Paula could hear the sturdiness in Ruby’s voice—this girl was used to handling whatever shit was thrown at her—but there was a tiny quiver in the voice too. She was only a kid herself, anxious about her brother and scared to be handling this on her own.

‘Okay, Ruby—that’s a really good description you’ve given me. And there’s no one at your house who can drive him in to see a doctor?’

‘Nuh. His dad, my stepdad, he took the car. I mean, should I bring Jye in on my dirt bike?’

‘No, don’t do that if he’s feeling wobbly. I’ll come out to your house and see him. Hang tight, Ruby.’

While Paula chucked a few antibiotics and other supplies into her medical bag, Fiona took back the phone to write down directions to the house.

Paula looked at the names and address on the slip of paper Fiona handed her. ‘Do you know this family?’

‘Nope. Don’t think they come to this practice.’

According to the GPS map in Paula’s car, Lower Pinch Road branched off the highway, then ran almost parallel to it behind a wall of trees before winding back to join the highway again. Upper Pinch Road looped off Lower Pinch, travelling up a heavily wooded slope, passing a small number of houses. The dirt surface was rough but Paula was able to zigzag to avoid the big potholes if she took it slowly.

Finding herself back near the highway, she realised she’d overshot the house and had to do a precarious U-turn on the crumbly edges of the road. Approaching from this direction, she could see it—the roadside mailbox for 8 Upper Pinch Road.

She had to rev her car to coax it up the rutted driveway, until the forest opened into a clearing where the house sat. A small clapboard house perched on the hillside, with a front verandah built on tall wooden posts and ramshackle lattice covering the dark mouth of the underfloor area. The house was in poor shape, with paintwork flaking off so the exposed timber was rotting away in places.

The dirt bike Paula had seen Ruby riding away from the town supermarket was now tucked in the space under the steps. Next to it was a kid’s tricycle. The carcass of an old truck was sprouting weeds beside the concrete water tank and other bits of rusty debris were strewn over the cleared ground. A corrugated-iron awning had been built against one side of the house to form a kind of open shed which housed a stack of engine parts and sections of car bodies.

There was no farmland nearby so this wasn’t a farmhouse; Paula guessed it must have been a timber worker’s cottage back when the logging industry still existed here. Now it was home for Ruby and her family.