Caleb’s lungs seemed a bit better. He didn’t need to go on the nebuliser, and as long as he had his Ventolin spray in his pocket, he seemed to manage pretty well. But although his breathing was better, he was fidgety and shaky and anxious. He jumped from one topic to another, sometimes halfway through a sentence. He hopped up and down and squirmed and sort of darted about the place. The asthma medication could make him a bit like that anyway but he kept worrying about Dad being sacrificed and wanting to talk about it over and over again. Ruthy and I tried to reassure him that it wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t what Mum meant. She just meant that Dad was going to keep working too hard for Mr Bednarski, but Caleb wasn’t convinced. He said he knew from the Bible that before they put Jesus on the cross, all the people around him started fighting with each other and being weird and that was exactly what was happening at home.

I got a bit sick of hearing about it and asked him how he knew it would be on the cross anyway. People had been sacrificed in lots of different ways in the past. Ruthy told me to stop but I went on about people who were tied to four posts and then stretched to death, and people who were put on altars and cut up into little pieces or thrown into fiery volcanos, and about Joan of Arc who was tied to a post with firewood under her and set alight.

Caleb gasped when I mentioned Joan of Arc and said that in his dream Dad was definitely stuck on a tree, so maybe he was going to be burned at the stake instead of hung on the cross. He ran round and round us on the floor of the tree house, which was very irritating, because there wasn’t really room to do that, and said he wouldn’t sit still until we told him about Joan of Arc.

Ruthy said okay, okay, if he sat down, we’d tell him what we knew, and that calmed him down a bit and he dropped next to us, crossed his legs and put his elbows on his knees to listen. Ruthy said she was pretty sure Joan was a French person, and it was something to do with religion, but she wasn’t sure what. Caleb asked if we were sure it was Joan, and not John, because Dad’s middle name was John, but we both said no it was a story about a girl. I knew a little bit about it because when I borrowed some books on knights from the state children’s library on North Terrace, there was a picture of her dressed as a sort of knight, so I read that section. I told Caleb I thought she was a Catholic saint because of being burnt, and he decided he’d ask his best school friend, Lincoln Waterford, because Lincoln was Catholic and would probably know the story.