On the farm she used to live for Sundays. When the jobs were done, she would switch her skirt for overalls and head for the forest behind the orchard where her heart lifted and freedom beckoned. Kurt always came with her. They would trudge in gumboots past the packing shed with its tractor, tools and cool-room, past the vegetable garden that fed them most of the year, beyond the compost heap of vegie scraps—which, in turn, fed the local wildlife—and into the orchard where old man apple trees raised their gnarled arms to the sky, and grass grew in lush profusion. At the boundary fence the forest waited: shadowy, secretive and inviting. Miki would slip between the wires, while Kurt climbed over a post. They would follow a faint trail up past the beehives and between slender grey-barked eucalypts. As the bush folded around them, Miki would feel lightness on her skin, happiness settling. She loved the swaying skirts of the leaves high above, the squeak of wood rubbing against wood, the sigh of air in the canopy, the crunch of sticks beneath her feet, the minty scent of the scrub. In the bush, she felt more alive, more real. The week fell away and her father’s rules faded. She was somebody. Herself. A young woman with hope in the world.

They would walk across-slope to their favourite gully, clambering over fallen trunks laced with moss, crossing a creek where ferns splayed their fronds and large rotting logs made moist chairs to sit on. Often, it was quiet. Grey fantails tinkling. Time and space expanding. There, she and Kurt would become equals for a few hours. Miki would ask him questions. ‘How’s Father?’—always the same every week. She hoped for meaningful answers, but with Kurt you never knew whether it would be sunshine or storm. He would shrug his broad shoulders. ‘Bossy,’ he would say. ‘His way or the highway.’

She would think of the road leading from the farm, imagine it joining with other roads and then the highway going all the way to Hobart. She’d only been on that road once, when she was seven and Father lost his fingers. But she’d always thought that one day she would walk away from the farm and never return. She hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.

Sometimes, they would speak of Mother’s arthritis. ‘I’m worried,’ Miki would say. ‘Mother’s getting slower. Do you think she needs treatment?’

Kurt would raise his eyebrows. ‘You know what she’s like. Won’t take any poisons. She’d rather live with the pain.’

But that pain had been a rope for Miki. A rope that wound round and round her future, keeping her tied to the farm.