A bunch of six or seven kids from Second-Grade, Lorrae, Edna, Val, Sherry, Sue Smith and Sue Goldstein, stuck together in the holidays, though Meg sometimes wondered why. The others had come around to Hogbens’ Tuesday evening.

Lorrae said: ‘We’re going down to Barranugli pool Thursday. There’s some boys Sherry knows with a couple of Gs. They’ve promised to take us for a run after we come out.’

Meg did not know whether she was glad or ashamed.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘My auntie’s died.’

‘Arrr!’ their voices trailed.

They couldn’t get away too quick, as if it had been something contagious.

But murmuring.

Meg sensed she had become temporarily important.

So now she was alone with her dead importance, in the fuchsia bushes, on the day of Auntie Daise’s funeral. She had turned fourteen. She remembered the ring in plaited gold Auntie Daise had promised her. When I am gone, her aunt had said. And now it had really happened. Without rancour Meg suspected there hadn’t been time to think about the ring, and Mum would grab it, to add to all the other things she had.

Then that Lummy Whalley showed up, amongst the camphor laurels opposite, tossing his head of bleached hair. She hated boys with white hair. For that matter she hated boys, or any intrusion on her privacy. She hated Lum most of all. The day he threw the dog poo at her. It made the gristle come in her neck. Ugh! Although the old poo had only skittered over her skin, too dry to really matter, she had gone in and cried because well, there were times when she cultivated dignity.

Now Meg Hogben and Lummy Whalley did not notice each other even when they looked.

Who wants Meg Skinny-leg?

I’d rather take the clothes-peg ...’

Lum Whalley vibrated like a comb-and-paper over amongst the camphor laurels they lopped back every so many years for firewood. He slashed with his knife into bark. Once in a hot dusk he had carved I LOVE MEG, because that was something you did, like on lavatory walls, and in the trains, but it didn’t mean anything of course. Afterwards he slashed the darkness as if it had been a train seat.

Lum Whalley pretended not to watch Meg Hogben skulking in the fuchsia bushes. Wearing her brown uniform. Stiffer, browner than for school, because it was her auntie’s funeral.

‘Me-ehg?’ called Mrs Hogben. ‘Meg!’

‘Lummy! Where the devil are yer?’ called his mum.

She called all around, in the woodshed, behind the dunny. Let her!

‘Lum? Lummy, for Chrissake!’ she called.

He hated that. Like some bloody kid. At school he had got them to call him Bill, halfway between, not so shameful as Lum, nor yet as awful as William.

Mrs Whalley came round the corner.

‘Shoutin’ me bloody lungs up!’ she said. ‘When your dad’s got a nice idea. We’re going down to Sarsaparilla dump.’

‘Arr!’ he said.

But didn’t spit.

‘What gets inter you?’ she asked.