‘Not if you keep your big pooswiddle mouth shut I won’t,’ I said to her in my best threatening voice.

She stood in the doorway and looked at me for a minute, and then grinned and said, ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt them,’ and ran and jumped on to the sofa, which we are never allowed to do. We made more toast together and sat and watched a sports show. We weren’t really paying attention, but it was fun and we threw pillows at each other and played tag and then found a show with hymns on it and sang silly words to them and had rather a good time.

Then the phone rang and gave us a fright for a minute, until we remembered that meant Mum and Dad weren’t coming home yet, and we weren’t in trouble. Ruthy rushed to answer it. Dad said Caleb was still very sick and they would be a few more hours. He said we were NOT to leave the house for any reason or make a mess, but we could have as much toast as we wanted if we were hungry. Ruthy answered with her good girl voice to reassure him.

When we got off the phone, we played chasey right round the house, bounced up and down on Mum and Dad’s bed, and made necklaces out of fruit loops and Mum’s gardening string. Then I opened Mum’s wardrobe and we put on some of her shoes and blouses and looked at ourselves in the long mirror by her window. I decided to try some lipstick on. This made Ruthy scared for a minute, but then she tried some on too. When we finished, we rubbed it off with toilet paper that we flushed to make sure there was no evidence and checked there was none left on each other. I noticed a tiny bit of orange lipstick on Mum’s good white blouse, but I didn’t show Ruthy and decided to carefully hang it up and hope Mum thought she did it herself.

Then Ruthy said we’d better clean up or there’d be trouble, but I didn’t feel like it and we had an argument and I walked out the back door and slammed it to make the point that it would be up to her. This was a bit mean, but Ruthy was good at tidying up and would get all the praise anyway. I walked to the olive grove and climbed my tree with a piece of toast, which was a bit difficult because although my hand wasn’t swollen any more, it was still a bit weak and sore if I didn’t use it carefully.

It was a beautiful Adelaide October day. The sky was very blue and very bright and made me squint when I looked up at it. Lots of fresh new weeds were growing up around the olive trees that had new leaves on them. Soursobs were waving up at me from big ponds of yellow. I had trouble stopping myself from eating soursobs, even though they gave me a stomach ache. Mrs Kerfoops’s cat Aristotle was stalking invisible mice. There was a mother magpie with babies that swooped on us lately, but she was in a happy mood today and left me quite alone. I had picked a pile of small stones and put them in my pocket to throw at things from up the tree, just in case.