“Was that paint?” he said. For a moment, my thoughts were fast enough: I was suddenly certain what Gary Damson’s square hands would feel like, raised in anger. He leaped out, but I was taller and faster. Gathering bucket and brushes, I ran into the yard, past the house, back to the safety of the garage.

“You coward, Tina!” he shouted, voice cracking. I knew he would not follow. Mother had forbidden him the yard, back when my brothers left. Damsons respect fences.

Coward. My hands were shaking. “Hush,” I whispered to myself, until they stilled, and my thoughts were quiet once more. I rinsed the bucket, and after a while the truck choked to life and roared away. Caution was better than bravery, I reminded myself. A civilised, bone-china soul knows, as a bird does, that a heavy-footed, shouting man is a thing to be fled.

The garage was quiet, except for the scrape and slide of noisy miner and magpie claws on the iron roof, the spreading patterns of hydrangea-blue shadows, and the perennial half-whispers in the trees that did not belong to any breeze or beast I had ever seen.

I wrung out the damp hem of my skirt, dried my hands and went inside.

“Are you feeling ill, Bettina?” my mother asked me in the bright evening, pausing over her letters.

“My stomach,” I said. Unthinking, I rubbed my neck and shoulder.

“You mustn’t be ill, Bettina,” said my mother, anxious. “You are never ill.” She smiled at me bracingly. “You are a good girl. You always do what I need to be done—you must be well for that. You are feeling better, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Mother,” I said. It had, after all, only been tension. Guilt, and alarm.

She paused delicately. “I heard some … altercation this afternoon.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Her eyes were still shadowed. “Someone painted words on our fence. Not crude. Just ‘monsters.’ I cleaned it.” Looking up, I saw her watching me, eyes kind and green, her pale lashes fine as the fringe on a fern.

“And?” she prompted.

“Gary—Mr Damson, young Mr Damson—came by.”

“What did he want, Bettina?”

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “I didn’t stay to ask.”

My mother nodded. “The Damsons are no better than they should be,” she said. “Fencers.” She shook her head, as if she did not love her white fence, as if the Damsons were involved in an arcane and dubious activity. “They are not like us, are they?”

“No, Mother.”

She watched me.

“He shouted at me,” I said, to please her, and to claw my way back to the peace I had felt that morning. You always feel better when you tell the truth, don’t you? “For almost splashing paint on his truck. But he was the one who frightened me.” Odd I had not heard him drive up. What had I been thinking of?