‘Nothing,’ was what I wanted to say, but I had somehow got it into my head that it was wrong to lie to the people you love. So I told him – I knew the way I talked with my friends was silly, that the man who took the missing girls didn’t have a hook for a hand. He was probably normal, and you would be an idiot if you believed otherwise. And that’s how it would be forever – the people who hurt us would look normal and be normal, except for the one thing that meant they weren’t.

‘They are some interesting thoughts for a thirteen-year-old girl,’ he said.

‘Fourteen,’ I corrected him.

I slid closer to him on the couch and thought about how his hands would feel underneath my clothes. Onscreen, the actress spewed and I explained it was pea-soup. I wanted him to understand that you could fool other people but you couldn’t fool me.

*

We read aloud an article from a woman’s magazine and giggled. ‘In her lifetime, a woman will have an average of twelve lovers.’ Twelve seemed an extraordinary number to us then. What would we say to all these men? What would we say to them with our clothes off? We thought about the missing girls. How many boyfriends did they have before they were taken? One? None?

He invited a woman to stay with us and, unbelievably, she did. Her named was Genevieve. He didn’t call her his girlfriend, but he didn’t have to. It was my first encounter with jealousy and I took a lively interest in it. Out of solidarity, so did my friends. Together we hated her with all the blackness we could muster. We hated her haircut, which we suspected was a pudding-bowl style but spiked up. A secret pudding-bowl. We hated her long, thin legs which she paraded in shorts. We hated the colourful silk underwear she hung up to dry outside the caravan. This underwear was so obviously corrupt that we wondered if there was an authority figure we could contact about it? What did it cover? Where could you buy it? We hated her Australian accent and her expression of gentle, calm acceptance. When the boys from the green asked about her – they had seen her striding through town – we nearly lost our minds with outrage. She was ancient. She was twenty-four.

I rifled through her things, her creams and lotions, as though, if carefully handled, they could reveal her secrets to me. I had become an expert at this scandalous practice from babysitting for a family who paid me very little, or sometimes paid me in chocolate, or, most usually, didn’t pay me at all. I quietly ripped apart their home as if it were a formal duty. I studied receipts, flicked tiredly through their clothes, checked out the hidden corners of their bedside lockers. If I took something, I felt no guilt about it. I told myself it was because they were blow-ins, because they had more money than my family, because they had lived. Or I told myself these small items would prefer to come with me, that I could give them a better home.