The Thursday I told Maynard about Mr Johnson was one of Mum’s head days, and she felt so bad she could only whisper when I went into her room for her to give me the money for our dinner. She didn’t even insist we buy fruit or a sandwich, so I took that as permission to buy a Kitchener bun if there was one left at the bakery.

The day itself was in a temper. There was stuff flying around in the wind like a nasty boy throwing sand at the beach. I said this to Ruthy who was quite impressed and said I should put that in my homework, which was an essay about the weather.

Ruthy was good at describing the weather. I was not. I hated writing about it, but it seemed to be a favourite topic for essays. I think teachers ran out of ideas, and when they did, out of the drawer came the good old weather essay, and here we go again. I particularly didn’t like it when grownups would say ‘You can see the weather coming in’, because there’s always weather, and it doesn’t come in. But that’s grown-ups for you.

My teacher often wrote comments on my essays such as ‘Surely you can say more than “it was hot”’, and ‘Dorcas, this time try for more than “very hot” when you revise your work’. Ruthy, on the other hand, would describe a day as ‘blustery with the wind playing “catch me” down the road to school’, or ‘the sky was like a bright blue blind pulled down low on the otherwise dull spring day’. Teachers raved about Ruthy’s descriptions and called her a protégé. I asked Ruthy to write descriptions for my essays, but she said the contrast would be too obvious. When Caleb asked what she meant, she said it would be like plopping a diamond into a lump of fresh dog’s poo, and I said, ‘Thanks for saying it would be fresh dog’s poo’, to try to be smart, but it didn’t really work.

We had to walk past Mrs Johnson’s house to go up to St Bernards Road to buy our tea, and I noticed Mr Johnson doing something down the side to the backyard. When I realised he was there, I walked faster, and Ruthy asked me what was wrong, because usually I went into the Johnsons’ for any reason. I told her I was worried all the Kitchener buns would be sold if we didn’t hurry, and that got Caleb and Ruthy talking about what they’d buy, so they left me alone.

The next day was Friday, and I was planning to go to see Sixpence as soon as I returned from school and before Mr Johnson got home. That left a small window of time because he was usually home by four. He was a teacher at the South Australian Museum on North Terrace and took classes of kids sent there for excursions. Little bits of pictures about Mr Johnson kept popping into my brain during the day. I must have tried literally shaking them away, because Maynard asked me twice if I had a bee in my hair or something. I badly wanted to see Sixpence but I almost as badly didn’t want to see Mr J. I started to call him that in my head so I could pretend he had nothing to do with his nice wife and all the animals at their place. But my plan to get to the Johnsons’ and back again early went down the toilet when I walked in to find Mum making happy-clappy hands over yet another Ruthy triumph.