. 'Declan? Now you're just trying to freak me out. I'm not biting.'

I take advantage of this distraction to make myself a sandwich – cheese, lettuce and pastrami. I was going to add tomato, but when I slice it I can smell that delicious sweet, acidy tomato smell, and I can't help myself. I eat it as if it was an apple.

I prop myself on the stool next to where Declan is lying and eat the sandwich. Declan's mum has bought proper bread from a bakery. It's soft in the middle and crusty on the edges.

It's the most amazing sandwich. I guess that's one good thing about being povvo. We've always had so much food in our house. I used to hang off the pantry door for ages and wouldn't see anything to eat in there unless all I had to do was open the packet. Now I can imagine a meal out of almost anything. Three months ago I wouldn't have eaten a tomato as if it was an apple. I wouldn't have considered a sandwich unless someone else made it for me. I'm beginning to wonder if Willem and I might have been a little spoilt that way.

I dig Declan in the side with my toe. He still doesn't move. Now he actually is freaking me out.

I kneel on the floor and shake him, but he's all floppy. I need to get my mum. I head for the door and in two seconds I'm through our back door. 'MUM!'

I can't find her. I run from room to room. I stop in the lounge room and look out the window. She's there on the lawn. Her hands are in her hair. There's a tow truck in the driveway, winching up Mum's car.

The screen door hits the wall as I push past it and bound down the steps.

Her face is wet with tears and her mouth is pulled into a grimace. 'They can't take my car,' she whispers. Her eyes are desperate and weary.

'Mum, I need you!' I say, shaking her arm. 'It's Declan. He's collapsed. He won't get up.'

'I'm sorry, sweetheart, but I just can't deal with this right now.' She clasps one hand over her mouth and the other rubs absently at her belly.

Bryce Cole is beside me. I didn't hear him approach. He's frowning. He has his hands on his hips. I grab his sleeve and drag him towards Declan's house.

In the kitchen he gathers Declan up in his arms as though Declan's just a little child. Bryce Cole is trying to run, but the weight drags him down so that he's hobbling. I hold the door open for him, then run ahead to his car. I open the car door and he drapes Declan across the back seat, and climbs into the driver's seat.

I'm shouting out the window as we drive away, 'Mum, ring Declan's parents! Mum!'

I can't tell if she's heard me. She's watching them tow her car away.

Grey's Anatomy is my favourite show of all time. Everyone is gorgeous and they rush around removing bombs from people's abdomens, making love in tiny storerooms, delivering quintuplets, or doing brain surgery while exchanging witty banter and sexual innuendo. I had no idea just how many illnesses can be fixed with a quick brain operation until I watched that show. So I was looking forward to going to the hospital with Declan.

Even on All Saints stuff happens. But all the excitement must occur behind those big rubber doors hospitals have, because where I'm sitting nothing is happening – there's just a row of chairs in front of a TV, and a water cooler, and several old people and a few mums with toddlers. Nobody has a bomb in their abdomen. I don't see any conjoined twins. There's no amusing wordplay.

There's no shouting to be heard over the wailing of people with unusual medical conditions, or even over the storeroom lovemaking. I definitely don't see any of that. I don't think I would want to because there are no gorgeous doctors. The doctor who came to ask me about Declan was a short, Egyptian-looking, older guy with a little mo. He looked more like Hercule Poirot than McDreamy. Very disappointing.

Dr Poirot thinks that Declan is my brother and Bryce Cole is our dad. We fill in forms and he asks us some questions about Declan's collapse.

'And what had Declan been eating or drinking?'

I look at Bryce Cole, glad that my mother was too traumatised to come along. She still hasn't said anything about me going to the track, either. She's been distracted.

I tell Dr Poirot about the shandy.

He asks me if there were other symptoms that I know of, so I tell him about Declan's dry mouth, blurred vision, fatigue and weight loss. Dr Poirot nods and takes his clipboard away.

'What's wrong with him?' I call after him.

Dr Poirot stops. 'Looks like he had a hypo. Have you heard of hypoglycaemia? He would have been better off if he'd finished that shandy. I have to do more tests, but I strongly suspect your brother has diabetes.'

'Declan really is sick?'

He will be so thrilled. I'm glad it's not cancer.

Bryce Cole is reading a magazine. He looks happy. I'm wondering why he's so pleased with himself, so I ask. I shouldn't have. One of the things I liked about him the most was the fact that he didn't say anything.

Bryce Cole tells me that for his whole life what he's really wanted is to live in a big house with a beautiful wife and a pair of healthy kids. Then he shoots me this look, and it creeps me right out, because it's true. He's just slipped into Dad's place – except for the sleeping with Mum, which may come along in time. I don't know.

I turn to Bryce Cole when I'm in trouble. I hardly even think about my dad really. Bryce Cole is a hero because he gave me money to play with at the track, and he gave Mum that money to get the debt collectors off her back.

Bryce Cole has bought us.

10
WAITING

Declan is beside himself with delight. He couldn't be happier if the doctors had told him he had Ebola. In fact, from Declan's point of view, diabetes is even better than Ebola.

I huff. 'Declan, you're not allowed to make yourself collapse all the time.'

He grins. 'Did you know I have to have injections every day?'

Declan will enjoy giving himself needles. It's painful and tragic, and at the same time a bit gross, which sums him up, really.

'Guess what else? I'm not allowed to drink beer, so I don't have to pretend to like it.'

'Goody for you.'

He wriggles in the bed, getting comfortable. He's wearing one of those blue hospital smocks and it suits him. I'm wondering if he'll be allowed to take it home. They've washed his guyliner off and he looks sicker.

Declan says, 'Now comes the part where you have to admit that you were always wrong and I was always right.'

My mouth drops open. 'That is so unfair! I have always supported you.'

He narrows his eyes. 'You humoured me, but you never truly believed. Get me some water, will you?' He holds out his plastic cup. There's a tag around his wrist with his name on it, and it freaks me out. It's a label in case he gets lost, like a dog, or in case they forget which patient he is and lop off his leg by mistake.

The water jug is on the wheelie table. Declan can reach it himself. He wiggles the cup at me anyway.

Be a doll, I think to myself.

This is the beginning of the new era. Every day for the rest of our relationship I will have to fetch for him, and watch Donnie Darko, and listen to Dashboard Confessional, or Belle and Sebastian, probably all at the same time.

I fold my arms. 'What are you going to do – lapse into a coma?'

'I could, you know, at any minute.'

Bryce Cole ducks his head in through the doorway. 'C'mon, JB. Let's head off.'

'I have to go now,' I tell Declan, turning on my heel.

He wiggles his cup frantically. 'Don't forget it was your shandy that nearly killed me! Jenna-Belle? I'm really sick! Forever!'

'My shandy saved your life,' I say, and I flounce out the door. I'm new to flouncing. I like it. I'll do it more often.

On the way home Bryce Cole stops at the TAB. He leaves the radio on in the car for me to listen to.

'Five minutes,' he promises.

I wind down the window and watch him push open the glass door.

There are counters running down either side of the TAB for filling in forms, like a bank, and multiple television screens, the same as at the track. There's a betting booth behind metal bars at the end of the shop.

Bryce Cole scans the televisions for a minute and places a few bets. He leans against the bench and watches the screen. There are no chairs in there. I think that's a mistake. People would bet more if their feet weren't hurting.

I fiddle with the radio until I find a song that I like. I settle back on my headrest and close my eyes. After three songs, I look out the window again. Bryce Cole is watching the television with his arms folded. He refers to the newspaper that someone has left on the counter, then to his notebook. He fills in a betting slip, places the bet at the booth, and watches the screens.

It's weird having to wait without something to do. My dad's car had a DVD player, and before that we had Nintendo, and our iPods, and even before that Mum used to play us talking books.

The worst part was waiting in airports. Dad confiscated our iPods when we flew because Will didn't believe that an iPod would really interfere with the plane's navigation system, and so one time he did an experiment and hid it under his hoodie, and the flight attendant got on the microphone, all shirty, repeating the part of his speech about electronic devices. He said it three times before Dad realised it was Will. He was trying to make Will turn it off without anyone else seeing, but a fat, irritable businessman pressed his call-bell and dobbed. So then the whole plane watched while the flight attendant told Will off. Will smirked like a smart-arse and said, 'I couldn't hear you.'

For the rest of the flight everybody stared at Will when they walked past on their way to the loo, as if they were thinking, That's the boy who tried to kill us all!

When we were smaller Mum used to keep us entertained by sending us into the tacky airport souvenir shop to pick out stickers. Once we landed at the other end, Will and I would collect our suitcases from the baggage carousel. When they were all collected together we were allowed to put our stickers on them. Now that I think about it, that was probably her way of getting us to do all the heavy lifting without whining.

There was this one time we went for a holiday in Mauritius, and in the resort they had an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. You could select a platter of raw things and take it to these Mauritian dudes who would cook it for you in different marinades. It was so yum!

One of the chefs was particularly hot, and he whispered to me, 'Meet me on the tennis courts in half an hour,' and I did think about going, but instead I went to the beach and had a scalp massage. At the end the lady braided my hair into cornrows, and put a red bead on the end of each one. It looked really cool and I was going to wear it to school, but it was a bit ratty by the time we got home.

Anyway, I'd been eating seafood solidly for about four days, and then I decided to try something else. I picked this curry and I was eating it, going, 'Mmm. I'm not sure what this is, but the flesh is really tender. It's such an interesting texture.' I encouraged everyone to try it – even a South African couple at our table who we'd never met before, telling them it must be some special Mauritian delicacy. Then Willem tried it. He said to me, 'Der, Jenna-Belle, it's chicken.'

I'm blushing even now as I remember it.

Bryce Cole has been longer than five minutes. I take the keys out of the ignition and climb out of the car. I knock on the window. When he looks up I tap my wrist. He nods and holds up his hand. Five more minutes. He turns back to the television.

Slipping the keys into my pocket, I stroll up the street a little way. There's a takeaway shop, and I'd like to buy a drink, but I don't have any money. I look at the houses in the window of the real estate agent. When I reach the end of the strip of shops I head back to the TAB again. I wave at Bryce Cole through the window. He comes to the door.

'What?'

'What do you mean "what"? You said five minutes about forty-five minutes ago! I'm hungry. I want to go home.'

He tugs a crumpled twenty out of his hip pocket and hands it to me. 'Get yourself some hot chips or something.'

I go back to the takeaway shop and order enough chips for all of us, and a two-litre Coke. I sit on the little plastic chair and read a Woman's Day from the year I was born. There's an article about how Tom Cruise is a Scientologist. I double-check the date on the cover.

When the chips are cooked I walk back to the TAB and indicate to Bryce Cole that I'm waiting in the car. He nods.

After five more minutes I start eating the chips. They have chicken salt on them, so they're a weird artificial yellow colour. It must be addictive. They're crack-chips. I can't stop stuffing them into my mouth three at a time, and then washing them down with the cold fizzy Coke, which I drink straight from the bottle.

Fifteen minutes later I've eaten most of the chips that I ordered for four people and at least a litre of drink. I think I'm going to throw up, and now I'm busting to go to the loo too.

It's been two hours, at least. I head back across the road and rap on the window of the TAB again. Bryce Cole nods and holds up his hand. Five more minutes.

This time when I go back to the car I lay my hand on the horn.

Pwwwaaaarrrrrrrrrpppppp.

I startle an old lady who's walking past. People in the street are staring at me. The chip guy comes out of his shop to see what's going on, wiping his hands on his apron. Bryce Cole's car has a really loud, obnoxious horn. I grin.

Pwarp, pwarp, pwwwarrrrp, pwarpity, pwarp, pwarp, ppwwwaaarrrrrrppp.

Bryce Cole runs out of the TAB. 'What the hell are you doing?'

'I want to go home now!' I shout back.

He blinks. 'This is my living, Jenna-Belle. If I don't bet I don't win and if I don't win you don't eat. Okay?

'I already ate!' I complain. 'It's been a big day for me. My best friend is in hospital, remember?' I fold my arms. 'If I could drive I would have stolen your car about an hour ago.'

Bryce Cole looks back at the TAB wistfully, and then he opens my door. 'Get out then.'

'What do you mean, get out?'

'You can drive home. It's an auto. You just press and steer.'

I clamber across to the driver's side. 'I don't even have my Ls,' I tell him as I adjust my seat.

Bryce Cole drops into the passenger seat. 'We'll take the back streets. Driving is easy. The pedal on the right is go and the other one is stop. Put your foot on stop.'

I press the brake with my left foot.

'No, you only use the right foot. Keep that left one flat on the floor.'

He shows me P for park and D for drive and R for reverse. 'That's all you need to know. Okay, check your mirror. Flick the blinker down. Good. Anything coming? No? Put the car in drive. Here, I'll do it for you. Now take your foot off stop and hover it over go. Just hover!'

The car starts rolling forward. I twist the steering wheel away from the kerb and into the road.

'Stop, stop, STOP!' Bryce Cole is thumping his right foot where the brake would be on his side, if there was one.

I put my foot on the brake again, and then gasp as a car whizzes past from behind us.

'You need to look in all directions at once,' Bryce Cole tells me, as though that makes sense. 'Okay, off we go.'

I squeeze the accelerator and the car jerks forward. I can feel each lump and bump in the road through the steering wheel. My heart is beating really fast. I'm trying to look everywhere at once. A car comes along the other way and I hold my breath till it passes.

'Good, now turn right. Put your blinker on.'

'Right? Across the road? Are you insane? There's a car behind me!'

Bryce Cole watches as I drive straight past the right-hand turn. 'Okay, maybe we'll try the next one . . . Or the next one. Listen, Jenna-Belle, you will have to turn right eventually, or we'll end up in Alice Springs. Put your blinker on. The car behind will cope, I promise.'

'Okay, I'm doing it!' I say, flicking on the right blinker, and then putting my foot on the brake. We inch to a stop. I look in the rear-view mirror. My eyes get wider as the car behind me rushes up and then swerves around us. 'I can't believe people can actually talk to each other and drive at the same time!'

'You'll get used to it.'

I turn the wheel and the car swings around. This street is quieter and I relax.

'Give it some juice, JB! I could run home faster,' Bryce Cole says.

I look at the speedo. I'm doing 20 km/h, but at least I feel in control. 'Go on, then. Run home. I dare you!'

He opens the passenger door and I scream. He laughs at me.

I take a left turn and then a right. I drive through my first traffic lights, squealing. Bryce Cole thinks it's hysterical.

Soon we reach our street and I pull into the driveway, putting the car in P while Bryce Cole pulls on the handbrake.

Bryce Cole is looking at our house's dark windows. He's checking out the parked cars on our street. I guess he's hoping nobody saw him letting me drive.

'Actually, I've got some things to do. I might just drop you off, okay? Take those stinky chips with you.' He hands me the white paper package of cold chips.

We both climb out of the car. He walks around the bonnet and then settles into the driver's seat and I head towards the front door.

'Hey, JB,' he says through the open window, 'lock all the doors and windows, will you? And don't answer the door, unless you know who it is, okay? Look out the window first.'

'I'm not five years old. I know about stranger danger,' I scoff.

Still, when I get inside, the house seems very shadowy and hollow. We still have no power so the answering machine is dead. There's a note from Mum on the bench and I squint to read it in the gloom.

Gone to hosp.

She must have gone with Declan's parents. That's nice and neighbourly of her.

In the same spirit I head over to feed Chairman Meow, but Declan's house is locked. The cat appears from around the corner, whining, so I bring him back to our place instead.

I take my dad's old t-shirt out of the back of my cupboard and put it on over my clothes. I lie on the lounge in the dark and wonder what to do, while The Chairman kneads dough on my belly. I can't watch TV, or play on the computer. I can't go next door and see what Declan's up to. Will isn't here. Annie's not either.

Soon I'm bored, so I wander back down the hallway. I peek into Bryce Cole's room. He has one open cardboard box in the middle of the room, and a sleeping bag stretched out on the floor near the window. That's it. There's a built-in wardrobe in his room. I look in there, but there's nothing in it. One box of stuff – that's all he has. Except for his car.

The phone rings.

'Is this Jenna-Belle?'

'Yes.'

'I'm calling from the hospital. Your brother's here and he asked me to ring you.'

I'm about to explain that Declan isn't my brother, but the woman continues. 'Your mum has just come out of the operating theatre now.'

'My mum?' This lady must have me confused with someone else.

'She's okay, but I'm afraid she's lost the baby.'

11
WOLVES AT
THE DOOR

I'm pacing around the house not knowing what to do. I wish I hadn't bought the stupid hot chips because then I would have twenty dollars for a cab. Now I only have six dollars seventy-five left and it's not enough. I can't get to the hospital to be with my mum.

In her room, I pack an overnight bag of Mum's things – her toothbrush, a couple of pairs of pyjamas, a cardigan and the book on the bedside table. I'm proud of myself for doing something useful.

There's a knock at the door and I run downstairs to answer it. When I see two men on the doorstep I remember Bryce Cole telling me not to open the door. They're not salesmen or Mormons. The meaty one at the front wears thongs, and the other one chews gum.

'Is Bryce Cole here?'

I blink. 'Who? Never heard of him. Sorry. Thank you! Goodbye.' I start to close the door and one of the men stops it with the heel of his hand.

'We'll wait.'

They push through the door. The meaty-looking man with the thongs flips the light switch a few times experimentally and then heads off down the hallway, opening doors. The man with the gum settles on the lounge. I'm lurking in the archway to the kitchen not sure what to do.

What am I going to do? Ring the police? There's a lock on the phone, but I assume triple 0 still works. Even if it does, when are the police going to arrive, exactly? I could be a soggy heap of miscellaneous appendages in about ten minutes, if these blokes brought the right equipment.

It's amazing how calm I am. None of my limbs are moving, and my heart's racing, but it was doing that already. I haven't had time to get scared, or maybe I was already keyed-up before they even arrived, like if you get off a little roller-coaster and straight on a bigger one without going through the zigzaggy line-up area, so there's no time to listen to other people screaming, and see how shaky and rickety the beams are.

Or it could be because I'm thinking about it too much, as if I'm a reporter in a war zone who's too busy explaining what's happening, thinking about whether her make-up is even, and being pleased about how calm she is in the face of danger to scream and cry for her mum like the people in the background are.

Or possibly I'm not as calm as I think. This might be what I do when I'm completely freaking out. I have already totally freaked out twice today – more if you count each time when I was driving as a separate incident.

None of this is actually very useful.

I lick my lips and try to memorise what the men look like so the police artist can draw them for the wanted poster. The gum-chewing man has a small nose and bags under his eyes. He has long skinny legs and a potbelly. He looks like a frog. He's wearing a polo shirt, and he's lightly tanned. He could be a golfer, or an air-conditioning salesman, or a botanist. His elbows are dry and scaly. He scratches one and it makes a disgusting reptile sound.

Police are looking for a frog-like Caucasian male with gross, scaly elbows.

Then it occurs to me that they haven't actually done anything worth telling the police about yet, and if they do, I might not be in a position to give the description any more. Besides, these blokes might even be good mates of Bryce Cole's. School chums. Punting buddies. So I stop memorising.

The meaty man returns and shakes his head.

The gum-chewing frogman regards me for a moment. 'I didn't even know Coley had a kid,' he says.

Coley. See? Mates! They've probably got names like 'Bazza', 'Dazza', 'Wozza' or 'Macca'. I should be offering them a coffee, except there's no electricity to boil the jug.

'I've come to collect my car,' Frogman tells me. 'The bastard's not here. Again! Maybe I'll borrow something of his. See how he likes it.' He gets to his feet.

Meatyman says, 'Looks like someone's pretty much cleaned out the rest of the place already.'

'Figures,' Frogman replies. He points to the microwave. 'I'll have that.'

'You can't! It's inside the unit. It doesn't . . .'

Come out, was what I was going to say, but Meatyman looks around, takes the cleaver out of the knife block, and prises off the cabinet front. He hands the broken bit of timber and the cleaver to Frogman, then reaches behind the unit and pulls the microwave plug from the wall.

They're taking our microwave hostage. I'm glad they didn't think to take me, but still. 'Hey! What are you doing?' I shout. 'You can't take that! That's not Bryce Cole's anyway, it's ours! It's my mum's!'

Frogman sets the broken wood on the bench. He brushes the splintered bits of cupboard front off his hands. 'Runs on batteries, does it?' he sneers.

'Your elbows are gross! Haven't you ever heard of moisturiser?' I yell back at him.

'Haven't you heard of dermatitis?' he answers.

They traipse out the door. I follow.

'Hey!' I'm on the lawn, cupping my hands around my mouth. 'Help! Stealers! These guys are kidnapping our microwave!'

The men ignore me, discussing which is the best way to set the microwave on the back seat so it won't slip. 'Move that seat forward would you, Davo?'

'Help! Help!' I'm jumping, but no one even cares.

They get in the car and drive away. The plug from the microwave hangs out the bottom of the back door and drags along the road.

I go back inside and lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I remember Mum is in the hospital and I'm numb. There's nothing I can do. Chairman Meow stands on my chest, staring into my face. He's hungry, but we don't have anything for him to eat. I lie there trying not to think about anything. It's twilight. I see headlights arc across my bedroom wall as a car pulls into the driveway. I open the window and lean out. It's Bryce Cole.

'Where have you been?' I call down at him.

'Why is that any of your business?' he asks, slamming his car door.

'Because your mate Davo stole our microwave, and you better get it back!'

He slips the keys in his pocket. 'I'd better get it back, or what?'

'Or you can just move out! Mofo!'

'You listen here,' he says, narrowing his eyes and pointing at me. 'The reason Davo took your microwave is that I gave his money to your mother to pay your bills. And I was trying to make more money, but you got bored. You were tired. You wanted to go home. Remember? I told you not to open the door. If anyone lost your microwave it was you! You're the mofo!'

'Me?' I bluster. 'As if! And . . .' I'm searching. 'Betting is not a proper job!'

'Oh yeah? What money are you making?' he shouts back. 'Why don't you have a job?'

'Because . . .' Actually, I'm not sure. It used to be because I was concentrating on my studies. Well, when I was going to school anyway, but Sapph managed to do both. 'I'm not old enough!' I shout louder.

'Exactly!' he yells. 'So shut up, and stop telling me what to do!'

He presses his lips into a thin line.

'I don't have to put up with this rubbish,' I hear him mutter. He gets back in the car and reverses. He whips the car around and drives down the road with the tyres squealing.

I take off Dad's shirt and stuff it back in my cupboard. I lie down on my bed. Chairman Meow nags at me from the doorway. I put my arm around Albert Bear, my pillow over my head and start to cry stupid tears of frustration, because that's not what Bryce Cole was supposed to do. He was supposed to turn on the electricity, bring us some groceries and get a new microwave and maybe a telly too. He was supposed to fix it.

Somebody has to fix it.

12
A GOOD
QUESTION

Declan's dad brought Mum home from the hospital when he collected Declan. There was this awkward moment where he moved towards her to help her lie on the lounge, but she misread it and thought he was leaning in to hug her. She clutched at his neck, weeping, and over her shoulder I saw a look cross his face, as if he'd walked through a cobweb and was waiting for the spider to run over his cheek.

Now Mum's on the lounge staring at where the television used to be. Sometimes she gets up, gingerly, but most of the time she lies there with tears leaking out of her eyes.

I thought I was doing Mum a favour by going next door to call up her work and tell them she wouldn't be in. Her boss said that he didn't know she was pregnant. He's confused. I ask him if he's trying to tell me that he's giving her the sack. I mention Today Tonight and how they might feel about him sacking a pregnant woman who has just lost her baby, but he says she was already sacked. He tells me that they've filled her position with a very competent graduate who is happy to make the company his highest priority.

So where has Mum been going in the mornings? Does she get Declan's dad to drop her off and then just sit in the park all day?

We still have no power. I leave the room and come back later, and she's still there, but the room is darker. It's like time-lapse photography.

I squat next to her and take her hand. Her face is puffy and pink. She's tucked a tissue under her cheek to catch the tears. That's how tired Mum is. She can't even be bothered lifting her hand to wipe her face.

'Mum, why don't we just sell the house?'

I've suggested it a hundred times since Dad left. It makes sense to me and I don't understand why she won't do it. Every time I say it she turns away, as though I haven't said anything at all.

'We can rent. Make a fresh start.'

Mum smiles at me, and then her face scrunches up. She lets go of my hand and rolls over so she is facing the back of the couch, like Andy Capp. Will is standing in the doorway. We trade a glance and he beckons me over. I follow him to the backyard. Annie from the granny flat is folding washing from the line, so we head into the alleyway.

'We can't sell the house,' he whispers.

'Why not?'

'Because Mum and Dad bought it when the market peaked. Now it's in a trough. The house isn't worth what they owe on it, so even if they do sell it and give all that money to the bank they will still owe more money. Lots more.' He shakes his head. 'If we sell the house they will still have to pay for the mortgage, as well as pay rent wherever we live. And before you're allowed to move into a rental property you have to come up with a bond, and rent in advance. You have to get the phone and electricity connected. We don't have money to do that. Also, they'll do a credit check before they even give us a house to rent. We have bad credit. They won't give us a house to rent. Even people who have good credit can't find houses to rent.'

'So what do we do?' I ask.

Will shrugs. 'Hope they don't kick us out of here.'

'But what if they do? I mean, we were sent that letter. They said we had thirty days, and that was, like, two weeks ago!'

'We'll have to go to a shelter or something.' Will is still whispering.

'A shelter?' I repeat. 'Like homeless people?'

Will frowns as though I'm stupid. 'Yes, exactly like homeless people. We will be homeless people, Jenna-Belle.'

'How can they make us go? They can't pick us up and carry us out the door, can they? They'd have to let us go once we were outside and then we could run back inside again. Maybe we could build a fort or something?'

Will stares at me and then he walks away.

'What?' I say.

Will keeps walking.

'Hey, Will?' I call out.

He turns.

'Where's Dad?' I ask him.

His face flushes. 'Well, that's a good bloody question, isn't it?' he mumbles.

I head up to Declan's room and sit for a while watching him being diabetic. He is sighing and grumbling. He hasn't gone back to school yet so we've been watching DVDs and playing Skip-bo.

His mother came in the other day and asked why I wasn't at school. I wasn't sure what to say, and then Declan blurted, 'Bird lice. Finsbury is completely infested with them.'

'Isn't that convenient timing,' she commented. Then she attempted to flounce down the hallway, but of course a flounce needs to be accompanied by a bigger statement – something like my shandy saved your life – otherwise it's just a jig.

I'm shuffling the cards.

'I'm glad you're not going to the track any more,' Declan says primly. 'I think that man was a bad influence on you.'

'Bryce Cole is a bad influence?' I say. 'You're the one who makes me drink beer and let you grope me!'

He snorts. 'That was not a grope, and it was outside clothes. Besides, you know I can't have beer ever again, even if I wanted to.'

'Poor thing.'

Declan glares at me. 'I don't think you realise that I have to deal with this for the rest of my life, Jenna-Belle.'

'Yeah, well, I menstruate. Get over yourself.'

When I go back into the house Bryce Cole is squatting on the floor next to the lounge where Mum is lying. She's talking to him and her words are bursting out in stuttering staccato like typewriter keystrokes. I stand in the gloomy kitchen eavesdropping.

'I . . . I didn't want to do nappies again. The kids are old enough. To look after themselves. And the idea of starting all over. Again with. Broken sleep for years. Twenty-four-hour care. Again. And birth! God! From the beginning. Again.'

I peek around the corner. They don't see me.

Mum grimaces. 'It's like I wished it,' she whispers. 'It's as if I wished it to death.'

Bryce Cole rubs the tears from Mum's face with his thumb. They sit still for a long time, and then he says, 'You've got to keep running. Even though your heart is going to burst, you've got to get up and keep running.'

'Like Phar Lap,' she says.

'Like Phar Lap,' he repeats.

And after a few minutes Mum gets up.

13
THE OTHER
C-WORD

When I open the front door I recognise the figure standing on the step with his back to me as my father, and I think, Yes! All our problems are over. He's returned with the answer. We're saved! But when he turns around it's all wrong, because he's not supposed to knock on the door and wait. He's supposed to walk straight in, because he lives here, right? He's supposed to burst in, filthy from the gold mine or the oil well he's discovered, and sweep Mum up in his arms. Eureka!

It doesn't even look like him. He has a silly beard. He's wearing a spotty shirt that I've never seen before. He has a jumper draped over his shoulders as though he's in an ad for the pants he's wearing.

It's like when you return to a house that you haven't been to since you were little and it's not nearly as big and grand as you remember. I'm wondering how he could change so much in three months, or whether he's always looked like this and I never noticed because I saw him every day.

He has his hands on his hips, sunglasses on the top of his head and he's looking casual, as if he's been yachting in the Mediterranean. He's got a grin on his face as though he's trying to sell me a timeshare apartment.

'Er, hello, sweetheart.'

He's sweating. It's not hot. He's nervous. Why is he nervous?

'How was your holiday in the country?' I ask.

A slight frown crosses his brow. He decides not to go there. 'Is Willem at home? I thought the three of us might grab a burger.'

The three of us? So, Mum isn't invited? That's it? He's been gone for all this time and now he's going to buy us a burger? What the hell is going on here?

. . . Except I'm hungry, and I'm hopeful, so I find myself saying, 'Okay.'

'Dad!' Will yells. He pushes past me and throws his arms around Dad. 'Hey, man!' He's slapping Dad on the back.

Dad's wearing this weird expression. It's the look you have when you're trying to be pleased about a birthday present you hate. That look makes me feel bad all the way down in my guts, because this is wrong.

Standing in the doorway watching them hug in an awkward man way, all I can think about are the little good things about Dad. That time I was in the concert band and we were on last at the eisteddfod, after this tiny primary school from the bush whose bus broke down, so we didn't end up going on until after midnight, and most of the other parents went home. He didn't just stay; he also drove two other kids home afterwards. How when my karate group had a fundraiser, I was going to quit because I'd forgotten to sell my raffle tickets, and he took the whole book to work and said he sold them all, but I think he bought them all himself, and then he didn't complain when I quit anyway. And how whenever we shared a chocolate he would take the smaller half, and he always let me play my CDs in the car even though it was music he hated because he said it all sounded the same. But it's too late. I can feel it in my guts.

'Let me get Mum. She's sleeping,' says Will, grinning. He's so excited he's almost hopping up and down on the spot. 'She's still not feeling great after, you know . . . the miscarriage, or whatever.'

A wave of colour washes across Dad's face, but he plasters on a weird approximation of a sympathetic smile. He didn't know that Mum lost the baby.

They're not even talking to each other.

'Ah, no. I don't want to disturb her. How about we go, just the three of us, and I'll catch up with your mum later.' He tosses his keys in his hand, and I follow his gaze to the car at the kerb. It's not his car. It's a rental with a logo on the side.

I walk across the lawn with a weird buzzing in my ears. 'Your mum', so not, 'my wife', or even, 'Sue'. The knot in my gut tightens. He hasn't just gone away for a while. They've broken up. This whole time I've been assuming that this was all temporary. I'd thought it was like when there's a storm and the satellite is out. But that's not how it is. Our account has been cancelled.

'There's this guy, Bryce Cole, living here now,' Will tells Dad. He's got his elbow out the window and his foot on the dashboard. 'Nothing's going on, though. I just thought you'd want to know. And Annie's in the granny flat. Still. Mum must have told you about that.'

'Mm,' Dad grunts.

Will goes on. 'Did you know Jenna-Belle got kicked out of Finsbury? I got a scholarship.'

Dad nods but he doesn't say anything. He pretends to be concentrating on driving. I'm staring at the back of his head. We drive past the fish and chip shop. I'm expecting him to stop, but he drives on.

He takes us to McDonald's. We don't even eat in. He takes us to the drive-through, and then we pull up in the car park opposite the supermarket. Classy.

Will's tucking in to his Quarter Pounder, as if he's cool with that. He mustn't have the gut knot. The smell of my McChicken makes me want to heave.

About four years ago we went on a camping holiday to this place called Wombat Crossing, which was unusual for us. Mum preferred to go to resorts where there was a pool and a cocktail bar; you could order a masseuse on the room service menu and, of course, there was a kids' club, so they could go off and see boring grown-up stuff without us whining.

Dad preferred the resorts too – they always had a nine-hole golf course. But Wombat Crossing was a place that Will found on the internet. There was assorted wildlife in all the pictures. They had grass skiing, windsurfing and all that outdoorsy Boy Scout stuff that Will is into, so we went.

It must have been off-season, although I don't know when would be on-season for a place like that. We were the only ones staying there, aside from the caretaker who was a hundred years old.

It wasn't camping camping. We stayed in a cabin, but there was no electricity and we washed from a bucket that you filled with warm water from the billy on the gas stove or the barbecue fire outside.

Mum hated it, but we never laughed as much as we did that week – usually at the look of dismay on Mum's face every time she made a new discovery, like if we didn't keep the door shut then all the wildlife would come inside, and wouldn't want to leave. Possums and wallabies might look cute, but they have fearsome teeth and claws, and make sounds like a lion cub when you try to pick them up.

Dad and Will made bad jokes, particularly about the long-drop toilet.

We attempted to bake a damper. It was disastrous, but we ate it anyway, because we were starving, and afterwards Mum tried to order pizza from her mobile, but they wouldn't deliver so Dad had to drive out and meet them on the main road. By the time he got back it was cold, but we ate it anyway, and then went straight to bed even though it was only about half-past six. Willem and I had to share a room and we played Joke Jeopardy in the dark.

Wombat Crossing was awful, but we managed to pull together and make it work. Or maybe I just remember it more fondly the more time passes. The people that we were at Wombat Crossing seem about a million years away from who we are now.

'I went back to my old company,' Dad begins. 'I wanted to see if they'd filled my place yet, and unfortunately they had, but I caught up with a . . . a colleague of mine for lunch, and she said she knew of some openings . . . some positions . . . A few jobs that were going.' He's blushing – stumbling through it. 'We had lunch . . . a few times, and we got talking. You see, we'd worked together for a long time and we hadn't realised, and things got complicated pretty quickly. I never thought, I mean I always . . . You have no idea until you find yourself there, really.'

'Complicated?' I say. I can see Will's face in the side mirror. He's frowning over his fries.

'So do you kids like this Bryce Cole fellow?' Dad asks. 'I mean, is he nice to you?'

Will grunts. 'He's nice to Jenna-Belle.'

'What does that mean?' He flicks a look at me over his shoulder.

'It doesn't mean anything. Will's a dickhead,' I say. 'Go back to this colleague.'

Dad stares straight out the front window. That's why he didn't let us eat in. He didn't want to look at our faces while he told us this stuff.

'See, now that we weren't working together my colleague felt that she was finally at liberty to . . . and I never knew she felt that way. I had no idea! Believe me. And you know things weren't going well with the business. I had very low self-esteem. Then your mother with the . . . baby. Has she said anything to you about that?'

'I went to the hospital with her,' Will said. 'She was only there overnight.'

'Did your mum say anything about . . . anything?' Dad asks.

He's searching for something. There's a secret – something they haven't told us. Something else.

'Well, anyway.' He sighs. 'It was very different with you kids. This time it really was a rock-bottom moment for me.'

'Are you trying to tell us that you're sleeping with your secretary?' I blurt. 'Seriously? I thought that was a joke! It's a joke, isn't it?'

Will is still frowning, and he's stopped eating. He's getting the gut knot.

Dad sighs. 'I'm feeling intensely conflicted right now. I really feel like your mum and I need a time-out.'

'Who uses expressions like that?' I say. 'Are you channelling Oprah? Jesus!' I'm smiling, because people don't talk like this. He's having a lend of us.

Dad ignores me. 'The important thing is that this is not about you kids. You're probably going to be angry for a while. I know I am. But I've come to accept that sometimes in your life you really need to just stop right where you are and think about whether your life is heading in the direction you want it to go, or if you're just living day-to-day, because you'll find . . . You wait and see – you'll wake up one day and think, My God, my life is halfway through and what am I doing? I know it sounds like a cliché, but isn't it a cliché because it's true?'

'So, what happens now?' Will asks. His face has gone white. There's a twitch in the muscle on the side of his neck.

Dad doesn't say anything for ages, and then he puts both hands over his face.

'God. This is really difficult for me.'

I snort. I can't help myself, because it's a joke, right? Difficult for him?

Dad sighs again. 'There's an opportunity for a job on a short-term basis, and I think I need to take it. I have . . . I've already accepted it.'

He taps the steering wheel and I can't escape the feeling that he's trying to recall a rehearsed script.

'I want to spend as much time with you guys as I possibly can. It may be difficult for us to see each other for a while, but it's short-term.'

'Why?' Will asks.

'I'm . . . The fact is that Heather and I are moving . . .' He takes a deep breath. 'I'm only here for a few days. I'm . . . The job is in New Zealand.'

The knot lurches to the side and now my ears are ringing. I'm too shocked to say anything.

When Will speaks his voice cracks. 'But what about our house? Where are we going to live?' Will looks as if he's been punched. I think he's going to faint.

'Maybe it sounds selfish. It is selfish, but I haven't done anything selfish . . . I haven't done anything for sixteen years! Do you know how long that is?' He's looking at Willem now. 'You have no concept of how long that is because that's as long as your whole life.'

Will scrambles out of the car. The half-eaten burger goes flying all over the dashboard and some of it sticks to the windscreen. He runs across the car park and a van has to brake suddenly to avoid him.

'But this isn't about us,' I say.

14
HANSEN'S
DISEASE

All right, I'm ready. The most embarrassing thing ever – well, second only to the laundry thing. It's the reason why I don't exactly miss all those girls I went to school with at Finsbury, and why I wouldn't try to contact them even if there wasn't a lock on the phone. There was a party at Tanner Hamrick-Gough's house a while ago, when we were still normal, rich people living in a huge house full of stuff.

Tanner's sister's friends were at the party too, and a whole heap of Tanner's parents' friends, because they were back from Dubai. I'd never been to a party like that before, where all the adults and their kids socialised. There must have been a hundred people, maybe more. They'd hired a barman and a jazz band. I only knew a handful of girls, because I was pretty new to the school. Anyway, a group of the younger people went out into the pavilion to play spin the bottle.

Okay, in hindsight it's obvious that this was going to turn out badly, but I was trying to fit in, and several of the boys were pretty cute, so I agreed to play.

Jasmina was picked first. She went into the sauna with one of the boys for about a minute. Everyone outside was laughing and trying to listen to them, but the walls were really thick in there, because it's designed that way, and there was music playing. When they came out again the boy was blushing, but Jasmina seemed unruffled.

I was picked next. I went into the sauna with a boy. He wasn't one of the really cute ones. Anyway, nothing happened. We just sat there on the wooden bench. He asked me if I'd ever had a sauna. I shook my head, and then we went out again.

But when we got outside, they all grinned at us as though we had done something, and the boy gave a little thumbs-up to the other guys. I didn't say anything; I just smiled, because that was the game, right?

Soon enough the bottle came around to me again, this time with a different boy. So I went back into the sauna. The first boy must have encouraged this boy, because he didn't even wait until we sat down. He leaned forward and kissed me, but just a peck. Then he tried again and I said, 'Time's up!'

When I took my spin, the bottle pointed to one of the cute boys. We went into the sauna and sat down. He put his hand under my chin and kissed me. It was a really nice kiss, and so I let him kiss me more. He put his arm around my waist and drew me towards him so that our torsos were pressed together, and it was good, because that was the game, right?

And then the sauna door swung open and Tanner Hamrick-Gough's ancient parents were there. The first thing I noticed was that the lights were on and the music had stopped. I blinked in the brightness and I could see all the people standing around craning their necks to see what was happening.

Tanner said, 'Jenna-Belle has been kissing all the boys.'

Tanner's parents made me sit in the kitchen and wait for my dad to pick me up. There were about five other grown-ups frowning at me over their champagne saucers.

When Dad came they made out I was in the sauna all night and the boys came in one at a time to kiss me, and who knows what else? They told him that they'd never felt the need to supervise the young people so closely, because normally they played board games, swam in the pool, or sang songs on the karaoke machine.

Yeah, right, and they finished the night with a prayer meeting.

I can understand Tanner and the others trying to cover their butts with their parents, but for the next few weeks at school they carried on as though the night went the way their parents said, as though none of them had been involved. I know I did a lot of kissing, but technically I only kissed one boy, and it was only because the game had just started and other girls hadn't had a chance to have a turn yet. If they weren't there to kiss boys then why were they sitting in the circle?

But they all stuck to that story, even when they were by themselves, and it made me wonder if I remembered it wrong.

And how come nobody rang the boys' parents and made them go home? How come it's okay for the boys to kiss girls, but it's not okay for a girl to kiss boys?

Maybe I am a skank? Skanks probably don't know they're skanks unless someone tells them.

I've noticed that when I'm not with those girls from Finsbury I don't wonder whether I'm a skank in denial. It's kind of like that joke:

Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I go like this.
Well, don't go like that then.

So, by not hanging out with Tanner and Jasmina and their hangers-on I'm not going like that. Besides, after the whole 'vintage' call, it's clear they're not very sympathetic.

Usually when I'm worried that I'm going to think about it I stick my fingers in my ears and close my eyes and go 'lalalalala' until it goes away, but what reminded me of it this time is that when Dad came to pick me up from Tanner Hamrick-Gough's party he didn't really say anything. I was expecting a lecture, but instead we simply drove home in silence. He just seemed tired.

It makes me mad – madder – because I'd felt bad for him about that night. I'd felt guilty that he had to come and collect me and be humiliated in front of the other parents because his daughter was a skank.

I'd assumed that he was preoccupied with how badly the business was going and how he couldn't provide for his family, but now I wonder if he was already 'complicating' Heather on a regular basis and didn't really give a rat's about how many boys I was kissing, or how bad our financial situation was.

He was already planning his escape.

There's a moving van parked across our lawn. I'm happy, then angry, then scared, then happy again, and then I realise it's Annie's sofa bed being carried down the alleyway instead of ours and I'm angry again.

I head over to Declan's house so I can watch from his bedroom window and bitch about how Annie is abandoning us too.

Declan is reading the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which he prints off the internet. I thought maybe having a chronic illness might make him back off a bit, but he seems more engrossed in death statistics than ever.

'She could have told me that she was moving,' I grumble.

'There were sixteen cases of the plague in the US last year.'

'She's running away.'

'Hansen's disease is on the rise. Hansen – H.' He flips through his medical encyclopedia. He finds the page, runs his finger down, and then his eyes widen. 'Leprosy! Hansen's disease is leprosy! Did you know there were one hundred and five cases of leprosy in the US in 2004?'

'In a population of three hundred million! The odds are pretty long, don't you think?' I sigh. 'I just think Annie could have said something. We might as well have leprosy the way people are falling over themselves to get away from us.'

Declan snaps his book shut. 'I didn't think you even liked her.'

I rest my chin on the heel of my hand and stare at the truck. The removalists are shutting the doors now. 'I don't! I don't care what Annie does. She's a bossy busybody. I just think it's polite to say something when you're leaving.'

'Jenna-Belle?' Declan interrupts.

'Stupid old biddy. I'm not going to miss her, so I don't even know why I'm cranky. I hope Mum watches Single White Female before she rents out the granny flat again.'

'Jenna-Belle!' Declan says again.

'What?' I say, turning around. Annie is standing in the doorway. She has my pinch pot in her hand. 'Oh. Hello,' I mumble.

Annie is kind enough to pretend she hasn't heard me. 'Your mother told me that I would need to look for a new place, and so I have,' she explains. Annie lays the pinch pot down on the doona cover. 'Do me a favour, will you? Don't ever sell this again. I've returned the finger painting to Willem.' She puts her hand on the top of my head. I can see she wants to say something else, but she doesn't. Instead she smiles at me, and then pads out the door in her leather sandals.

'Bye, Annie,' I say.

I see her cross the lawn and start her station wagon, which is stuffed with last-minute items and odd things that don't fit in boxes. I want to run after her and say sorry, because what I said just now wasn't fair. It's not Annie that I'm angry with.

But I don't run down there. I let her drive away.

I wonder how many times in your life you let people just leave without saying what you need to say, or what you should say.

15
THE
SIEGE

The sheriff doesn't look like Clint Eastwood after all. He's grey-haired and wrinkly and wearing a uniform like a traffic cop. There is no posse . . . yet.

I see him knock on the front door from my bedroom window and so I run downstairs and out the back door. I run through Declan's kitchen, past his startled mother, and up to his room.

'C'mon. The sheriff is here,' I gasp. 'I'm going to the roof space. Building a fort.'

Then I run back home again and climb up into the ceiling. I thought Declan was behind me, but he's not. I wait for ages. I'm sure he's not going to turn up. I curse him for being a coward mofo, and then the cover slides back and two shopping bags emerge.

'Good thinking,' I whisper, digging through the bags as Declan clambers up. He's brought water, bags of pretzels and fruit.

'What's all this healthy stuff?'

'I have diabetes,' he protests.

'Yeah, but I don't.'

'You have a menstrual cycle, remember?'

I pop open a bag of pretzels.

'What are you doing? It's not a picnic, Jenna-Belle. We're supposed to be holding the fort, aren't we?'

I have one pretzel, then roll the top of the pack down and put it back in the shopping bag. We're not going to be very comfortable. I scoot over to the hole and stick my head out. I can see through the doorway and down the hall a little way.

'WILL!'

A few moments later Will stands in the doorway to the room below, frowning. 'I could hear you, but I couldn't find you. What are you doing? You should come down and see what's happening. There's . . .'

'Yeah, I know. Declan and I are building a fort,' I interrupt. My face is going red from being upside down. 'Can you bring us some pillows?'

Will disappears down the hall. He comes back with three pillows and his doona, which he stuffs up into the hole before him. Once he's in, Declan places his boogie board over the hole and sits on it. Will doesn't have a boogie board so he puts a pillow under his bum and balances across two beams.

It's very dark and it takes a minute or two for my eyes to adjust.

'What are all these beer bottles?' Will asks.

'They're an experiment in insulation. I saw it on Discovery Channel,' I lie.

Will eyes off Declan's hoard. 'Can I have some pretzels?'

'No!' Declan says, moving the bags out of reach. 'They're for later.'

'So what's happening downstairs?' I ask.

'The sheriff is there. He has paperwork. Mum's pretending that she doesn't know what he's talking about. It's pretty pathetic. There's a locksmith too, he's leaning on his car waiting. He'll change the locks as soon as they get us out.'

'No way!' Declan says.

We can hear thumping from downstairs.

'What's that?'

Will says. 'I think they're moving our furniture onto the lawn.'

'Can they do that?' I ask.

Will shrugs. 'I guess so. Can I have some pretzels now?'

Declan huffs. 'This isn't going to be a very long siege, is it?'

'We're going to have to pee eventually,' I say. 'It's a shame we can't see, because then we could sneak out to the loo when no one's around. There should be a window up here.'

Will unfolds the open bag of pretzels and we share them, listening to the bumping and thumping below.

Declan says, 'Did you know you're not supposed to menstruate as much as you do?'

'What?' Will and I say in unison.

'They've done studies on women in Africa who start childbearing at about the same time as they start menstruating, and they actually don't menstruate all that often – maybe once a year – because most of the time they're either pregnant or breastfeeding. They reckon the incidence of cervical and ovarian cancer is so high in Western women because they menstruate much more often than nature intended.'

'Really?' says Will, crunching on a pretzel.

I cross my arms. 'And what is the life expectancy of women in Africa?'

Declan shrugs. 'Dunno. Maybe forty.'

'And how many women die during childbirth?' I ask.

'I'd say one in sixteen.'

'How do you know all this stuff?' Will asks.

'He reads medical journals,' I say.

Declan clarifies. 'It was in The New Yorker.'

'You do not read The New Yorker!' I scoff.

Declan blinks at me in the gloom. 'My dad has a subscription.'

'He does too,' Will says. 'I've been taking them out of their recycling. That's how I got my scholarship. I take them to class with me and my teachers think I'm an intellectual.'

Declan and I stare at him.

'What? I don't read them. Not all of them.'

I ignore Will. 'So basically my options are to have thirteen kids starting now, and then die, or I can get cervical or ovarian cancer and die?'

Declan shrugs again. 'Procreation, Jenna-Belle. It's the goal of every species on the planet. You're born, you procreate, you die. That is the meaning of life.'

'Obviously our dad hasn't heard of this philosophy,' I mumble.

'Actually,' says Declan, 'there's an argument that it's a biological urge making middle-aged men leave their menopausal wives to seek a younger, more fertile mate in order to spread their genetic material . . .'

'Okay, you can shut up now,' interrupts Will.

'It's just a theory,' says Declan.

'Mum is not menopausal,' I say. 'In fact, she is obviously still fertile.'

'Yes, but this is exactly my point. Your father has procreated as much as he's likely to with this mate and so now he's going to . . .'

'I said SHUT UP!' Will warns.

We eat pretzels.

After a long time I ask, 'How come you two never ended up being better friends?'

Will smirks. 'I always thought Declan was, like, a . . . you know.'

'A what?' I asked.

'Gay, or whatever. You know how gay guys always seem to have girl friends? It's like a rule that you have to be friends with the opposite of who you want to have sex with.'

'I'm not gay,' Declan says.

'Oh. Sorry, man,' Will mumbles. 'But, you have to admit that you seem gay. Like reading magazines about African women menstruating. That's pretty gay.'

Declan frowns. 'Wouldn't it be more gay not to be interested in menstruation? It's about vaginas.'

I put my hands over my ears. 'Don't say vagina.'

'It's gay to only be interested in it as a kind of, you know, functioning organ,' Will says.

'Don't say organ!' I say.

'No, that's cool,' Declan says to Will. 'You're not the first. Dad thinks I'm gay. Mum doesn't, though. She thinks I'm sleeping with Jenna-Belle.'

'She does not!' I say.

'That's why she walks past my room all the time when you're there – to make sure we're not doing it,' Declan adds.

'In your dreams!' I protest. It would explain why she hates me. She thinks I'm a skank too.

'What about the other day?' Declan grins. 'You know.' He holds his hands out and squeezes. 'Honk, honk!'

'I don't want to know!' Will says, covering his eyes.

My face reddens. 'Declan! You have such a big mouth. It was outside clothes so it doesn't count! And you tricked me into it anyway.'

There's another bumping sound, closer this time. Then we hear a thump directly beneath us, and muffled conversation.

'Are you kids in there?' says a voice.

We sit silently and stare at each other. I'm not really sure what we're supposed to be doing. 'I don't think we've thought this through,' I whisper. 'Are we hiding or are we sieging?'

'Hiding.' From Will.

'Sieging.' From Declan. 'Don't worry, I'm prepared for this.' He gestures for us to stay out of sight, then removes the cover and calls down through the hole. 'I'm diabetic, you ignoramus, and when I collapse Jenna-Belle is going to call Today Tonight. How's it going to look for you when I get dragged out of here on a gurney?'

Then there's some more barely audible talking disappearing down the hallway.

Declan is smiling, pleased with himself.

'Good thinking! That was ace,' says Will with admiration.

A few minutes later the voice is back.

'Declan, is it?' the voice asks. 'How are you going to ring Today Tonight?'

'With my mobile phone,' Declan says, feeling his pockets.

'A blue Nokia with an Astroboy cover? I'm looking at it. Jenna-Belle and Willem, your mother is waiting for you outside. We've removed your furniture and David is changing the locks now. That's going to take an hour or so. You can stay up there as long as you like, but once you do come out the house will be locked, and if you attempt to enter again you will be charged with trespass. You don't want to put your mother through that, do you?'

Will frowns and I can see tears of frustration building in his eyes. He covers his face with his hands. Declan looks deflated and embarrassed. I just feel bone weary.

'I appreciate that this is a difficult day for you kids, but this isn't making it any easier for anyone. It's probably best just to come down, don't you think?'

As I climb down the ladder I'm wishing we had come up with a better plan. There would have been a way to make it work, but I was secretly hoping something would happen. I'm not used to having to do things for myself – not the big things anyway.

Outside, Declan's dad and Will move the heaviest furniture into Declan's garage. Mum still has the bag that I packed for her to take to the hospital. I put a change of clothes into a green shopping bag. At the last minute I also put in Dad's t-shirt, Albert Bear and my pinch pot.

Declan's mum and I stack washing baskets full of clothes in their garage. Bryce Cole's box has been plonked on the front lawn, next to the letterbox. The rolled-up sleeping bag pokes out of the top.

Declan and Willem walk in to the garage carrying parts of the dismantled cot. Declan's mother and Mum exchange a fleeting, horrified glance.

'Er, put it behind that other stuff, can you?' Declan's dad mumbles. He chucks an old blanket over it when he thinks our mums aren't looking.

'They can stay with us, can't they?' Declan says to his mum and dad.

Declan's mother grabs the chain around her neck. She's tugging on it. There's a franticness to it. She's going to break it, or hang herself. She's staring at her husband.

Declan's dad's throat is going a deep beetroot red.

'Where else are they going to go?' Declan asks.

'I'm sure we'll . . .' Mum trails off, because there is no way to finish that sentence. Manage? Does it look like we're managing? We're all sinking into this etiquette quicksand.

'You know, Sue, we could really use your fridge,' says Declan's mum. 'Could we buy it from you?'

'Don't be silly!' says Mum. 'You can use it as much as you like until we come and pick it up. It won't be long – maybe a few weeks.'

'How about we buy it now, and then when you come to collect it you can buy it back from us?' Declan's mum says.

Mum finally twigs that Declan's mum is trying to lend her cash without embarrassing us. 'That would be okay with me,' she whispers.

'It's such a nice fridge.' Declan's mum runs her hand down the handle. 'Do you think five hundred would be reasonable?'

Mum's lip trembles.

'Let's make it a thousand. It has such a lovely stainless steel finish. And there's not a mark on it!'

Mum's legs crumple and she crouches on Declan's driveway, sobbing.

16
JENNA-BELLE
SHARES HER
MOTHER'S
VALUES

We're sitting in the formal lounge at Declan's house when Bryce Cole pulls in. I'm glad to see him because about five minutes after we finished moving our stuff, Declan's mum ushered us in here for a cool drink. Declan's dad disappeared into his study. I was going to run up to Declan's room, except Mum coat-hangered me. Our mums have been discussing weight loss programs for half an hour. They've pretty much exhausted that line of conversation, and we're all panicking about where to go next.

'There's your friend now,' Declan's mother says in her smooth voice. There's a red mark around her throat where she's been fidgeting with her necklace.

Bryce Cole stares at his stuff next to the letterbox. He stacks it in his boot, and then he stands there tossing his keys in his hand.

I rush outside and tell him what happened.

'Go get Will and your mum. I've got an idea.' He grins at me.

Bryce Cole drives us into the city. We pull into the driveway of a fancy hotel near Circular Quay. The concierge wears a top hat and white gloves. I ask him if he has a whole stack of them behind his desk, because no one could wear the same white gloves all day. I'm rabbiting on because normally we would have suitcases when we check into a hotel. Mine was pink, with those stickers on it from every country we've visited. I think we sold it at the second garage sale. I don't want the concierge to notice that there's only one decent bag between us – Mum's overnight bag. I've got my green shopping bag. Will hasn't brought a thing. If the concierge does notice, he doesn't say anything. He directs us to the reception desk in the lobby.

Bryce Cole checks us in to a suite. As we stand in the lift, Mum is looking a bit shell-shocked.

Our suite has three bedrooms and a view out over the Bridge. I'm not sure who's supposed to have which room, so I hang back, but we're all hanging back, until Will calls the main bedroom with the king-sized bed. Bryce Cole swiftly kicks him out of that one, so he goes for the next biggest bedroom. Mum and I plonk our stuff on two single beds in the other room.

I take out Albert Bear and lean him against the pillow.

Will checks out the mini bar. He cracks himself a beer, hands one to Bryce Cole, then flops on the lounge with his feet on the coffee table. Mum has a wine and I have a Coke.

It's dusk and the cars crossing the Bridge have their lights on, leaving a trail of red inside my eyelids when I blink. Ferries cross the harbour. Nobody says anything. All I can hear is my drink fizzing inside the can, and the low thrum of the train pulling out of the station under the Cahill Expressway below.

This is it. This is the rescue we were hoping for. I can see how living in a hotel is actually better than living in a house. You don't have to worry about all that rent in advance and electricity deposit stuff that Will was talking about, or furniture, or washing, or anything. We can just order room service for our meals. We should have done this ages ago.

Mum sighs.

'There's a spa off the master,' Bryce Cole tells her. 'How about I take the kids out while you have a bath? We'll come back in an hour or so and we can go for dinner. You can take this with you.' He hands the wine bottle to her. 'In the meantime, we'll be in that pub down there.' He points to a building in The Rocks.

'Jenna-Belle can't go in there. She's under-age,' Will says. He's under-age too, but it's my youth he seems to be worried about.

'Getting into pubs is all about attitude,' Bryce Cole says. 'Come on.' He hustles us out the door.

On the way out I ignore the concierge. It's time for me to get a handbag. It's worth the nuisance of carrying around a handbag just so I can rummage through it to avoid conspicuously ignoring people.

The pub smells like the bar at the track, a combination of old spilt beer and trough lollies. We're the only ones in here, although I can see through a corridor to another bar on the other side where a few tourists are chatting.

Bryce Cole leans against the bar. The bartender asks if I'm over eighteen. Bryce Cole looks puzzled for a moment and then answers in a very strong French accent. 'We 'ave stayed 'ere for tree days already.' Then he smiles and orders two beers and 'an 'ow you say . . . shanzy?'

The bartender asks again. Bryce Cole pretends to be confused and stares at me, as though looking for an explanation.

I'm having a brain fart. All I can remember from my French lessons is Jenna-Belle a les mamelons velus, so I say that. Bryce Cole looks startled, and then he barks out a laugh.

'Did you just say . . .?' Will begins.

'Oui!' I reply, quickly.

Will starts to laugh too.

I shrug at the bartender. He shakes his head and pours the beer.

My face is turning crimson. It didn't occur to me during the brain fart that someone who can do a passable French accent probably speaks enough French to know the word for nipples. I don't want to know how Bryce Cole knows the French word for nipples.

Of course Will knows the French word for nipples. It's probably the only French word he knows. Mamelons et fesses. He is a schoolboy after all.

I stare into the middle distance, hoping that if I don't look at Bryce Cole and Willem, they won't be able to see me.

This would be a perfect handbag-rummaging moment. Even better would be an expandable handbag. Then you could just hop inside it in situations like these and wait for it to be over.

We climb onto a trio of bar stools around a high table in the corner. Outside the window, tourists and workers stalk past. I'm waiting for Bryce Cole or Will to pay me out, but they don't. Yet.

I'm racking my brain because sooner or later – probably sooner and later – someone is going to ask me why I said that. I can't tell them about Penelope Sullivan because they're going to wonder how I know that about her, and I can't see them buying the bathroom story, even though it's true. It's the same dilemma in a new location. I just know I'm going to be haunted by those hairy nipples for the rest of my life.

The only possibility I can see is that someone else taught me to say it, and I thought it meant something else.

Jenna-Belle enjoys melons.

Jenna-Belle favours mammals.

'What did you do before this?' Will asks Bryce Cole.

Bryce Cole puts down his beer. 'I used to restore antique farm equipment.'

Will and I wait for him to tell us more.

'I had a truck and drove out to country towns. I'd go to demolishers, and to the real estate agents. I'd find out who had old farm equipment that they were getting rid of. Then I would bring it home and restore it, and sell it on to interior decorators or landscape supply places. Bed and breakfasts in the Southern Highlands pay a packet for that kind of stuff. I had a nice little gig for sale and a guy who trained trotting horses came to look at it. He didn't buy it, but we got talking, and Bill – that was his name – asked me to help him load and unload his trotters a few times at the track, and while I was there I watched a race or two and put a few dollars on. Turned out I had an eye.'

'What about before that? Were you ever married?' Will asks.

'No.'

'Girlfriend?'

'A few.' He shrugs.

'How come you speak French?' I ask.

He takes another sip of beer. He has froth on his lip. 'I was a dancer in a burlesque show in Marseilles.'

'You were not!'

Bryce Cole drains the rest of his beer. He stands up and brushes down his lemon-coloured shirt. Then he holds his arms out to the side, shimmying his way across the pub floor to a chair. He's humming a stripper tune. He flicks his leg up a few times and lowers himself onto the chair. He runs his fingers through his hair and bats his eyelashes.

'Oh my God!' I say. 'You have to stop that right this minute, because it's obnoxious and gross!'

Bryce Cole is dancing with the chair. He's shaking his booty. Will thinks it's hysterical. I cover my eyes.

'No, really,' I plead. 'You have to stop! I'm pretty sure this is child abuse. It will take years of therapy for me to get over this incident.'

Then I look over and see the barman frowning at us not being French or over eighteen, and so we leave.

So we're at dinner when it comes up. Bryce Cole is telling Mum how he could hardly keep a straight face when her daughter says in French . . . He's laughing too much to finish. Will is laughing too. They're sharing a moment. Guffawing. Other diners are staring.

We're not at some sleazy burger joint. This is all silver service, a pianist in the corner, and a view over the Opera House. The waiters almost bow as they serve our meals. Mum's wearing a satin pyjama top over her slacks, because that's pretty much all I packed for her, but she has her pineapple on her head, so we're all pretending it's a blouse.

I'm watching Will and Bryce Cole, trying to keep an innocent expression on my face.

'What?' asks Mum, smiling.

'She says . . .'

More laughter.

'She says, "Jenna Belle has hairy breasts,"' Will blurts, although he has better manners than to say it too loudly.

'No, technically it was nipples,' Bryce Cole corrects.

'I did not!' I protest.

Mum turns to me. 'Say it again.'

'Jenna-Belle a les mamelons velus.'

Her mouth twitches.

'Jasmina Fitzgibbon taught me to say it,' I tell them. 'At Finsbury the French class always goes to Paris, and Jasmina said that you should say it when you meet the family you're staying with. It's tradition.'

'What did she tell you you were saying?' Mum asks.

'"Jenna-Belle shares her mother's values,"' I answer.

The three of them roar with laughter. After the giggling has died down, Mum wipes tears from her cheeks. 'You know, that Penelope Sullivan woman had hairy nipples,' she says.

17
COCKFIGHT

'What are we going to do today?' I grin at Mum and Bryce Cole.

I've ordered a big stack of pancakes for breakfast. It comes with berries and ice-cream, which is melting into the dough.

Willem is at the bistro. When he lifts up one of the lids I see ramekin dishes of coddled eggs. The next one is eggs Benedict, which you can assemble yourself with smoked salmon or ham or wilted spinach, or all three. Or if you hesitate for two seconds a waiter will rush to your aid.

You can order fruit juices. A girl in the corner in a perfectly white smock will juice it for you, and not in a noisy juicer either. She does it with a manual stainless steel juicer that looks like a rocket ship. I've ordered strawberry and guava. She brings it over on a tray with a wedge of lime, and a tiny bowl of freshly torn mint leaves.

The sun is shining on my back through an enormous glass dome in the ceiling. My hair's still wet from the long shower I had with the rose on massage. Out the window I can see ferries chugging across the harbour. I haven't felt this fresh and relaxed for ages. It's going to be a beautiful day.

I'm thinking about suggesting the zoo, or maybe the aquarium. We can have yum cha for lunch and then catch a movie. There were also lots of great-looking restaurants on the waterfront that we walked past last night – that's if we don't stop at a Spanish place on Liverpool Street for tapas. We could even order room service. Our room has a view that's almost as good as that place we went last night, anyway.

'We have to check out before ten.' Bryce Cole consults his watch. 'It's nine now.'

'Check out? I'd thought . . .' I trail off.

'You thought what?' He crunches on a strip of bacon.

And then I realise that last night was a bender. My stomach lurches.

A series of questions form in my mind.

Wouldn't it have been sensible to find somewhere cheaper and stay for a week or so while we figure out what to do next?

Wouldn't it have been wiser to use the money to pay back the gum-chewing frogman? Or at least make an instalment?

If you wanted to splash out, wouldn't it have been a better decision to spend the money on something solid? Something real that you could hold in your hands? Like maybe some groceries?

But I don't voice any of these, because there's no point. If Bryce Cole was going to start being sensible and making better decisions he would have done that after he lost his house.

He's a roll-with-the-punches kind of guy.

Instead I ask, 'Where are we going to sleep tonight?'

No one says anything.

After we check out, Bryce Cole takes us to the track.

He passes me the form guide and asks who I like. I don't even look at it. Will picks it up. Bryce Cole puts money on a horse for Will. It loses.

Will loses three times in a row and then Bryce Cole tells him about the jockey, the conditions and the prize money. Next time Will gets a place. He's all excited.

Mum doesn't say anything. She just drinks another wine.

Bryce Cole buys three plates of chips for the table. He buys me a shandy, but Will drinks it.

My green shopping bag is between my ankles under the chair. I shift it with my foot, and then I shove my chair back, looking inside.

'I've left Albert Bear behind!' I tell Mum. 'At the hotel. We can go back, can't we?'

She stares back at me blankly. My heart sinks. We're not going back.

'He's my bear!' I shout at her. I want to throw myself on the floor, because all I have in the world is Albert Bear, my dad's old t-shirt and a stupid pinch pot. I stand up fast and the chair falls down behind me.

As I'm heading out the door I hear Will yell out, 'Go, you bastard!'

The gate to the stables is open and I walk through it. Nobody stops me. There's a long shed with alcoves in it. The horses stand there cross-tied. Waiting. Some of them stamp and shake their heads, or nicker, but mostly they just stand there. They're tied there like slaves.

A truck drives along the alleyway and two young men load the horses from the bays into the trucks. The horses are transferred from one little box to another little box.

No wonder they run so fast when the gate opens. They think they're going somewhere.

Bryce Cole knows a caravan park we can stay at for seventy dollars a week. We go over the Anzac Bridge. He can drive us there, but then, he explains, he has 'things to do'.

'Are you dancing tonight?' Will asks, grinning.

Mum doesn't get it.

'Don't ask,' I warn her.

We're heading west. It's common knowledge in my part of the world that the more east and north you live, the better a person you are. That is, until you get to Pittwater. Anywhere north of that and you're a bogan again.

We stop at a supermarket on the way and buy some home-brand canned soup, two-minute noodles, eight apples and a packet of cigarettes. If Mum decides not to take up smoking after all, and we can live on one packet of two-minute noodles a day between us, I'm guessing we can probably stay at the caravan park for about six weeks.

We drive along a winding road that runs through the middle of the park. There are little side roads off it like spokes. They have cheery names such as 'Sunshine Lane' and 'River View Crescent', although there's no river, just a stormwater drain filled with battered shopping trolleys and potential gang violence.

There are some tourists with their own vans, and a few on-site vans similar to the one we're given, but most of the caravans don't look like caravans. They don't have wheels, for starters. They're little boxes with windows. The biggest one is about the same size as the master bedroom in our house. They're called 'relocatable homes' in the brochure from the rotating stand in reception. The brochure also says they have cyclone anchors. Good to know, Toto.

There are no roof spaces. There's not even the possibility of treasure. I can't believe people actually live here. It must be, like, their summer place. Although I don't know why you would want to spend your summers here. Surely you'd want to be near the coast?

We put our stuff in the van. It looks like a shipping container with windows. There's a double bunk up one end, and then the dining table folds away and you can pull out a bed from the seat. It's all upholstered in cheap plasticky fabric as if it's going to be hosed after you've gone. It smells like a car with leather seats that has been in the sun all day.

Will and I go for a walk. Mum sits under the awning and smokes. Nice. Classy.

At least the landscaping is attractive. There are palm trees and hibiscus hedges between each of the cabins. Many of the vans have potted plants and ferns in hangers. Little kids run around in singlets and undies. Old men sit motionless and alone on their verandahs, watching us with suspicious and cloudy eyes. Their televisions roar in the rooms behind them.

This is how Bryce Cole will end up. He'll be in a place like this when he's old, because he didn't have a family and he doesn't save.

There's a pool. It's not much bigger than our pool, and it's way smaller than Jasmina Fitzgibbon's pool, which has this whole cool undercover lap section actually inside the house.

I'm thinking we should camp in her ballroom. They probably wouldn't even notice for a week or so.

We find a laundry with coin-operated washing machines and dryers opposite each other. Next to it there's a games room. I peer in and see an air hockey table and pinball machines against the far wall.

There's a group of guys already in there. They look about sixteen or seventeen. As soon as I see them I withdraw. Will and I stare at each other. He looks like a snooty private schoolboy with his square shoulders, grown-out salon haircut and first-rate orthodontic work. I guess I look like a snooty private schoolgirl, totally decked out in Sass & Bide and no make-up in an I-don't-need-your-approval way.

'Oi! What's your name?' one of the boys calls out.

I lean my head back in the door again. 'Jenna-Belle.'

'Come and sit on my face, Jenna-Belle.' Collective sniggering. The boy who spoke sits with his legs spread wide. He holds my gaze. I step back again, and I feel a shiver of unease. I've had boys say rude stuff to me lots of times, but there was something cold about the way he looked at me. He wasn't trying to impress me; he was playing up to his mates.

Will and I head on down the laneway. A group of girls sit on the railing. 'Just ignore them. They're dickheads,' the first one says.

'Okay.' Will smiles.

One of the girls is quite pretty – for a bogan trailer-park girl – although she slouches, which does nothing for her cleavage, and she's wearing rubber thongs that once had a cluster of beads around the toes, but now just have ugly, empty metal clasps. Her clothes are all pilled, because they're made from cheap material. The whole ensemble just screams, I buy my clothes at the supermarket!

At least they won't tease me for being 'vintage'.

'What are yous guys doing here?'

'We're on holidays. We live in Melbourne,' Will tells them.

'And you're staying here?' asks a red-haired girl.

'It looks better on the website, eh?' says the first girl.

'Yeah,' I say.

The red-haired girl looks offended.

'Actually, it's one of the nicer parks we've stayed in.' Will smiles again.

It's only the second park he's stayed in, after Wombat Crossing, where there were built-in goannas and you had to sleep about twenty metres away from a pit of poo. Unless in his definition of 'park' he counts the resort with the bungalows over the lagoon in Vanuatu – I expect that place tops the list.

Willem wants to stay and flirt with the girl, but I tug him by the sleeve. We have six weeks. We can make friends with them later.

As we walk away I hear one of the girls say, 'He's cute.'

'You reckon?' mumbles another. I'm guessing the redhead.

Back in our van I discover a snakes and ladders board. The three of us sit outside playing until it gets dark. Mum is still smoking, even though there's a sign. She turns on the little fan instead, making the passive smoking more efficient. This game is like our life, except our life-board is one big ladder at the beginning and then all snakes after that.

Somewhere in the park a couple start fighting. It's quiet at first and then gets louder, and soon they're both screaming swearwords at each other. Even though they're a long way away, all the muscles in my neck and shoulders are tense.

The man, I'm guessing, based on their exchange, storms out, slamming the van door behind him. She shouts after him. Glad that he's gone. Hoping he'll never come back. I hope so, too, but he does. The fight resumes. It goes on and on. I can feel the beginning of a headache pulsing in my temples.

We play again and again, and nobody says anything. We're listening to the fight. Eventually the man leaves. A car grunts into life and squeals away.

I've tried to look at the bright side, but this place really sucks. It's ugly, it smells bad. I don't like the people. They're like the characters in My Name is Earl, except not funny, or nice to each other.

'I don't like it here,' I say. 'I don't want to stay for six weeks.'

Mum lights another cigarette.

'Can you stop smoking? Please? You're giving me a headache. And can we get something else to eat? Like, order pizza or something?' I add. 'I'm starving.'

Mum ignores me. She rolls the dice, and counts out four spaces with her token.

'Who said anything about six weeks?' Will frowns.

'There's a phone box near reception. Will and I could walk down and order a pizza. We could get two, and some wings maybe. Mum? Can we?'

Mum squints at me through the smoke. 'Have an apple.'

'I already had an apple!'

'Have another one.'

I rock back on my seat. 'I can't believe you are starving us, and making us smoke cigarettes, and forcing us to live in this shoebox.'

'It's just for a little while,' she says, placing the dice in front of Will.

Will picks up the dice. Instead of rolling it, he says, 'Mum, why don't you go to Centrelink and get the dole?'

She looks startled and disgusted, as though Will just suggested that she might like a maggot sandwich.

It's like a little rainbow arching over my cloudy day. Why didn't I think of it before? It's designed for people like us, isn't it? Hardworking taxpayers down on their luck.

I've seen dole bludgers on telly. It must be enough to live on quite comfortably. Why would these people choose to live on it otherwise? I'm guessing it's enough for rent, food, and a little over to catch a movie. No popcorn, of course. We might even be able to afford Mum's new habit.

The lights go out. The fan blades slow down and then stop. Mum's cigarette end glows in the dark.

'The plug must have come out,' I say. The guy who showed us to our van plugged the power in before he unlocked the door. There might be a torch in one of the drawers, although it's pretty light outside. 'We can probably re-plug the socket without a torch,' I say.

And then the van rocks. The springs squeak. Collective sniggering.

'Mrs Melbourne,' whispers a voice. The window is open and the voice is right in my ear. It sends a violent shiver over me like a sharp poke in the side. I shoot out of my seat and bump into Mum. We hold each other's hands.

Outside, the light is behind them, so I can't see their faces, but there are four of them. It's the boys from the games room. I'm sure of it. The whisperer is clinging onto the side of the van like a monkey.

The van starts rocking rhythmically from side to side. The voice starts telling us what they are going to do to us. He's whispering it through the window. I haven't even heard of half the terms before, but I know I don't want them done to me. Most of it is directed at Mum.

They wouldn't be calling Mum 'Mrs Melbourne' unless those girls had told them that's where we're from. Why would they do that?

Our stuff pitches and rolls across the floor. I'm holding on to the foldaway table, and I feel sick. I'm scared too, because they're so brazen. If only I knew how far it was going to go. And for how long. Are they just going to rock the van for a while and leave, or will it be all night? What if this is their idea of foreplay?

I remember the way that boy looked at me – as though it had nothing to do with me. It was almost like he was looking through me. Adrenalin shoots through my body and makes me twitch and jitter. My eyes are adjusting and I can see Will's face clearly. He's frightened and angry. His Adam's apple is bobbing. I hope he's not going to do something stupid. Even while I'm thinking it I can see his brain working. He's imagining the squeaky wheel. He's remembering Dad saying that we should be proactive.

Mum must see it too, because she yells out, 'Willem, no!'

Will lets out a roar and makes a dash. He flings the door open and leaps out of the van. Mum is right behind him. She swipes at him and misses. She slams the door after him and leans against it with her shoulder.

Outside the window they fall upon Will with athletic grace.

I'm clawing at Mum, but she has her body pressed against the door. She's not letting me out. She's not letting them in. I can feel her body crumple up as she weeps.

'They're going to kill him,' I screech at her, and they are. Will is in a ball at their feet. He has his hands over his face. They are shadowy dancers on the lawn. Then they each grab a limb. They're carrying Will across the grass. He's wriggling and fighting to get free. They're laughing at him. It's a game. They're going to take him somewhere and beat him for fun. Will tears a leg free and he kicks one of the boys in the stomach.

Now they're going to stab him. I can see it in my head in slow motion, as if it's a movie.

I think about that lady and the man fighting before, and how we didn't do anything. We just listened and played our stupid game. People out there are turning up their televisions to drown out the sound of those boys killing my brother.

Then torchlight swings over the boys. They drop Will and run. He lands flat on his back, and then curls up, like a dead spider. After we're sure they're gone we run out and drag Will inside.

The security guard with the torch knocks on our door.

'Everything all right in there?' He eyes us with suspicion.

Mum wants to call an ambulance, but Will insists that he's okay. Next she wants to call the police.

'Did they steal something?' the security guard asks.

My mother glares at him. 'They assaulted my son!'

The security guard suggests that we can go down to the station and report the incident in the morning, if we still want to by then. Or maybe (he doesn't say exactly, but we get the message) we will have gained some perspective by then.

We lie in the dark. I can hear Will grunting and sniffing as he tries to hide the fact that he's crying. I want to call an ambulance, but I don't want to walk down the road in the dark to the phone booth next to reception.

None of us even goes out to plug the power back in.

I lie there thinking about the time we were in Hanoi, when I was about eight. One minute we were all together in a market, looking at shoes and wooden toys, and then the next minute I was by myself in this grungy little alleyway. I looked up into the face of an old woman. She opened her mouth and it was all red in there with little maroon stumps for teeth. I knew the red was betel nut stain, but her mouth looked like a wound. Further ahead, men gathered around, staring at something. When I looked closely I could see two roosters in the middle of the circle, fighting. The men weren't even cheering, or trying to stop them, or anything, they were just standing there watching, and it made me feel sick in my guts. I was frozen in the spot. Then suddenly Mum and Dad were there and we continued on our way through the market. The whole thing probably lasted less than fifteen seconds, but I had this sense of infinite isolation.

I'm not used to people being mean to me, or to being alone. It's this weird feeling; I got it from Jasmina and Tanner when they said 'vintage', I got it from those boys and the security guard too, and even from Dad a little bit.

I've never felt like that before – as though the things that are important to me don't matter to anyone else. It's like I'm one of those roosters in the circle, fighting for my life – as though I've been set up for this fight, and nobody cares.

In the morning Will has dried blood on his face. He heads off to the shower block with a towel over his shoulder. He comes back ten minutes later wrapped just in his towel and crying again. I can see a faint bruise on his ribs.

There were two of them. They took his clothes. Will's voice cracks as he tells us. He had to fight them for the towel. They were laughing. He had to fight them in the nude.

I walk to the phone booth outside reception. Every step I'm looking around, but I pretend to be casual. It looks peaceful. The kids are on the lawn playing with a hose. One squirts the others and they squeal and laugh. The old people watch from their porches. But now I notice the big metal shutters they have over their windows and spotlights tucked under their eaves.

I hear footsteps behind me, and I look over my shoulder. It's one of the boys. He grins at me. Suddenly he darts forward. I scream and hold my hands over my head.

He pantses me, and laughs.

'You're an arsehole!' I shout at him as I pull my pants up from around my ankles. I'm furious.

'Oh, come on! It's just a joke,' he says. 'Nice booty, by the way. Kind of like . . .' He licks his lips. 'Two peaches.'

My lip curls and I stomp past him. I'm really scared, but I'm angry too, and I hope he sees the angry part more. My hands are shaking as I put the coins in the slot. I ring Bryce Cole's mobile and tell him what happened.

'Yeah, you get a bit of that going on,' Bryce Cole tells me. 'If you just ignore them they generally go away.'

'Generally?'

And that's when I decide we have to get off Bryce Cole's crazy conga line.

18
100 POINTS

There's a little shopping centre in the suburb where we used to live. There aren't any clothes shops. It has all the banks, a deli and a post office. There's a bakery, a florist, a newsagent and a big coffee shop. It doesn't matter what time of day you go, there are good-looking people everywhere. Nearly everyone has well-cut, properly fitted clothes, straight white teeth and clean hair. Even the old people wear jaunty hats. They sit in their wheelchairs at the coffee shop with their daughters and grandchildren and smile contentedly. They eat cake together. People smile at each other.

We walk to this suburb's equivalent of that. They have mostly the same shops, but there's also a big Centrelink. There are no old people in jaunty hats. Everyone seems to be alone – even the people who are with other people. There are families arguing with each other. They're swearing. They don't care that people can overhear. If they ever had pineapples in the first place, they've taken them off their heads and are throwing them at each other.

The kids of the parents who are swearing aren't even crying. They're just watching everything.

I make eye contact with a toddler lying on the floor. I would swear that's Coca Cola in her bottle. She's got crusty boogers around her nostrils. The knees of her pink tights are dirty and baggy as if she's been wearing them for a week.

Eventually her mum growls, 'Come 'ere, you little witch.'

Mum keeps crossing and uncrossing her legs. I'm worried she'll walk out, and then we'll have sat in this horrible place for no reason. I hope they'll give us our money soon so we can leave.

Finally our number is called and we're ushered into a little room. Mum explains about the letter and the sheriff. The Centrelink man is nodding as he shuffles through his manila folder. Mum's voice is all wavery as she tells him about the boys rocking the caravan and stealing Will's clothes. The Centrelink man glances at his watch. It could be that he's just really anxious to rush out and help all those people out there waiting in the queue, but I don't think so.

He gives us some brochures for charity organisations and a women's shelter. Mum nods, but I know she won't go there. He needs to see Mum's identification before he can process a payment. Mum hands over her licence.

The Centrelink man stares at it for a minute. 'This licence is out of date. Do you have another one?'

Mum explains that she didn't renew her licence because it costs money, and there didn't seem to be any point when they took her car away.

'What other forms of identification do you have?'

Mum rifles through her wallet. She lays her Medicare card and two credit cards on the table.

'They're worth twenty-five points each,' he says. 'You're still short twenty-five.'

She slides across her Myer card, her blood donor card and her Video Ezy membership.

'I'm afraid they're not from a financial institution,' he tells her.

Mum's flustered. She flicks through her wallet again. She has her gym membership and a wine club card.

Will lines all the cards in a row on the table facing the Centrelink man. 'This out-of-date licence has Mum's photo on it, so that's who she is, right? You don't need to know whether she's allowed to drive, you just need it to prove who she is, isn't that right? That's her in the photo, isn't it? And all these other cards have the same name and address, so it stands to reason that she is who the licence says she is, even if it is out of date, doesn't it?'

'I don't make the rules,' the Centrelink man says. 'Do you have your birth certificate? Passport? Pension card? A council rates notice?'

'I'm not on a pension,' Mum says in a scratchy voice. She clears her throat.

Will interjects. 'Who carries that stuff with them, anyway?'

'What about a phone bill? An overseas driver's licence?' the man asks.

'So a phone bill with no photo is better than an out-of-date driver's licence?' Will is getting really mad now.

Mum shakes her head. She rubs her eyes. All Mum's points are in Declan's garage.

'This is such bullshit!' Will shouts.

'I don't make the rules,' the Centrelink man says again.

Mum takes Will by the hand. I don't think she's done that since he was five years old. She pats his hand. Her face is grey. His is red. Mum stands up. She takes my hand too and we walk out of the office.

Will sweats and swears. Mum tells him to hush. He kicks at a crumpled-up bit of paper on the floor, and swears at her, and now we're exactly like everyone else in the Centrelink office.

Outside, Mum tries to shush him again and he claims that he's all right. She still wants to take him to see a doctor. And she still needs her one hundred points.

I'd prefer to dig through boxes in the garage than sit in emergency all day, especially with Will in a foul mood, so we make a deal.

She gives me twenty dollars and I head for the bus stop.

The first part is okay. I just catch the bus that says 'City', but then as we get closer it occurs to me that the city is a pretty big place and I don't know all of it very well, just Pitt Street Mall and The Rocks and most of Darling Harbour. I know some other bits as well, because we used to have family friends at Watsons Bay, Balmain and Paddington, but I don't know where they are in relation to other parts, because I've never needed to know.

So I get off near the QVB, which I do know, because those are the only public toilets that Mum will use when we're shopping, and then I stand there looking at the bus timetables until a nice old man tells me to go up to Wynyard. I follow his directions, and I must walk ten blocks! But it isn't so bad, because the buildings are nice and there are interesting windows to look into, and I'm enjoying checking out all the office chicks' shoes. Besides, in that part of the city you don't get those people coming up and begging for money, which can happen down near Haymarket.

And then I have to wait forever for a bus. It's really longer than forever, because the whole time I'm panicking that the old man has told me the wrong thing, and I keep leaning in the doors of every bus that pulls up and asking the drivers where they're going. I have no idea how long the forever is, since I don't have a mobile phone any more, which is what I used to tell the time before, but of course that was one of the very first things to go – even before Foxtel and Mum and Dad's wine club membership.

I don't really understand how come wine club was more important than my safety, which is what a mobile is, when you come right down to it, but anyway, I finally get on the right bus and it goes back down around the QVB and up Clarence Street, so I didn't need to walk all that way after all.

The whole trip is really quite a long one, especially sitting among a whole bunch of old people and freaks. Haven't any of these people heard of deodorant? And I'm so hungry by the end, but I'm afraid to buy myself something to eat, because what if I run out of money? I could say to passers-by, 'Excuse me, I need a few bucks to catch a bus,' but nobody would believe me, because that's what all the bums say. I have to keep reminding myself that it's not just povvos, the A-listers are hungry all the time too.

The whole way to Declan's I wonder how many people I've walked past on the street who actually, truly, wanted a few bucks to catch a bus. How did they get where they needed to go? Are their mums still out at a caravan park near St Marys somewhere waiting for them to arrive?

Declan is at home having another sick day. He sees me out the window, and I can hear his feet running down the hall, but when he opens the door he's all casual. I want to hug him because I've missed him, but I'm being casual too.

'Do you ever go to school?' I ask as I saunter past him into the house.

'Do you?' he counters. 'How did you get here anyway?' He looks up and down the road for a car, but the street is empty.

'I caught a bus.' I sigh, as though it was the easiest and most boring thing in the world. I help myself to a bowl of this noodle salad thing from Declan's fridge, and explain about Mum's one hundred points through a mouthful, and soon we're squatting on the floor in the garage with the filing drawers open.

All of our most sensitive documents are spread across the oil-stained cement floor. I don't know what half of them are about, but I know they're supposed to be private. I feel exposed, kind of like I'm wearing one of those hospital gowns where your bum hangs out – Declan did keep his, by the way. He swears hospital chic is the new black. I can see myself in a scrub cap. It would look really cute with this Anna Sui smock dress that I have. Had.

I tell Declan about the night in the hotel. He loves the story about the French hairy nipples at the pub. He can't believe I didn't tell him about the hairy nipples thing from the beginning.

'Because you would have demanded proof that my nipples aren't hairy!' I say.

'True,' he concedes. There's a pause where I wait for him to say, So are they? but he leaves it.

I tell Declan how Mum has taken up smoking, about the whisperer, and how they beat up Will. I told him about how they stole Will's clothes, and pantsed me in the laneway. Declan's face scrunches up.

'I did that to a kid. Aiden Farmer, his name is. He's a little pain in the arse, and one time he was walking along the promenade in front of me. It's this second-storey walkway that goes from B Block to C Block, and it's glassed in, so you look down into the Junior Quad. I fully pantsed him and then pressed him against the glass so everyone below could see. So they put me on this "program". Every Tuesday morning I had to go in with the chaplain and talk about empathy, so then I stopped going to school on Tuesdays. They changed it to Mondays, so I stopped going on Mondays too. The chaplain asks me questions as if he's trying to find the reason for me being such an arsehole.'

'Well, it was an arsehole thing to do.'

'You think I don't know that?' Declan glares at me. 'But the whole thing happened in about five seconds and I've been on the program for months now. You'd think we could all move on.'

I flick through the folders in the filing cabinet. 'How come it's going on so long?'

Declan grimaces. 'The chaplain says I have to keep going until I agree that I sexually abused a younger boy, and I won't, because I didn't.'

'Yeah, you did.'

'Pantsing isn't sexual abuse. It's only sexual abuse if you touch it.'

'You did touch him. You pulled his pants down. You made him do something against his will.'

'I didn't touch his thingo. And I didn't get off on it either. It wasn't sexual, it was just normal abuse, and if you don't want boys to do that, then you shouldn't put, like, a thousand of them together, and only acknowledge the ones that are good at contact sports.'

'Okay, whatever.'

Declan is getting shirty, so I open the next drawer. 'If you had asked me to guess why you hated school I would never have picked that,' I tell him. 'You look more like the pantsee to me.'

'You're welcome to try.' He grins.

It doesn't take us long to find Mum's passport. It's with mine and Will's, but Dad's isn't there.

'He would have needed it to get to New Zealand,' Declan reminds me.

I stare at the spot where his passport should have been. 'He must have slipped his passport in his pocket and then crept out, leaving his pregnant wife and two sleeping kids. Nice.'

'Classy,' Declan adds.

'This sucks. He should be here. I can't believe we let him off so easy. I'm going to ring him.'

'How are you going to ring him?'

I pull out the drawer above. This one has bills in it. They used to be filed in order by date with receipt numbers written in the top corner in my mother's small, neat handwriting, but for the last few months they are just shoved in. They have big red stamps on them. OVERDUE!

Declan takes a handful of phone bills, and we flick through them till we find the month before Dad left. We're looking for mobile numbers called during the day. That would be when Dad called the Heather woman.

Declan stops. 'What about this one? This number has been called a lot. Five minutes, then twenty-three minutes, then ten minutes. I know this number. Where do I know it from? Look, I can say it without even looking.' He rattles it off twice. 'Why would you have a number on your phone bill that I know so well?'

'Maybe it's in an ad? Maybe it's Pizza Eatza?'

He keeps repeating the number. He makes a song of it, until I crumple up an old envelope and throw it at his head. 'Why don't you just ring it?' I ask.

'I thought we were after the number for this Heather woman? I've never rung her, so that wouldn't be it.' He flicks the bill over and looks at the back. 'My mum has this big thing about the phone company ripping us off. When the bill comes in she goes through every number with a ruler under each line, and she writes down numbers she doesn't recognise in a little book that she keeps in her handbag. How weird is that? I've seen her ringing numbers to find out what they are, which is stupid because then on the next bill, her calling the number will come up as a two-second call, and then she'll be all suspicious of that. Sometimes I think she needs a job.'

'Let's try this one.'

Declan hands me his mobile.

Suddenly there's a voice attached to this Heather person, who had been merely a concept. In my head she's mid-twenties, blonde and goes to the gym, because that's what all home-wrecking secretaries look like, isn't it? But she doesn't sound like that. Heather must be older. She just sounds tired.

I put on the face that my mum used to call bolshie – back when Mum said things, before she was the chainsmoking, monosyllabic, trailer-park lady. I say in a bolshie voice, 'I wanna talk to my dad.'

Heather doesn't say Who is this? or any of the things I had been preparing myself for. I just hear her cover the mouthpiece and then after a few moments my dad's there.

'Yes, Jenna-Belle, what is it?'

I take a deep breath. 'You can't just answer the phone with "Yes, what is it?" as if we saw each other half an hour ago – as if I'm a nuisance.'

Then I told Dad about the sheriff. I skipped the part about our siege. I also skipped the part about the hotel, and went straight to the part where the whisperer was clinging onto the side of the caravan like a monkey. I told him what they said. I used the swear words. I told him how Willem was the squeaky wheel.

My dad didn't speak, but I could tell he was there because he had a whistle in his nose that came through the phone. That made me all choked up in the neck, because when I was small and my dad had a whistle in his nose, I used to ask him to play me a tune. He always did, and it was always 'Good King Wenceslas'.

With my choked-up voice I told him about the passport and how I had pictured him creeping out past his children and pregnant wife.

'What do you have to say about that?' I said. 'What are you going to do about it? Are you just going to pretend we don't exist?'

There was a space where his nose whistled for a while.

'And besides, yelling at the woman from the electricity company is not being proactive. A squeaky wheel is not proactive. It's the opposite, because if it had been taken care of properly, then it wouldn't be squeaky, would it? You know what would have been proactive? If you'd bought a generator, or windmill, or something.'

'Jenna-Belle, you need to understand something important,' Dad said. 'After you were born I had a vasectomy.'

'A what?' I said, but I knew what that word meant. 'No . . .'

So now Dad's lying around on the lounge crying while Mum gave me the little-brother-or-sister speech made a bit more sense.

'They can come undone, you know,' I add.

'It didn't come undone.'

'Oh.' I hang up the phone and sit for a while cross-legged on the floor not saying anything at all, until the suspense sends Declan insane.

'What did he say?'

'Dad had the snip.'

Declan stares at me. 'Then who . . .?'

'Yes, that's what I want to know,' I interrupt.

After that Declan and I did something that I'm not ready to talk about yet.

19
TEXTS

'It's got to be Bryce Cole,' Will says in a low voice.

We're sitting on the edge of the pool splashing our feet in the water. I've just told Willem about Dad's little procedure. The light reflecting off the water makes crazy patterns on Will's squinting face. There are a few women with mini-bogan children down at the other end. Our swimmers are in Declan's garage, otherwise we'd be in the pool.

Mum has taken her points back to Centrelink on her own.

All the way on the bus back to the caravan park I'd been thinking and I decided that Bryce Cole was not the father of Mum's baby. Where would Bryce Cole have met my mother? They don't have a single thing in common. Well, they do now. They're both povvos.

'But why bother pretending? Surely not for our sake?' I say. 'And besides, they're just not lovey with each other. They're more like siblings.'

I know lovey. Declan gave me his mobile when I left and he's written lovey text messages for the last three hours from Messenger on his computer. He started out all about how he was a slave to his silent love for me, but now he is free. Then he realised he could use medical metaphors. I think he thinks it's poetry. He's still fixated on Hansen's disease, and some of the imagery is pretty ripe.

I cud liv w/out my legs
Bt I need my hands
2 rip out my & give it 2 U

It was freaking me right out, so I turned the phone off and stashed it at the bottom of my bag, under Dad's t-shirt and the pinch pot.

'If it's not Bryce Cole, then who?' Will asks.

'I don't know. Maybe it was someone from work.'

Will keeps a wary eye out for those other boys, but we haven't seen them yet. They're probably off playing hacky-sack with kittens.

Bryce Cole left a message for us at reception. He's coming over later. He said he'd take us somewhere for dinner. I'm hoping he had another good day at the track and will take us somewhere nice.

'If it is him we could confront them and maybe he'll stay over.'

'Better still, we can go and stay wherever he's staying,' Will says. 'Where do you think he stays?'

I had wondered about that myself. I bet he sleeps in the car.

'But if we do confront Mum then I'll have to admit that I rang Dad, and then explain that I actually rang Heather.' I think about it. 'It might be worth it. I don't want to stay here another night.'

Will grunts.

I'm so used to thinking of Dad as the bad guy, but now I don't know who cheated on who first. I think it was Mum. She's the bad guy and we're with her. If Dad's the good guy, then he's supposed to save us. We should be with him, shouldn't we? Bryce Cole seems to be doing all the saving, such as it is, but I know he's not the good guy. Maybe there aren't any good guys? It's a depressing thought.

I tip forward, land in the water with a splash and let myself sink to the bottom. When I pop out of the water Will is shaking his head. 'You're an idiot.'

I reach out my hand for him to haul me out, but when he takes it I jerk with all my strength and Will falls into the pool next to me. It's the oldest trick in the book. I can't believe he didn't see it coming.

Neither of us gets out though. It's nice and cool. I hope our clothes will dry before it's time to go out for dinner.

Bryce Cole has a friend who owns a Chinese restaurant in Parramatta, so we go there for dinner. The restaurant is closed, but there are some Asian men sitting at a table at the back. Bryce Cole knocks and they let us in. A waiter sets the three of us a table. She gives us forks and spoons instead of chopsticks as if we're ignorant chumps, and brings us a plate of piping hot spring rolls. She also brings us hot chips and pours soy sauce over them. The whole time she's watching a television. I say thank you, and she flicks me a look. There is no religious flourish or bowing.

After a quick greeting, Bryce Cole joins the others at the back table. There's a clatter as one of the men tips out a box of small tiles. They shift them around on the table, mixing them up, and then start building a tiny wall.

'What are they doing?' I ask.

'I think it's called mahjong,' Mum answers. 'It's kind of like cards.'

'Let me guess,' I say. 'It's a gambling game.' Now I understand why he took so long to get our food that night.

When we finish eating I turn Declan's phone back on. There are twenty-five text messages. They start out lovey and then get more urgent. Thankfully he has reintroduced vowels into his repertoire. The most recent one reads: ur obviously dead. I'm calling the police.

I text back: Not dead. Eating.

Declan answers almost immediately. OMIGOD I have been so worried! u haven't said anything 2 me since u left. Is everything okay? I mean about this afternoon.

I really, really don't want to talk about this afternoon. I'm racking my brain trying to think about something else – anything else – to talk about, and this is the crux of the problem, because the beauty of my relationship with Declan was that I didn't have to think when we talked. Hey wot did u get in that pol pot assignment anyway? I text back.

After a minute or so I receive a new message from Declan. Something that random was def a code 4 something. Have u been kidnapped? If u want me 2 call the police DON'T answer this msg.

I put the phone on the table and cross my arms. Bryce Cole yells out, 'Mahjong!', which I presume means that he won. One of his opponents pushes his wall of tiles over and mutters what I imagine to be a curse in Cantonese.

No code, I text. I'm switching off now. Nighty!

Instead I watch the telly with the turned-off phone in my pocket. I feel so mean, because it's not all Declan's fault, but I don't want to talk about it or even think about it, and the more I don't want to, the more he does, and I just wish he'd back off.

I turn the phone on again and browse through the numbers in his phone book.

A new message comes in. OK. I just want U 2 no that U R the most beautiful girl in the whole world & I hope U hav sweet dreams. Even if they R not about me.

I write back. Hey wot was that number that U recognised from our phone bill?

After a minute he sends it through. I browse through the numbers in his mobile – it's there. I quickly punch in his number. When he picks up I say, 'That's your dad's work number.'

'Why would your dad be ringing my dad?' he mutters.

'Maybe they were having an affair,' I joke.

'Hang on.' Declan is rifling through pages. While I wait I look across the table. Mum is staring at me, her face drawn, gaunt. She looks trapped.

'This bill isn't for your home phone,' he tells me. 'It's your mum's mobile.'

20
DIRTY
LAUNDRY

Will's learning how to play mahjong. I hope he's not getting himself in debt to the Triad. Mum's gone outside to have a cigarette. I'm so glad that she did that, because she knows I know about her and Declan's dad, and if she stayed we would have to talk, or not talk, and even the not talking is communicating – like when . . .

Before I get into that it's important to understand that I was very young, and I thought I was in the house alone. Unsupervised childhood is a time of experimentation. There's nothing weird about that.

I'd been watching that show Scrubs, and the Carla character told the Elliot character that if she wanted to have an orgasm she should use the washing machine. She didn't elaborate. Anyway, an ad came on and I just happened to notice that at that exact moment our washing machine was starting the spin cycle. I was curious, and so I went into the laundry and hopped up onto the washing machine lid.

I didn't get a thrill. I tried various postures. Still nothing. And because I thought I was in the house by myself I got quite inventive. Then my mum comes around the corner with the hamper from the upstairs bathroom and I'm engaged in a lewd act with her whitegoods.

What do you say?

It would have been best for me if Mum had laughed. Believe me, I have re-run various alternative scenarios in my head. If she had laughed, then I could have laughed, and it could be a kind of silent in-joke – an awkward moment that we shared. Later she could have even teased me about it, because in a way that's almost like saying it's okay.

It would even have been better if she'd said, Silly duffer, that's not how you do it. Actually, no. That would have been worse. To this day I have no idea how you get off on the washing machine – not that I dared try again, but in the months afterwards I hypothesised.

Instead Mum looked shocked and disgusted. Then she turned away, murmuring, 'Excuse me,' the way you do when you inadvertently open the door when someone is on the loo. She could at least have had the courtesy to forget about it, but even now, years later, she never says the words 'washing' or 'laundry' to me.

I know rationally that what I did was in the normal range of behaviour, but her black-banning any words that might in any way bring up associations kind of makes me feel as though she'd caught me boiling puppies.

All that self-esteem stuff she talks about is such total crap, because instead of offering me a way out when it really mattered, she left me with my shame and mortification. That's what she does. Mum opens her mouth, and in all the places where she can confide something real, she says I look good in pastels, or she admires my spatial awareness, and when she doesn't open her mouth at all she's reminding me that she remembers every single stupid and humiliating thing I have ever done.

Mum comes back inside and sits at the table next to me. We're in a closed Chinese restaurant in Parramatta with some guy we just met, who is totally ignoring us anyway. Tonight we'll go back to the caravan and possibly be beaten up.

I take a deep breath. Although she knows I know, I'm still having trouble putting the words together, mostly because I can't picture her being intimate and messy, and intimately messy with someone, and especially not with Declan's dad. My mum wears rubber gloves to take the rubbish out. When they talk to each other, which I have hardly ever seen them do, they talk about council rates, concrete stencilling and options for solar pool heating.

But I need to say something. I think about when the boys brought the cot in to the garage, and how Declan's dad freaked out. And then I go further back and remember when Declan's dad brought her home from the hospital, and how she clung to him. I remember Dad telling me that it was complicated. What did he say? He felt 'intensely conflicted'. No shit!

I want her to tell me, or at least not not talk, in that pineapple-on-your-head way.

She's sitting at the table opposite, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand and pretending to watch television.

I say to my mother, 'Hey, do you remember that day with the washing machine?'

She blanches. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

In the car on the way back to the caravan park I have this brainwave. If Declan's dad and my mum got together we could just go and live in Declan's house, which is almost exactly the same as our house – same colour, same shape, same room configuration almost – just different fittings, and a few metres to the left.

Declan's dad earns a packet. I could go back to school. A school. You couldn't drag me back to Finsbury. In essence our lives would be the way they were.

Almost the way they were.

It seems hard on Declan's mum to be shunted out of the picture, but once she knows that her husband is a cheating bastard, surely she would want to leave? Mum already knows that he's a cheating bastard, and besides, it turns out she's a cheating ho, so they'll suit each other.

Alternatively, Declan's dad could leave and we could move into wherever he goes. I think a terrace in North Sydney or a unit in Kirribilli would be nice, and also close to work for him. Mum too, assuming that she'd go back full-time. She needs to build up a nest egg for when Declan's dad cheats on her and his new girlfriend moves in with her kids.

It would solve two problems. Declan would be my stepbrother, and so he could never hit on me again. It would be icky. We could pretend that the thing that happened didn't happen, but not in a taboo laundry way. Once every ten years we could say, 'Remember that day? Ha, ha, ha. Wasn't that a silly one-off mistake? And now here we are related.'

And that would be the end of it.

See, what happened was, I was at Declan's after the whole ringing Dad business, and we were talking about other things, the way you do. Declan said that he had been looking at vaginas on the internet, but he needed to see a real one, just for scientific research. I said I thought the photos were probably pretty accurate and the real ones were most likely much the same, but he said they weren't in three dimensions. Anyway this back-and-forth went on for a while, and we laughed a lot. Eventually I agreed to flash him for half a second in the name of science. Except it didn't end up being for half a second.

When I went over to Declan's house he was listening to my story, and he was saying all the predictable things. He was genuinely interested in everything that I said. He'd missed me, because he loves me. He made me laugh.

When I saw him again after being apart I'd missed him too. It's as if when we first met we were two separate shapes but over time our personalities have rubbed together so much that now they're moulded into two complementary shapes – like a jigaw. Yin and yang.

This morning it was so nice to fit into the mould again, and be in a safe happy place with someone I trust, and to be able to laugh at the things that happened, to be able to cry, and have Declan be genuinely, sincerely, earnestly . . . and all that.

So that's why it happened.

And also it felt good at a time when everything else felt bad.

The big question is, what do we do about it? Almost the second we stopped I realised it was a really, really dumb thing to do. Especially when he said the thing he said afterwards, which was meant to be a joke, but wasn't.

Who knew this was how events were going to unfold? Even twenty minutes before, if someone had suggested it I would have said pfft! If I'd known beforehand I would have worn nicer undies, for starters.

Now the mould is broken because our whole relationship had been based on him making dirty suggestions and me turning him down, and neither of us believing that it could ever occur. Those are the shapes we are.

Were.

Now I'm sad, angry with myself, and scared too, because the one thing I could rely on in my whole life was the shape of Declan.

But here is the magic solution! We just tell Declan's mum about the affair, like tipping over the first domino.

This is what I'm thinking as we pull into the caravan park – dominoes. The car stops. Bryce Cole, Mum and Will are all staring at our caravan, which has these weird black and grey blotches around the windows like smudged mascara. While we were away having Chinese, someone has set the caravan alight and then hosed it down.

21
THE PLOUGH
AND PEANUT

On the inside, the caravan is not as burnt as I imagined, but it still leaves a hollow feeling in my gut. Everything stinks like an old ashtray. There's also the acrid odour of melted plastic, and some kind of fuel. Not petrol, but maybe paint thinner, or kerosene. Someone came in here to wreck our stuff. Why would they do that? Why do they hate us so much? They don't even know us.

The beds are soggy. There are beads of sooty water leaving trails down the wall and in pools on the uneven floor. My green shopping bag is damp. My dirty clothes on the top are sooty and smell really bad, so I take them out.

You'd expect that people would be milling around, and maybe there was excitement a while ago, but by the time we came back it was old news.

The guy from the neighbouring van seems disappointed that we weren't in there at the time. 'Yeah, I told the firies that I hadn't seen yous, and they went in there just in case. Then they washed it down, and that.'

Nobody saw who lit it.

'But your mum smokes, eh,' the neighbour says. 'Yeah, I told the firies that.'

The woman from reception says there aren't any other vans available, and she gives us a look, as if we were the ones who lit the fire – as if we're trouble.

So now I have the chlorine-smelling clothes I'm standing in, my Dad's daggy old t-shirt and the stupid pinch pot.

Bryce Cole knows a pub where we can stay for thirty-seven dollars. It's called the Plough and Peanut. I know where that is. As the crow flies, it's not that far from our house. We used to drive past the Plough and Peanut to get to the swimming centre where Will and I used to go to for lessons.

He parks at the back and goes into the bar. We wait in the car. A couple come stumbling down the laneway. They stand in the corner of the car park right next to our car. They're giggling, murmuring and tearing at each other's clothes. I'm trying to pretend I can't hear what he's saying to her. He hitches up her skirt. She wraps a leg around his waist. She's trying to undo his belt.

Mum leans across the driver's seat and turns on the headlights. The couple stare into the light, stunned for a moment, and then they laugh as they scamper back down the driveway the way they have come, hand in hand.

Soon Bryce Cole returns with a set of keys. We climb the rear stairs. There is what looks like a heavy duffel bag draped across one of the lower treads, but as I step over it I realise it's a sleeping man.

Classy place, the Plough and Peanut.

At the top Bryce unlocks a door and we walk into a hallway that smells pretty similar to the caravan we just left. We take the third doorway on the left and then we're in a narrow room with two sets of bunk beds. The sound of the crowd is louder here. There's a set of French doors covered in dusty lace curtains at the far end of the room. I unlock the doors and peek out. There's a throng of drinkers on the verandah outside the doors – some standing against the rail, some sitting around tables. The bloke nearest the doors holds up his beer to me, and slurs, 'Hey, ho! Whaddya know?' I shut the doors again.

'They're right outside!' I say to Bryce Cole.

Mum sits on the edge of the bunk bed, holding a pillow up to her face and sniffing it experimentally. She puts it down and straightens the slip.

'We have a roof over our heads,' she tells us, but I can tell she's trying to convince herself. When I sit next to her she picks lint off my collar, and runs her hand down my arm, straightening my cuff. 'This is a great colour for you, darling.'

I blink at her because it's the same outfit I've been wearing for almost three days now.

'We could go for a quick drink downstairs,' Bryce Cole suggests to Mum.

'I'm not really dressed for it.' She smoothes down the front of her 'blouse'.

'Rubbish! You look like a princess,' he tells her with a wide smile.

'Where are the toilets?' I ask. I can feel the chlorine on my skin. I'm looking forward to a hot shower. I'll sleep in my Dad's old t-shirt, which is still clean, if a bit smoky.

'Down the end of the hall,' Bryce Cole says. He throws me the keys. I slip them into my pocket and walk down the hall and around the corner. I see the bathroom. It has a sign on the door that says 'Room Guests Only'. It turns out I don't need the keys after all. There's a line of women coming out the door and down the corridor.

I join the queue. The woman in front of me turns around and grins. Her make-up is smeared across her face. Her lipstick has come off and she has a ring of dark lip-liner around her mouth. Her eyes are bloodshot.

'How's your night going?' she asks me.

'I've had better,' I tell her.

'Really? I'm having the best time. I've just met this guy. His name's Trevor and he's really hot!'

We shuffle forward. I can see into the bathroom. There are women at the mirrors powdering their faces and fluffing their hair. One woman rearranges her boobs. Right there in front of everybody!

There's only one toilet cubicle, and next to it what I guess is a shower, since it's covered by a curtain. I'm not going to have a shower, not with all those people, but at least I can get changed in there. I leave the queue and pull the curtain back. I quickly take off my top and slip Dad's shirt over my head.

All of a sudden the curtain whips back and a woman stares at me. Her face looks kind of green, or it may be the light. Then her cheeks billow out. I have just enough time to think, Oh, no! and stagger backwards, and then she chucks all over me. It soaks through the shirt, and I pluck it away from my chest. It's warm and it stinks. I reef the shirt over my head, even though everyone can see me standing there in my bra.

The woman is at my feet. Her back arches as she chucks again. I shuffle back from her as far as I can. She tries to push chunks of spew into the drain.

'Are you right? Do you need me to hold your hair back?' asks a dark-haired lady.

'Pooey!' says the woman behind her, waving her hand in front of her nose. 'You can smell it, eh?'

I put my old chloriney shirt back on and take Dad's shirt to the sink. I rinse it as much as I can, and then I hang it up on the shower rail. I don't think anyone is going to steal it. I wash my face and my arms up to the elbows. Running my tongue over my teeth, I realise that I haven't brushed my teeth for two days. How disgusting.

The loo flushes and a woman comes out. After she washes her hands she looks around for a towel, sees Dad's shirt and dries her hands on it.

Fabulous.

When I get back to our room Will is on his own. He's picked the bottom bunk. He's on his back with his hands under his head.

'Don't get under the covers. I did a minute ago, but I got itchy. I think there might be lice,' he warns me.

It gets better and better. I climb up to the top bunk and lie on top of the covers. We can hear the blokes outside the door. I pick out one voice among the hubbub. He's right outside the door. It might be the Hey Ho man.

'You're such a good mate to me, and I never say this, right? I mean, we could all die tomorrow, right? I never tell you that you are such a good mate. I love you, man. No, truly.'

'They've been going on like that for the last five minutes,' Will tells me.

We listen to them in silence. Then Will says, 'Did you throw up?'

'No.'

I think again about Tanner Hamrick-Gough and her yacht club. She always used to say that she was going to borrow her sister's ID and go out clubbing. I thought it sounded cool, but now I wonder if it's just drunk blokes talking crap, lining up for the toilet for ages and then having people vomit everywhere. Why would you want to do that?

I close my eyes. I can almost feel the tiny little insects crawling on my skin. I'm itchy but it could be my imagination. It could just be the chlorine, or the spew. My teeth are furry, I need to pee and I'm getting hungry again.

When I used to get nervous before an exam, or when those Finsbury girls were being horrible and I was having trouble sleeping, I used to imagine yellow flowers bobbing in the sunlight. That's what I'm doing now. Sunflowers, daisies, daffodils. Bright yellow. Bobbing in a breeze. Blue sky. I can feel the gentle paralysis of sleep washing over me.

And then the French doors fling open. They bang as they hit the walls and I sit up so fast my head spins. The Hey Ho man sprawls across the floor. I mustn't have locked the door properly. Hey Ho has leaned on it, and it's given way.

'Christ on a bike!' he shouts. 'I fell right through the bastard!' He turns to see us staring at him. 'Sorry, man,' he says in a stage whisper. Hey Ho's on his knees, but he's still holding onto his beer, which is slopping on the carpet. 'Sorry!' He pauses to take a slurp. 'It's still good.' He heads back to the verandah on unsteady feet.

Will shuts the door behind him. He shoots the bolt home and shakes the handle to make sure it's fastened. He lies down again and we listen to Hey Ho recounting his adventure to his mates. 'Straight through the bastard! Didn't spill me beer, though.' Laughter.

I fall asleep.

When I stir, it's not the sound of drinkers, but a rattling snore from the next room. Someone, I'm guessing an old man, is drawing his breath in three parts – eck, eck, eck. There's a long pause, and then he lets it out in one long whistling phew!

It's driving me mad. I put the pillow over my head, but I'm still listening through the fabric. I wish he would just shut up.

Then it does stop. Eck, eck, eck . . . Nothing. I wait for ages. Thank God!

I close my eyes again. The next time I wake up it's to softer voices. Bryce Cole is in the doorway. A shaft of light crosses his face, leaving half in shadow. There's a woman with him, but it's not my mum. I look across and see Mum asleep in the top bunk opposite.

The woman is squinting into the gloom. Her skirt is too short and her heels are too high. She trips a little and giggles into his shoulder. 'Oh look! There are children in here. I thought you were joking. Let's go back downstairs.' She takes his hand.

'The bar's closed,' he whispers. 'I've got to get some sleep.'

'The Railway Hotel will still be open. We've got at least an hour.'

Bryce Cole extracts his hand from hers. 'Maybe some other time.'

'C'mon. Just one drink. It'll be fun!'

He hesitates.

'It's just at the end of the block. I'm buying.' She takes his hand again and he steps out of the doorway. The door shuts quietly behind them. I hear the woman giggle again as they head down the corridor.

I hate the Plough and Peanut. I hate that old man next door. I hate the tarty woman and I hate Bryce Cole.

22
ROMANCE
ME

It must be some poor bugger's job to clean the bathrooms because in the morning it's orderly and stinks of bleach. There's no little bar of soap in a cardboard box like you get at a hotel, so I jump out of the shower halfway through and nick a handful from the dispenser over the sink. Willem must have done the same thing in the men's, because when I sit next to him at the table downstairs afterwards I notice that he smells like toilet cleaner too.

We have a big fry-up breakfast in the saloon. There are three bain-maries along the bar and one of those toaster machines with the conveyer belt. It's all greasy, the cold eggs float in a mysterious grey liquid, and I don't know how fresh their oil is, but the bacon is good.

The barman turns on the racing channel. He's literally hosing down the floor behind the bar. Bryce Cole is staring at the screen, watching the racing from overseas that was on overnight, so it's just race after race after race, with no lead-up or talking or anything. In the ad break Bryce Cole takes the race guide out of the paper.

It rattles as he flicks it, making the page stand up straight. Then suddenly he holds it up close to his nose, frowning. He puts the paper down on the table.

'Romance Me is running today,' he begins.

Will helps himself to another serve. I'm quite worried about how many baked beans he's having. He's chanting 'protein for my body' in an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent. It's ten o'clock already. I'm not sure what we're doing for the rest of the day, but I make a mental note not to sit next to Will.

Bryce Cole continues. 'The sire was a colt named New Romance – this must have been about six, maybe seven years ago now. Sensational animal. Incredible breeding. He sold for a record amount as a yearling at the Magic Millions. Everyone was watching him. Then he falls in his first race and fractures his shoulder. Tragic! So the owner rests him for twelve months. Complete rest. Hand-walked every day, bathed in milk and rose petals, the whole bit. Then after a year he's declared fit to serve. He covers his first mare. The fracture's not healed. He dies on the job. Can you believe it?' Bryce Cole shakes his head. 'Everyone's in uproar. But!' Bryce Cole holds up his finger. 'The mare's in foal.' He taps the race guide. 'This is the filly. Romance Me. Started slowly. They didn't even barrier trial her until she was three. Everyone's forgotten about the whole thing, but this is it! This is the big one.'

I shake my head. They're all 'the big one', aren't they? I turn to Will to roll my eyes, but he's standing there, silent, with his plate of prrrotein for hiss bardy and he's buying it!

'How much money do you have left, Mum?' Will asks.

She's rifling through her wallet. 'A little over four hundred. You really think it will win?'

'I've been waiting for this horse for seven years!' Bryce Cole says, his eyes alight.

'And how much would we get if we put the whole lot on?' Will asks.

Bryce Cole scratches his chin. 'Let me see . . . times by . . . hmm – six thousand four hundred.'

'Okay. And how much will we get if this horse loses?' I ask. 'Zero. Zilch. Doughnut.'

The cleaning man saunters in. He has a rag over his shoulder, an apron with a bottle of Ajax poking out the top of the pocket and he's rubbing his hands with a Chux. He's a million years old and bow-legged.

'We got oursells a dead-un,' he tells the barman in a drawl.

I dig Will in the ribs. 'Did you hear that?' I whisper. 'Did he say a dead-un? He said a dead-un! Oh my God! It's the eck, eck, eck man!'

I can't believe I actually heard someone die.

I saw a dead person once on the side of the road. There had been an accident, and there was a body on an ambulance gurney all wrapped up in a white sheet. We were all in the car together – our whole family – and nobody said anything. Mum was driving. She had to concentrate, because they'd set out witches' hats and three lanes were all merging into one.

If Tanner and Sapph were here they'd want to hold a seance. They were so big on supernatural stuff. Sapph was in love with John Edward, even though when he talks it looks as though somebody else's lips have been superimposed on his face.

'Six thousand?' Mum repeats. She starts flipping notes onto the table.

'What shall we do in the meantime?' Bryce Cole glances towards the poker machines in the corner.

'No way!' I say, standing up. 'Did you hear what he said? Somebody died. I can't stay here!'

'We can go to the park,' Bryce Cole suggests.

Around the corner there is a park next to the railway line. It has massive palm trees in a row and a cement path winding through the middle. A few of those dirty, grey birds with the long beaks slouch around the bin. Bryce Cole lays out overlapping sheets of his newspaper on the ground and we sit on them as though it's a picnic rug. Mum has her legs curled up under her. She lifts up her face to drink in the sun and she has a little smile on her face as if she's on some beach holiday. Bryce Cole lies down. He interlinks his fingers over his chest and dozes.

To pass the time I send texts to Declan, explaining how somebody died and we left the scene, which will look suspicious, and now we're waiting in the park till it's time to spend our very last money in one go on a stupid horse, and when we get back to the pub all the CSI guys will be there, and we'll be taken away for questioning.

Come over, he texts.

Yeah, right, how am I going to do that? Walk?

Remembering my domino theory from last night, I ask Declan if he's talked to his mum yet. That will work even better! If Declan tells her about the affair, she can run screaming from the house, and then after my mum loses all our money we can go over there to stay, and I won't even be the messenger. Not that Declan's mother can have a much lower opinion of me. Assuming we don't get arrested for killing the old man.

Declan hasn't talked to her. That's too bad.

I watch Bryce Cole lying there on the newspaper. I wonder what will happen to him after this is over, because he's not coming with us to our new life. I can't see Declan's dad wanting Bryce Cole around. Besides, there is no way Mum would be friends with him if she wasn't desperate. He's like the friend you make when you're on holidays and never see again. He's the girl you sit next to when you picked a dumb elective class. He's the opposite of a fair-weather friend. He's a cyclone-weather friend.

Half an hour before the race we go back to the Plough and Peanut. There are no CSI guys. Mum lays out all her fifties on the table. I'm relieved to see the corners of a red and a blue note still in her wallet as she slips it back into her handbag.

Bryce Cole places the bet with the barman. Then we wait. Mum orders a glass of wine. Everyone's staring at the television. The car keys are in the middle of the table. I place my hand over them.

A guy in an ambulance uniform comes in the front door of the pub with a gurney. He's here to pick up the body.

'Oh my God, he's going to bring a dead body right through here!' I say. 'A dead body!'

I assume that it will be wrapped up like the body on the side of the road. I kind of hope that it isn't, because I want to see it. I tell myself that I want to pay my respects, given that I was probably the last person who ever had a thought about Eck Eck Man, even if it was a mean thought, but really I'm just a busybody. Also, I want to tell Declan that I saw the dead body, and I know he'll ask very detailed questions.

As the guy pulls the gurney up the stairs it makes a clinking, rattling noise. I lean back on my stool, but I can't see it.

'Shh! Here we go,' Bryce Cole says. The barman turns up the volume. They're pushing the horses into the starting gates. Mum wriggles on her stool. Her eyes are glittery.

On the television the starting gates swing open and the horses bound out.

'Away. Chan Caesar out quickly, Suziewantsa Grey up near the fence, then Go Bravo, Romance Me getting in behind them, Chinchilli Tilly, Bikabunda, Miss Linky and here comes Furious George as they settle in. Romance Me tucks into the rail.'

'Go, you bastard!' Bryce Cole shouts.

'Run!' shouts Mum.

I wrap my fingers around the keys and slide them into my lap. Nobody notices.

'They come around the turn, Bikabunda down the outside, Suziewantsa Grey has broken through, Furious George stays with him. Romance Me forced wide. Then Bikabunda, Go Bravo, and Chan Caesar drops to the tail of the field. Romance Me leaps forward and takes the lead.'

'Run!' Mum has her fists bunched up as if she's a boxer.

I stand up and edge towards the door, pushing it open.

'Across the back of the course they go. Romance Me two lengths ahead but Furious George is catching her. Then Suziewantsa Grey. Bikabunda, Go Bravo presses on, goes around the outside, Romance Me still leads but Suziewantsa Grey is . . .'

The door swings closed behind me. I jog to the car park. There's an ambulance in the driveway but I'm sure I can squeeze past it.

In the car my heart is hammering in my chest. I practise the stop and go pedals before I start the car. I turn the key and sit there for a moment chanting inside my head. Right go. Left stop.

It's easy. I can do this. I did it before. I probably drove further before.

Will opens the passenger door, startling me. 'Where are you going?'

I haven't had a chance to tell him about Mum and Declan's dad. I quickly fill him in.

'Shit!' he says. 'What did she say?'

'She didn't say anything.'

'So it might not be true.'

'Are you coming or not?'

Will slides into the passenger seat and slams the door.

'Don't you think it makes sense? You know, the whole car-pooling thing? How they were always home late?' I ask Will.

I haven't had a chance to be mad about that yet, but I am now. Before we were even povvos Mum stopped cooking for us – or at least collecting our takeaway orders. As far as I'm concerned, feeding your children really is the least you can do for them. Telling them that their hair is shiny and that they have a pleasant singing voice doesn't really make up for that.

Will sets his jaw. He wants the dad of Mum's baby to be our dad. He wants everything to go back to the way it was before.

I put the car into reverse.

'Don't you think I should be driving?' Will says.

There are no other cars in the car park, so it's easy to swing around, although as we head towards the ambulance Will feels the need to direct me. 'You're right. Heaps of room on this side.' I inch the car down the driveway.

'Wait, wait, WAIT!' Will screams. 'There's a pole.'

'Why didn't you say before?'

'I didn't see it before. You need to go right, go right. More. More.'

I'm looking out Will's window, looking for the pole. I can't see it because it's below the window. I stretch up, trying to look over the side and when I turn around I'm nose in to the ambulance. I thump my foot on the brake.

'You're going to have to get out,' I tell Will.

He climbs out and squeezes around the front of the car. 'Okay, go back, go back!'

I put the car in R and creep backwards.

'STOP!'

Now I'm nose in to the ambulance and bumper in to the wall of the Plough and Peanut. 'Dammit!'

'Where are we going anyway?' he asks.

I explain to Will about my plan to tell Declan's mum and how she will run screaming from the house.

'You think they're still in a relationship?'

I remember the spider-look on Declan's dad's face when she hugged him after he brought her home from hospital. But that face he pulled didn't necessarily mean it was over between them, did it? Maybe she was stepping on his toe? She could have had bad breath.

Around the corner comes the gurney with the dead body strapped to it. The ambo can't get to the back of his ambulance with the dead body because Bryce Cole's car is in the way. 'Is she stuck, mate?' he asks.

'Yeah,' Will says in his deep, old-enough-to-drive voice. 'Dunno what she was trying to do.'

Traitorous mofo!

'Do you want me to have a go, love?' The ambo calls out to me.

'Thanks.' I take my foot off the brake and open the door. The car is still in reverse. The car hits the Plough and Peanut. 'Oops!'

The ambo thinks I'm an idiot. He pushes the gurney towards Will. Will holds it by the rail on the side. He's holding on to a dead body and he's not even looking at it.

The ambo gets in. He does about a hundred-point turn. He's got it straight and then he drives forward, smiling at me. The ambo thinks I'm hot. A hot idiot.

'Stop, stop, STOP!' Will calls out, but it's too late. There's a loud crunch as the ambo hits the pole with Bryce Cole's car. He rolls the car back a bit. He's sitting up high in the driver's seat, trying to see what he's hit. Will lets go of the gurney and it rolls forward, down the other side of Bryce Cole's car. I can hear the metallic screech as it slides along the metal.

'Oops!' I say, grabbing the gurney. It's heavier than I imagined. I can't help myself. I poke the body through the sheet. It's cool, and firm, but at the same time rubbery, like a big ham.

'Geez! I'm sorry, sweetheart!' The ambo climbs out of the car to inspect the damage.

'That's fine!' I tell him, smiling back. 'I really am in a bit of a hurry, so I'll take over now.'

As I slip into the driver's side, I hear a voice from the back door of the Plough and Peanut.

'JB? Are you guys out here?' Then a pause. 'Where the hell is my car?'

'Get in, Will!' I hiss.

'I should give you my number – for insurance,' the ambo says.

From the thumping sound I can tell Bryce Cole is taking the steps two at a time.

I carefully put the car in D and head down the driveway.

'Jenna-Belle!' Bryce Cole hurtles down the driveway behind us. His face is purple.

There's a gap in the traffic. 'Go! Go! Go!' Will shouts.

I press the accelerator and the car bursts forward, ka-thumping over the kerb. I swing the steering wheel wildly and the tyres squeal. Once I get the car straight I punch Will in the arm. 'Don't yell stuff!'

Bryce Cole stops on the footpath, bellowing at us.

Well, I did tell him that if I could drive I would steal his car. He was stupid for teaching me.

23
PINEAPPLE-HEAD

Declan is not keen on my plan to break up his family and replace it with my own, but then he's not staring at the prospect of staying at the Plough and Peanut again tonight. He'll be staying in his nice warm neighbourhood, so he's not making an informed vote on the subject.

He's got me by the arm as I march down their hallway. If we were in a cartoon there would be smoke and flames coming from his heels as I drag him along the carpet. He's muttering objections.

Will is shuffling along behind us. He was going to stay in the car, but I think he wants to see, like I wanted to see the body.

Declan's mother is sorting flowers on the dining table. I'm going to tell her. I'm nervous and I know if I don't say it straight away I won't say it at all, so I just say it.

'Your husband is having an affair.'

She doesn't look up. She's stripping leaves off daisy stems. A few seconds pass and my heart is hammering, because this is a really big thing for me, breaking up a marriage. It's not a decision I've taken lightly, and it's not even completely self-interested because she'd want to know, wouldn't she?

Maybe she didn't hear me. I could just run away, but where am I going to run to, exactly? Perhaps I didn't actually say it out loud. I was sure that I did! There's no harm in saying it again, just in case.

'Your hus–'

She interrupts me. 'I heard you the first time.'

We're all just standing there in Declan's dining room. Willem has shrunk back against the wall. I can just imagine him with a lampshade over his head, pretending he's not there. Declan is standing next to me, holding his breath.

I don't know what to say next because I'd been expecting a bigger response. I'd pictured her crying and running out of the room to pack her stuff. Or his stuff. Somebody's stuff needs to be packed. There's enough room in this house for all of us, but it would be awkward.

Declan's mum keeps stripping leaves.

Eventually she looks up, smoothing a stray hair back from her cheek. 'It's over now.' She offers Declan a watery smile. 'Nothing for you to worry about.' She holds the bouquet of daisies up and carefully adds one flower to each side. She twists it this way and that, making sure that it's even.

'Your husband is . . .'

'All husbands do that, Jenna-Belle.'

And now I understand what it is about my mum and Declan's mum. The affair is the pineapple on both of their heads. Declan's mum doesn't check the phone records every month because she thinks Telstra is ripping her off; she rings her husband's girlfriends. She's always known. She lives with it because she doesn't have a job, or any skills, and she doesn't want to be a single mum living in a caravan park.

Declan's mum has decided it's better to have one person be indifferent and disrespectful to her than everyone.

24
BARBS

Bryce Cole has just climbed out of a taxi at the front of Declan's house. He shields his eyes and looks through the window of his car, but I have the keys in my pocket.

When he sees Will and me walking down the path his lips draw into a thin line. I pull my hand out of my pocket and he snatches the keys from me. 'Get in the car!' he growls. 'In the back!' he qualifies, as Will heads towards the passenger side.

Mum's at the end of the road, waiting on the corner. She didn't want Declan's mum to see her. She's embarrassed.

'What happened with Romance Me?' Will asks.

'It won,' Bryce says.

I look at Mum.

She whispers, 'The jockey was underweight.'

'So you lost? You lost it all?'

'The horse won the race,' Bryce Cole says.

'But it didn't,' I protest. 'It was disqualified.'

'It won by three lengths! What do you know? You weren't even there!' Bryce Cole rubs his lips. 'It won by three lengths.'

We drive west in silence.

After about twenty minutes Mum lights a cigarette and ashes out the window. The ash whips back into my face. This morning I thought the least your mother could do is feed you, now I think the very least your mother can do for you is not to flick hot ashes into your face.

Declan's mobile rings in my pocket.

'Your dad was here! You just missed him!' Declan says to me. He's out of breath. 'He went to the house, and then he almost got back in his car, but I ran out there. I tried to make him stay, but he was looking for you. He's only just gone.'

'What did he say?'

'He had this whole story about how he applied for some job. I told him to meet you at the Plough and Peanut.'

'Yes, I know. In New Zealand. And we're not at the stupid Plough and Peanut!' I yell at him.

'He didn't say anything about New Zealand to me. He just said he applied for it ages ago. Where are you?'

I look at the back of Mum's head. Do I tell her? What do I do? Even if we go back to the pub, Dad will have gone by the time we get there. He might leave a message for us. But what if he doesn't? Should we drive all the way there and all the way back again just to find out something we already know?

'Why do you even care? Just shut up. Anyway, I've only got two bars of battery left.' I snap the phone shut and turn it off. I'm mad at Declan because my plan didn't work, and because of some other stuff about him, which I haven't worked out in my head yet.

It hurts that Dad doesn't want us to go with him. I need my parents to want to be with us, even if we don't want to be with them. I remember one Valentine's Day when I was about twelve, Mum and Dad were talking about going away for the weekend. They asked us if we thought we were old enough to look after ourselves overnight. Will and I told them that if they went away we'd have a party while they were gone. We were just kidding, but they didn't go. It was a joke, but I think we made it because we didn't want them to want to go somewhere without us.

I wonder if Tanner Hamrick-Gough feels like this every time her parents go back to Dubai? Apparently they think she gets a better and safer education here. Tanner says they can make more money over there, and that's probably true, but why can't her parents get a job here – at least until she's finished school? It's only a few more years. There must be some point at which they think the relationship they have with their kids is more important than having stuff, otherwise why would they have kids in the first place?

Unless they thought kids would be fun, but it didn't work out that way and now they're completely jack of them, which is even more depressing.

We stop at a petrol station. Bryce Cole puts in ten dollars, which takes the gauge from empty to nearly empty.

Just on dusk we pull up outside a brick house in a suburb I've never heard of. The woman who answers the door has drawn-on eyebrows so high on her forehead that she looks permanently shocked. Maybe she is shocked. She's got drawn-on lips as well. She's made herself a little cupid's bow.

This is a much cheaper option than surgery, I think. You just draw your features where you want them to be. You could change your mind, too. You could move your eyebrows to suit your mood.

She's got long fake fingernails and lots of bling, but the pantsuit she's wearing looks neat and comfortable. It's something that even my mum might have worn around the house – Sportscraft leisurewear.

'Bryce,' she says, leaning back against the doorframe and crossing her ankles.

'Hi, Mum,' he says.

As soon as he says it I can see the resemblance.

'Who's this?' she asks, looking my mum up and down.

'This is Sue, a friend of mine.'

'And did you father these?' she asks.

Bryce Cole blushes. 'No, Mum.'

Bryce Cole doesn't have to say anything. She gets it; she's just making us work for it. She raises her real eyebrows and her drawn-on ones disappear into one of her wrinkles, so then she has no eyebrows at all, and she stops looking surprised and just looks weird. She stares at us.

A woman with disappeared, drawn-on eyebrows, who lives west, is judging us.

After a long silence she says, 'You can come in for a cuppa,' then she turns around and I follow her down the hallway.

We walk though a crowded lounge room and into the kitchen. I lift a stack of well-thumbed women's magazines off the dining chair and sit down, then make a space between a variety of hideous, unfinished craft projects on the table for my elbows. There's an upright piano under similar domestic debris. It's dusty and smells like old people. I wrinkle my nose at Will.

Mum settles into a rocker in the corner.

Barb Cole spoons instant coffee into cups. She nods towards Mum, asking if she wants a cup. Mum stares at the instant coffee tin in Barb's hand. I've heard her say she would prefer to drink dishwater than instant coffee, but after a pause she sighs. 'Sure. Why not?' Mum turns to Bryce Cole. 'Where . . . um . . . where were you thinking of staying?'

'Not here, that's for sure,' Barb scoffs.

There is a long awkward pause. Will, Mum and I trade glances. That's what we're here for, right? To stay? When I look at Bryce Cole's face I can see he was going to raise it more subtly, maybe just by waiting until Barb had gone to bed and then dossing in the corner.

'Mum, it would only be . . .'

'No way,' she interrupts. 'I told you the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.' She holds her arm up and the jewellery jangles. She glares at Mum. 'What did he say to you? "Oh, it's all right, we can go and sponge from the old lady. She's always good for a tenner." Well, I've told him!'

'Mum!' Bryce Cole pleads.

'I didn't mean to impose. We'll go now.' My mum stands up. 'I'll pay you back as soon as I can,' Mum tells Bryce Cole.

Barb arches her real eyebrows again. If she knew how it looked she wouldn't do it. 'You owe him money? That's a new one.' She thumps the coffee mugs on the table in front of each of us, and the thin brown liquid slops over the side. 'I've made the coffee now, so yous might as well drink it.'

'No, really. Thank you for the trouble, but we must . . .' Mum begins.

'Drink it!' Barb says.

We drink our coffees. I don't even drink coffee normally. It's disgusting, but I drink it because Barb is glaring, and I don't want to embarrass anyone.

'What did you think, coming back here?' Barb shakes her head. 'Not that I ever expected better – not from the very beginning. Couldn't find your arse with two hands and a flashlight.'

Bryce Cole rubs his face.

'Has he ever told you about his "business"? Yeah, he used to drive around the country, picking up other people's crap! No wonder he went broke.'

Bryce Cole is standing in the doorway. He drums his fingers on the frame. Why doesn't he say something? Why doesn't he just tell her to piss off?

'Good. For. Nothing.' She sounds out each word.

Mum stands up. 'I'm going now. Thank you for the coffee.' She stalks down the corridor.

We all follow.

My mum thinks Barb is a bad mother for saying Bryce Cole is good for nothing, but really, Mum always says that I'm good for everything, and that doesn't mean she knows me any better than Barb knows Bryce Cole.

But then I don't know my mum at all. I don't know my dad. I don't know Declan, either, and I thought I knew him best in the whole world.

See, the reason I was freaking out at the Chinese restaurant and why I didn't want to talk to him was, when we got to the end of what we did, Declan said, 'Shall I pay you now?'

It was a joke. He was picking up on what I said way back when we were in the alley – I said that the girls on the internet get paid to do what they do, but it also kind of wasn't a joke, because Declan knows that I don't love him that way. Besides, he was still a little bit cranky from when I said that what he did to that Aiden boy was sexual abuse, and he'd been looking for a way to get me back.

We were lying on our backs side by side on his bed, and I felt like there was a big weight on my chest, so heavy that I couldn't breathe. All of a sudden we weren't even any more. He was Declan – the same as he had always been – but I was the povvo skank from the caravan park who gives it up.

It makes me mad because I never thought Declan would buy into all that old-fashioned 'girls should be all shy and withholding' crap. If we're truly equal then girls should be allowed to have desire too. Girls should be allowed to experiment without feeling shame and humiliation, and like it's always their responsibility to stop everything.

I want to know how come in this century that part is still my job.

It also made me want to punch him, because he made me feel bad so casually. He didn't even notice that he'd hurt me.

And now I understand why, if you live in a caravan park – with no roof space and no possibility of treasure – and you see some other guy about your age looking down his nose at the way you live – some guy with designer clothes and straight teeth, who stands up straight with square shoulders because he's going to get pretty much whatever he wants without having to try very hard – you'd want to goad him out of his caravan by saying rude things about his mother and sister, and then punch the crap out of him.

25
JUST LIKE
J'ADORE

Bryce Cole takes us to the Bowling Club. I've never been to a club before. It looks like an airport, with lots of glass, empty spaces, bad commercial carpet, and announcements over loudspeakers. People sit on the plastic chairs at plastic tables as though they're waiting for their flight.

In a vast alcove, poker machines trill and burble like Fisher-Price toys on steroids. There's a TV screen showing the keno numbers. Bryce Cole is eyeing off another corner where there's a TAB counter.

Will, Mum and I navigate through the tables into the bistro. There's a special on – roast beef for six dollars. Mum stands in line. When we get to the end the woman in the white smock and comically oversized chef's hat says, 'Kitchen's closed.'

'What about those potatoes?' Mum asks, pointing to the warming trays.

The humungous-chef-hat woman has this look on her face as if Mum has just asked for a rat salad.

'We haven't eaten for a while. My kids are hungry. I know it's a bother . . .'

The humungous-chef-hat woman glowers at us as she shoves the potatoes in a bowl.

'Is it possible to have some gravy? Perhaps some sauce?' Mum asks. 'I'd really appreciate it.'

The chef lady turns the lights off. 'Kitchen's closed.'

We take the dried-out, lukewarm potatoes to a table. The cutlery has been packed away so we eat them with our fingers.

Bryce Cole has been standing in front of the tellies with his arms crossed. Now he slouches over to the chair opposite Mum. 'Listen,' he begins.

No conversation that starts with that word is ever going to finish well, unless you're birdwatching. If someone had told me a year ago that I would wish I was birdwatching, I would never have believed them. Back then I thought we were happy.

I was pretty happy. I had everything I wanted, and if I wanted something more I could just throw a bit of a tantrum, or say I was thinking about being anorexic or something like that. I had no idea that my happiness was actually dependent on my parents being happy too. I'm thinking now about the small changes I could have made, say for example if every now and then I could have agreed to do the stuff that Willem is so passionate about, we could have done that as a family – like I did when we were at that Wombat Crossing place. I should have encouraged my parents to go away for Valentine's Day.

I'm not saying it's my fault that Mum had an affair and Dad left, but Will and I did make it harder for them. We always expected to be entertained. Sometimes when you get caught up in the entertainment part you don't think about what happens behind the scenes.

It's like when I went to the races. I watched those horses race for weeks and weeks, and I didn't think about them as living, breathing, alive things until I saw them tied up in tiny boxes. I let Bryce Cole tell me all about how they wanted to run. Of course he's going to say that. What would it make him if they didn't?

'I'm out of ideas here,' Bryce Cole says, drumming his fingers on the table. 'I can always sleep in the car, but . . .'

'You're dumping us?' I ask.

Mum starts crying again. Not proper crying. Her eyes are just leaking from the sides. She's not even wiping her face. The tears are dropping down and making dark splotches on her shirt.

Bryce Cole ignores me. 'I don't have kids. I've thought about it, but with my lifestyle, it's just never really been an option. Far be it from me . . .' He takes a deep breath. 'This is no way to raise kids, Sue. You really are going to have to find a way of getting it together.'

'You're dumping us because you're worried about us? We have to get it together? What about you?'

'I didn't sign up for this, JB,' he protests. 'I was just looking for a place to stay. I didn't even want to know you, really. It was just supposed to be for a couple of months.' He stares at me. 'I know I'm a mess, all right? But you guys are just making it worse for me.'

'How can things get worse for you?' I ask.

He huffs. 'I don't want to have to think about how what I'm doing might affect someone else.'

We sit in silence.

Mum wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and gives Bryce Cole a watery smile. 'Thanks for all your help. It's been a real pleasure knowing you. All the best for the future.'

Bryce Cole pushes his chair back. He stands up, pats his pocket and then he walks out of the club.

Will's not even watching. He's staring at the keno, shaking his head.

'All the best?' I wrinkle my nose.

'What would you have me say, Jenna-Belle?' She smiles at me. She's twisting her wedding ring, except she's transferred it to her right hand. Her engagement ring isn't there. She's sold it.

My mum's sneakers were always white. Her laces were always tied. She put on make-up every morning before breakfast. She wore mascara and powdered her nose even on a Sunday when she wasn't going anywhere – when she would recline on the lounge in her ironed tracksuit flicking through Country Style magazine with her manicured fingers. She always looked like a woman with a plan. That's what I want to ask her: What's the plan, Mum?

So far we've followed Bryce Cole's plan, but it's not a very good plan. In fact, it's not much of a plan at all. We just joined his crazy conga line as he crashed from one crisis to the next, but at least we were moving.

Mum has no plan. She just has a crumpled blouse, little spiky bits of hair that stick up because there's no product in it, and an orangey-coloured lipstick that she bought on sale once, but never wears because the colour doesn't suit her. She's not wearing J'adore, she's wearing Just-Like-J'adore.

I'm starting to panic, because we have no money and no plan.

Mum's still waiting for me to answer her. I want her to stop being so polite. I want her to say, Actually, Bryce Cole, you can kiss my butt! And you too, Mister Centrelink! And then pull some freaky kung-fu moves. Hai-ya! That's what I want to see. Some double-you-oh-em-ay-en.

Instead I have the cloying smell of Just-Like-J'adore in my nose and it's making me feel ill.

'I just think you could have . . .'

'Could have what, Jenna-Belle?' she hisses. 'Lost my temper? Sworn at him? How would that have helped? Where have you seen that work?'

She's staring at me. She's so still.

All she has is us. Will and I are her Albert Bear, so I bite my lip and blink away the tears that have sprung into my eyes.

26
JOKE
JEOPARDY

When the club closes we find ourselves on the footpath of a main street lined with closed shops. We walk past a saddlery and a shop that advertises 'Bait and Ammo'. We must be way, way west. Perhaps Wyoming . . . in 1868.

There are some kids on the other side of the street. They have a wheelbarrow, and are taking it in turns to pitch each other out of it. The three of us bunch up together and walk faster. Around the corner is a KFC. We walk towards the light, but it's closed too.

We walk past a knick-knack shop. There's a pile of dirt and wilting potted flowers strewn on the ground out the front, which explains the wheelbarrow.

Up ahead there's a bus shelter. Inside, I lean my head against the poster, crossing my arms over my chest against the cold.

Willem walks backwards into the empty street. He's watching for a bus.

'Where will we . . .?' I start.

'Into the city,' Mum interrupts. 'There'll be more places open there.'

I take out Declan's phone and stare at it. 'There must be someone we can ring. What about those friends of yours who lived in Paddington? The Fredricks? Was that their name? Or the Perrys in Balmain.'

'I called everyone there was to call long, long before this,' Mum says quietly.

I close my eyes, trying not to shiver. My toes are going to sleep, so I stomp my feet. What is it about forever and buses?

'Let's play Joke Jeopardy,' I suggest. 'I'll start. The punch line is "a carrot".'

'What's orange and sounds like a parrot?' Will guesses. We've played that one before. 'Okay, "To get to the other slide".'

'Why did the chicken cross the . . . playground?' I ask.

'That's an easy one.' Will grins. 'I know! "Because they'd be bagels".'

I'm thinking. Something to do with dogs? I hear an engine and open my eyes, but it's just a truck. 'I give in.'

'Why don't seagulls go to the bay?' He laughs.

'That's dumb,' I say, yawning. 'All right . . .'

'"Burple!"' Will interrupts. He bounces up and down on the spot, probably to keep warm, but also because he's really getting into it.

'I don't know – what colour is my brother?' I suggest.

'"A private tooter",' he says, chuckling.

'That makes no sense!' I complain.

'No, it's a new one. You were being too slow. Can you guess it?'

A man walks towards us in the gloom. He has his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his chin dipped into his jacket. We stay silent until he has passed. A taxi creeps along the road. The driver looks at us through the passenger window, but Will shakes his head, and the taxi speeds away.

'You want to have a go, Mum?' I ask.

'I'm thinking.' She leans her head back against the Perspex with her eyes closed. 'Okay. The punch line is "Only one, but it takes ten visits".'

'What is a . . .' I start.

'No, it's a light bulb one,' Will says. 'How many somethings to change a light bulb.'

'Something about a doctor?' I offer. 'I give up.'

'How many light bulbs does it take to change a chiropractor,' Mum says.

Will and I giggle. 'Don't you mean the other way around?'

'I said it the other way around,' she says.

'No, you didn't!'

'What are you talking about? I know how to play this game.'

'Never mind,' I say.

Finally a bus pulls in. It's empty. Will and I climb the steps and choose a seat. Mum pays the driver with a handful of small change.

'Okay, one more. The answer is, "I didn't".'

Neither Will nor Mum says anything for ages. I think they've stopped playing when Will says, 'That's not fair. It's too open. There's no way we can get it.' He's sitting with his back against the window and his legs stretched out across the seat.

'Wanna hear the joke?' I ask, smiling.

'Tell us,' Mum says. She's closed her eyes again. Her head rocks gently from side to side as the bus moves. The driver slows down, swerving in towards the kerb, but none of the passengers at the stop wave it in, so he turns back into the road without stopping.

'Okay, there's this vampire bat, right? And he's been out hunting and he comes in late and he has blood all over his face, and the other bats come over and they say, "Where did you get all that blood?" and he says, "Rack off! I just want to go to sleep." They keep hounding him, "Where did you get it? Where did you get it?" So eventually he takes them out and they fly along for ages, and then the bat says to the others, "Do you see that tree over there?"'

Will looks at me, waiting, and then he starts to laugh. '"I didn't." Ha! Ha! That's a good one, JB.'

No one ever called me JB before Bryce Cole. I wonder if it's going to stick?

We head down the ramp and onto the motorway. I remember this part from when I caught the bus before. There are big concrete slabs on either side of the road. Ahead there are concrete overpasses crisscrossing the way. I'm so tired that my bones ache, and my eyes are scratchy.

I pull out Declan's mobile and turn it on to check the time. Ten past two. The phone beeps, telling me I have a message. I dial the message retrieve number and listen.

Jenna-Belle, this is your father. I spoke to Declan just now. I was hoping you would be here. I wanted to . . . Then there is a gap where the message breaks up . . . See me in school holidays if I moved there. Well, it's . . . More breakup. Your mother would have to . . . Another gap . . . And neither of you are going to like that, but I think we can make it work. It's probably best if we don't live together, given the circumstances, but . . . Static . . . To give back the rental car this afternoon, so I'll be catching a train . . . Another break . . . We can talk about it in person. There is another gap, but this time it's Dad, because his nose whistles. Finally he says, I made a mistake, sweetheart. Please forgive me.

27
THIRTY-EIGHT
DOLLARS AND
SEVENTY-FIVE
CENTS

It's just after three when we climb off the bus on George Street. We walk a few blocks until we find a coffee shop that's open. We slide into a booth at the back.

'How much money do you have left?' I ask. Mum reaches into her pocket. She pulls out a handful of notes and coins. She's making little piles on the tabletop.

Watching her, I decide that you should never have to count out all the money you have in the world in small change.

'Thirty-eight dollars seventy-five.'

The coffee boy comes over with his notepad. Mum orders a tea for herself and two hot chocolates. After I drink mine I have trouble keeping my eyes open. We take it in turns to lie along the far side of the booth and nap. It feels so good to close my eyes. I'm sure I won't be able to sleep with the hissing of the coffee machine, the cars outside, and people talking so loudly as they walk past, but next thing Mum is nudging me under the table with her foot. I sit up just as the coffee boy comes over.

'Something else?' he asks. Behind him the light through the doorway is greying.

Mum orders another tea.

It's Will's turn to sleep. I sit next to Mum, spinning my pinch pot on the tabletop.

Mum grabs it. 'Stop it. Or you'll drop it and then . . .'

Then I will have nothing in the whole world except the clothes that I'm standing in – and they stink.

I slide out and collect a newspaper from the table by the door. Mum and I split it. I've managed to get the employment section. I turn the pages half-heartedly until I see Mum has the section with the crossword and the sudoku, so I abandon my half and read over her shoulder.

The coffee boy brings us a pen. He slides two cappuccinos across the table.

'We didn't order these,' Mum tells him.

He waves his hand dismissively. 'It's on the house.'

'You are too kind,' Mum says. I think she's going to burst into tears, but she holds it together.

I scoop the chocolate off the top with the spoon and Mum drinks the coffee.

When the streetlights turn off it gets busier. A woman with her hair braided into two long plaits rushes in, hangs up her coat and wraps an apron around her waist. She pushes through the saloon doors behind the coffee machine, and soon plates of bacon and eggs, and toasted sandwiches appear. The waiter takes them to the tables. It smells great and my stomach rumbles.

A lady sits in the booth next to us with a plate of Turkish toast and mushrooms. She sprinkles the top with cracked pepper and then cuts the toast into little wedges. She presses the mushrooms onto the wedges with her fork and then eats the toast with her hands. Some of the mushrooms spill over the edge. The woman lurches over her plate to catch the stray bits.

Mum elbows me. 'Stop staring!'

As soon as she says it I realise that I've been leaning over the table with my mouth hanging open.

Will stirs. When he sits up his hair is all sticky-up and he has a seam down his cheek from where he's been lying on the edge of the cushion.

We give up on the sudoku and Mum flicks through the rest of the paper.

'What time is it?' Mum asks.

I switch on Declan's phone. 'Just after eight.'

She heads off to the QVB to see if the toilets are open yet.

While she's gone, Will and I make up a game. When a new customer comes in we guess how much money they have left in the whole world.

'That guy took a redundancy package and his mother just died.' Will nods towards a paunchy middle-aged man in a navy suit. 'He paid off his house and bought himself an Audi. He still has thirty thousand to invest in shares, but he's waiting for the right moment.'

'No, he has a company car,' I say. 'He bought the Audi for his wife. His daughter started a double degree at Macquarie this year and he's paying for that up-front.'

I watch a woman in her twenties with straight brown hair and a funky dress. 'She's just finished her degree. She still lives in a share house, but she's earning real money for the first time. She's saving up for a new car. She has eight thousand already.'

'She did have eight thousand, but she went to Fiji over the summer with her uni girlfriends, and she spent the rest on shoes,' Will tells me. 'She has three hundred in her account, tops.'

'That guy still lives at home,' I whisper. The thin young man jingles change in his trouser pocket. He wears a tie and has his sleeves rolled up, but he's wearing red suede sneakers. 'He's single, but he's been in love with the same girl in the office for ages. He's too scared to ask her out. He goes out drinking with his mates all weekend. He has about three thousand in the bank.'

Will shakes his head. 'He doesn't drink. He wants to be a professional triathlete, but he's not quite good enough. He dreams of owning a yacht one day and doing a round-the-globe trip, but he has an old car that breaks down all the time and eats up all his savings.'

When Mum comes back she looks better. She's washed her face, but her eyes are still puffy. Then it dawns on me that she didn't sleep. She watched over us instead. In my head I see images from all the wildlife programs of mother big cats – leopards and cheetahs watching out while their kittens rest. It makes me teary just thinking about it.

My mum is quite cat-like. Even through all of this she's maintained her dignity. I have only seen inaction – a kind of numbing denial. But maybe she knew what was going on all along?

Maybe she was copping it on the chin?

I rub my eyes and pick up the paper that I abandoned before. I flick through, and then I see the ad. I can't believe it. I lay it down flat.

'Hey! Listen to this: "Long-term, live-in manager wanted for Wombat Crossing boutique holiday cabins. Check in and out, answer phone enquiries, take reservations, cleaning. Live on site, free accommodation. Would suit family or couple. Easy drive to local schools and shopping centre. Small remuneration package."' I stare at Mum and Will. 'It's perfect!'

Will snatches up the paper. 'Awesome! It would be like being on holiday all the time!'

Mum's wearing that face again. She would hate it. I know she would, but it would be a home, and we'd all get used to it. It would be quiet, and I could go to a normal school, and be a normal person with a roof. We could stay in one place and be a team.

'This is not the sort of job you take on a whim,' she begins.

I pull out Declan's phone and thrust it into her hand. 'Ring them!' I say. 'Ring them now!'

'They have long-drop toilets, Jenna-Belle. Remember?'

'But it's a place to stay!' Will argues. 'I'll help out, I promise. I could do stuff before school, and on weekends. It would be ace!'

'Tell them we can start now! Today!' I implore.

Mum looks at Declan's phone. Will and I have our eyes glued on her face.

She punches the number in. She licks her lips. 'Ah yes, good morning,' she says in her smooth phone voice. 'I was just reading the paper from . . .' She flicks to the cover, and winces. 'Ah. The important thing is that I saw your ad. It leapt out at me because our family have been to Wombat Crossing on a holiday, and it was so . . . memorable.' She pauses. 'Really? Is that so? Uh-huh. Thanks.'

She drops the phone back on the table.

'Well?' I ask.

She sighs. 'They found someone already.'

28
TWENTY-FOUR
DOLLARS AND
FORTY-FIVE
CENTS

At nine a new waiter arrives. The coffee boy pulls a jacket on and leaves. Nobody has asked us to leave yet, or order something else, but they will. Then what? There's only so many things you can do in the city for free.

'We can go to the art gallery,' Mum says. She's been thinking about it too. 'Would you like that?'

Will nods, but not enthusiastically. 'Maybe we could sneak in to a movie? They only check your ticket once. After that we could see two, or even three, and it would be warm in there.'

'But it would be stealing,' Mum says. 'Besides, how are we going to sneak in? The art gallery might have a video installation, which is almost like a movie. It might even be better than a movie – more meaningful.'

The look on Will's face makes me stifle a chuckle.

The mobile rings. I look at the screen before I answer. It's Declan.

'Talk quick, I only have one bar left,' I say.

'You were weird afterwards,' he says, starting in the middle of a sentence, like we always do. 'And I think it might have been what I said. I was joking, you know. It was a stupid joke, but I didn't know what to say, because it was all my dreams come true. You're my dream girl, Jenna-Belle, and some days I can't believe that you even want to talk to me – that's how perfect you are.'

I don't say anything.

'Are you there?'

'I'm here.'

'I can't believe you're going to be in a whole other country.' He sighs.

'What? I'm not going to another country.'

He laughs. 'Yeah, it's just like here except they talk funny. Do you think you'll get an accent?'

I frown. 'I don't think so!'

'I suppose you're on the train now.'

'Train?' He's lost me.

'Hey, maybe your dad could give me a job too? I could help in the kitchen. Does the place even have a kitchen?' He laughs. 'I didn't even know they had wombats in New Zealand!'

'What?'

He pauses, like he's talking to a slow child. 'Your dad. He told me yesterday all about how he applied for that job ages ago at the Wombat Hotel, or whatever it's called, and they only just rang him to say he could start right away. And then you said, "Yeah, I know. In New Zealand." But I didn't know they had wombats in New Zealand.'

I can feel all the blood draining from my face. 'Declan, I've got to go.'

My fingers are trembling when I dial the retrieve messages number, so I have to do it three times. I hold the phone up to my ear. Now that I'm sitting still – not travelling under the concrete overpasses – Dad's message is clear.

Jenna-Belle, this is your father. I spoke to Declan just now. I was hoping you would be here. I wanted to tell you that I got a job managing that place Wombat Crossing, I don't know if you remember it. You kids were happy there and I thought maybe you wouldn't mind coming to see me in school holidays if I moved there.

Suddenly, I have a pain in my throat, as if I've swallowed a tennis ball. It must show on my face because Mum says, 'What is it?'

I put my finger on my lips. 'Shh!'

Well, it's a bigger job than I realised. But I hoped . . . maybe we could all do it together. Your mother would have to do room cleaning, and some book work. You kids would have to pitch in answering phones, working in the tuckshop, and neither of you are going to like that, but I think we can make it work.

The tears are running down my face now.

It's probably best if we don't live together, given the circumstances, but there are two cabins side by side. I thought that might do us for the first little while. I have to give back the rental car this afternoon, so I'll be catching a train down there tomorrow morning at nine-twenty from Central. Maybe the three of you could meet me there. We could all travel down together and then we can talk about it in person. I made a mistake, sweetheart. Please forgive me.

Beep. End of messages. Press 1 to listen to this message again, press 2 to save. . .

I press 1 and hand the phone to Mum.

I watch Mum's face as she listens. Her face is red. She puts her hand over her mouth.

'I can't believe it,' she whispers.

'What is it?' Will yells. He leans in so he can hear too. His mouth is getting wider and wider. All of a sudden they stare at each other. Will grabs the phone out of Mum's hand and stares at the screen. 'Stupid thing's gone dead! What time is it?'

'It's after nine already!' I say.

We scramble out of our booth, pushing past customers on our way through the door. On the street the three of us run along the footpath. We have to skip and jump through the jostling pedestrians. At the traffic light Will hops up and down on the spot.

Two blocks down we can see the clock tower above Central Station. Ten past nine.

'We're never going to make it,' I moan.

We're lucky with the next lights. Will runs ahead on his long legs. Mum pants behind me.

'This is why you shouldn't smoke!' I say to her.

'I know, I know!' she puffs.

We run up the slope, past the tram. We're close to the entrance now. I tilt my head back, looking at the clock. Fourteen minutes past.

'We're not going to make it!' I gasp.

'Yes, we are!' Mum's got her second wind. She sprints past me up the hill and towards the front entrance. I lean forward and pelt after her. I haven't run so fast in years. I wonder when I stopped? My lungs are going to burst. It feels great!

Inside Mum races towards the ticket office. Out of breath she asks for one adult and two children for the nine-twenty southern train.

'There's no nine-twenty,' the man says.

'What are you talking about, you stupid man?' Mum shouts.

The ticket man shakes his head. 'I'm sorry, lady, there is no nine-twenty. There's one at twelve-ten. I can put you on that instead.'

'My husband is on that train! Don't you get it? We're in a hurry, you idiot!'

My mother is making a scene. Will and I stare at each other.

She goes on. 'It's quarter past already. You're making us miss it!'

A voice comes from behind us. It's Dad. 'Sue! I'm here. Sue!'

He has one of those tall, waxed cardboard cups with a domed plastic lid. He's standing there casually drinking from the straw.

Mum turns around. Her face goes white.

'It's my fault. I read the timetable wrong,' he says.

'Bastard!' Mum shoves him, and he has to take a step back to steady himself. 'How could you do that to me?'

Dad stares at her for a moment, then he offers her the cup. 'Slurpee?'

29
WOMBAT
CROSSING

The train pulls out of the station and we're on our way. I lean my forehead on the window and close my eyes. Alternate flashes of grey and vermilion cross my eyelids as the sunlight shines on my face through the trees. I turn the pinch pot over and over in my hand.

I know that I smell and my head's a bit fuzzy because I've had too much Slurpee, but I can put all those feelings of discomfort in a little box in my head and padlock it, because now we are going somewhere.

It's just overnight. We're coming back tomorrow to pack our stuff. We're not getting removalists this time. Dad said we have to hire a truck and do it ourselves.

I wonder if the caretaker's cottage at Wombat Crossing will have a flush toilet. The other cabins had lamps that you have to light with a match and a gas stove in the kitchen. I hope that if the shower is still a bucket, it's a bigger bucket than the one before. There won't be any television.

There used to be a common room where guests could play board games. It had a swap library system filled with dog-eared, trashy novels that I will enjoy. There was lots of sports equipment too.

Dad says my job will be to strip the beds and organise the linen service. Mum and I will mop and clean the bathrooms. Dad will split the wood and then take a big trailer around to the different cabins. Will can stand on the back and throw logs in piles near the fireplaces, and use the ride-on to mow around the cabins. Mum will do the accounts at night. Dad will take the bookings.

Dad says the owner is sending a National Parks and Wildlife officer to teach us how to catch snakes, herd goannas and safely move possums. Mum is going to hate that!

Dad said he'll stay in one of the empty cabins so we can have the caretaker's cottage, to be with Mum, except we haven't told the owner that. The owner thinks we are a normal family who live together.

I don't know how long we're going to stay at Wombat Crossing. I don't even know if I'm going to like it, but it's a good place to start again.

Maybe Declan could come and stay with us sometimes. He'll hate it, but if my mum can adjust then Declan can too. He'll get his licence soon. If he gets his own car then I can make him drive back home when he's annoying me.

Besides, I want to know what kind of a camper he is, because there's no way I am going to South America with him if he's going to complain the whole time.

Will gets up. 'I'm going for a walk.'

'Don't go far,' Mum says.

'I'll go with you,' Dad says.

We watch them lurch down the aisle as the train sways.

Mum runs her hand over the shoulder of my top. 'This is a good colour for you.'

'You said that already.'

'Well, it's still a good colour for you.'

We stare out the window.

After a while Mum nudges me with her elbow.

'What were you doing in the laundry that day, Jenna-Belle?' she asks quietly, under the hum of the engines.

'What do you think I was doing?'

She shakes her head. 'I've always wondered, but I thought it was private and I didn't want you to be embarrassed. Were you . . .?'

'Yes!' I blurt.

'And is it . . . effective? That way?'

'Not really,' I laugh.

As I look out the window I run my finger around the jagged edge of my pinch pot.

I think our family had so much stuff that we got buried in it and couldn't see each other any more. Then we had nothing and could see each other too much. There has to be a balance somewhere.

I'm looking forward to Wombat Crossing. We won't be the same people we were last time we were there. We won't even be the same people we are now, but I'm glad we are all trying to start afresh together.

READING GUIDE

The following questions for classroom or reading group discussion are from the Reading Guide for Girl Next Door, which is available on the Random House Australia website.

Random House Australia Reading Guides and Teaching Support Kits are designed to facilitate reading group and classroom discussion and further exploration of the themes and issues, writing style, characterisation and plot of the book, as well as providing further information on the author's inspiration and the writing process.

Find out more at www.randomhouse.com.au/teachers

1. Alyssa has said that she was inspired to write Girl Next Door after hearing a radio program that challenged her ideas about how and why people become homeless. How did Jenna-Belle's perceptions of poverty change through her experiences? Has your perception of homelessness or poverty been challenged at all by Girl Next Door?

2. Jenna-Belle refers to the 'pineapple on everybody's heads' (e.g. p. 48, p. 52, p. 152, p. 174, p. 200, p. 231). What do you think is at the core of this idea? How do you think it contributed to the way Jenna-Belle and her family cope with their situation – and how might it have contributed to the situation arising in the first place?

3. Is Jenna-Belle a likeable character – and is she meant to be? Did your reaction to her affect your sympathy for her as the book progressed? Why do you think the author might have chosen to portray Jenna-Belle as she has?

4. Jenna-Belle's immediate family seem distant from their extended family. How might the novel have been different had Jenna-Belle's family situation been different? Do you think her family situation is common today? Is it different from, say, your great-grandparents' generation?

5. Why do you think the author chose to have Jenna-Belle narrate the story in the first person, and using everyday speech? What did Jenna-Belle's narrative voice tell you about the character – and how might the story have been different if it were told by a third-person omniscient narrator? Would elements of the story have been lost?

6. 'If I wasn't so mature and chic I would definitely want to play a game of smugglers, or vampires, or something like that.' (p. 7). Is there a disconnect between the way Jenna-Belle describes herself and what she reveals through her narration? Do you think Jenna-Belle is unaware of the space between how mature she feels she is and how mature she wants others to believe she is – or is she playing with the idea (and the audience) deliberately? Why might the author have chosen to create this effect?

7. 'Mum thought you could buy self-esteem.' (p. 11) What do you think of Jenna-Belle's mother's attitude to self-esteem? Why do you think Jenna-Belle's mother might not have offered support or communication when Jenna-Belle felt she most needed it (for instance, p. 21, p. 198)? Which characters in the book do you think actually have the worst self-esteem – and is this surprising?

8. Can you give examples of ways in which concepts such as pride and respect inform what happens in Girl Next Door – between married couples; friends; parents and children; males versus females; school peers; people from different neighbourhoods and socio-economic groups?

9. What did you think of Jenna-Belle's frustration with the different roles she thought boys and girls were expected to play? (e.g. p. 128, p. 203 and pp. 241–242). Do you agree with Jenna-Belle that gender roles can be unfair? Can you think of instances where Jenna-Belle might have made Declan 'feel bad so casually' (p. 241)?

10. Jenna-Belle encounters many new and difficult experiences throughout the novel and along the way slowly gains a broader view of the world and greater empathy for others, including those she depends upon and strangers. Do you think such drastic events are necessary to develop empathy for other people? Do you need to sometimes step 'out of your comfort zone' in order to change your views?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alyssa Brugman's young adult novels Finding Grace, Walking Naked, Being Bindy and Solo are distributed around the world and have been shortlisted for numerous awards in Australia and overseas. Alyssa has also written five novels for younger readers about a girl called Shelby and her pony, Blue: For Sale or Swap, Beginner's Luck, Hot Potato, Hide & Seek and Greener Pastures. This series has been shortlisted for a number of Children's Choice awards and was also selected for the 2007 'Books Alive' campaign. Alyssa recently published Book Two of the new Quentaris series, The Equen Queen. She lives in the Hunter Valley and is currently writing more novels for children and young adults. Visit www.alyssabrugman.com.au for more information about Alyssa and her books.

Girl Next Door – Read Now and Download Mobi

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