Ash doesn’t get what he calls my ‘perfectionist streak’. Because I haven’t told him the history.

Already I feel like the oldest sophomore in the nursing program at UCLA. What the other students are interested in—keg parties, pep clubs, streaking the quad drunk—holds no appeal to me now. I prefer staying in the library until it shuts, waking up early to run in the grainy light before dawn, going to extra study sessions with my pack of multicoloured highlighters.

‘A lot of us took a while to figure out what it was we wanted to be,’ Ash told me when I complained about their lack of focus. ‘I spent more time on a skateboard than studying. I was directionless too.’

I nodded as if I agreed, but at that age I wasn’t directionless. I had a very specific purpose.

I wanted to disappear.

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4

The smells and sounds of Sydney were a shock. There were cars everywhere, throwing up dust or mud—depending on whether it had rained or not. The smell of dunnies in the heat, grease and steel, rotting fish by the harbour and stale beer outside the pubs. In Glebe everyone lived in each other’s laps, except those in the fine, grand houses on Glebe Point Road. The narrower the street, the narrower the terraces lining either side.

Mum had always had spells every few weeks, meaning she would have to lie down for an afternoon. I’d thought that being away from the work of the farm would help them, but in Sydney they grew worse. The doctor said it was her nerves and that she simply needed rest. We were too many of us in my aunt Joy’s terrace: a skinny house with floorboards so mouldering that sometimes they gave way. They were patched with flattened kero tins. Joy also had her husband Alf and her boys, who were nine and six, streetwise kids with missing teeth and freckles as thick as fleas. With the truck, Dad found work as a delivery driver for a bottling factory and he took Jack with him to help out. I was stuck at home every day with Joy and Mum. Luckily the boys went to school and so I had some relief from them catching frogs and worms and slugs and sticking them beneath my pillow and inside my boots. I helped Joy with the housework and brought Mum her headache powder, and at night after dinner and washing up and listening to the news about the war on the wireless, I lay down beside Mum on the bed we made on the living room floor while Jack and Dad slept outside on the verandah.