I started to cry then. I tried not to because I didn’t think showing weakness was going to help us any, but I couldn’t help it. Aiden’s muscles were tensing. He was on the verge of attacking, I knew. He’d throw himself at the nearest boy and start punching. It wouldn’t matter that he was outnumbered, that they would probably beat him half to death. He’s never scared, even when he has every right to be.

‘You touch my sister and I’ll kill you,’ he said. There was no tone in his voice, no sense of threat as such. It was like he was stating a fact. The temperature today may reach forty-five degrees. Australia is an island continent. You touch my sister and I’ll kill you. It made it all the more scary. One kid even took a step back.

The girl – Xena? – took a step forward instead and held up her hand.

‘Easy soldier,’ she said. ‘Huge cojones, I’ll give you that, but your brain’s nowhere near as big.’ That made all the others laugh. I didn’t even know what cojones were. ‘Brother and sister, huh?’ She put her face right up close to Aiden’s and examined him as if in search of clues. Then she did the same with me. ‘Wow!’ She whistled. ‘Twins. Something you don’t see every day.’

One of the boys, the biggest in fact, stepped in.

‘Hey, Xena,’ he said. ‘Let’s stop messing around, okay? Let’s just take them to Headquarters. Their parents will trade craploads to get them back and you know it. What the hell are we waiting for?’

Xena put a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

‘What are we waiting for, Ziggy? What are we waiting for? We’re waiting for me to give the order, aren’t we? We’re waiting for me to make up my mind. That’s what we’re waiting for.’

Like Aiden, she didn’t raise her voice but Ziggy turned away regardless. She nodded at the rest of the group and turned back to face me.

‘What are you doing here, huh? Why’d you come to the park?’

‘Someone said there were mangoes here.’ I was still snivelling, so it came out all broken.

That made her laugh. Most of the group gave a chuckle.

‘Mangoes?’ she said. ‘That’s the best I’ve heard in ages. I wish, rich kid. I wish. And what, you thought you’d just wander down here, pluck a couple of juicy mangoes from our park and stroll back to class, huh? Unbelievable.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I had no idea what I was apologising for. ‘Please let us go.’ But the other boy had scared me. I hadn’t thought of kidnapping. Why hadn’t I thought about kidnapping? Our parents were enormously rich, one of the wealthiest couples in New South Wales. Maybe the wealthiest. They’d pay a fortune to a kidnapper to get us back and it wouldn’t make a dent in their bank account. Suddenly I needed to go to the toilet. My legs started trembling and I really believed I’d wet myself there and then.