‘There you are.’ Mummy held her hand out and twitched her fingers. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Look.’ Isla pointed through the hedge at Steve. ‘Look. He’s crying again.’

Mummy reached for Isla’s hand. She lifted Isla away from the hedge and picked twigs from her hair. Behind them, Steve sobbed and moaned. Mummy seemed not to notice. ‘You’re getting straight in the bath,’ she said.

‘He’s crying,’ Isla repeated.

‘Who?’

‘Steve.’

Mummy stood still. She held Isla tightly by the hand and listened. ‘So he is.’

The air was thick with a bad, rotting smell. A cloud of flies hummed around the bins.

‘We shouldn’t snoop,’ Mummy said.

Isla followed Mummy up the steps of their own verandah, stepping over the tiles with the cracks in them so bad things wouldn’t happen. Andrea Walker had told Isla about the cracks. Andrea was nearly ten and she lived across the street in a house with stairs. She was going to be in Fifth Class at school after the holidays and she knew about all the Kings and Queens of England. There was practically nothing Andrea did not know.

Mummy found her keys and put them into the lock. ‘Poor man,’ she said. ‘He must have had a hard day.’

‘The children don’t want to go in his truck,’ Isla said.

Mummy looked down at Isla. She brushed a fly away from her face. ‘What did you say?’

Isla felt less sure this time as she spoke. ‘The children don’t want to go in his truck.’

‘Where did you get that from?’

‘Steve told me.’

‘Did he?’ Mummy pushed the door open. ‘What a strange thing to say to a child.’

‘It’s true,’ Isla said. When there was no reply she said it again, louder. ‘It’s true!’

Her mum’s voice reached her from inside the house. ‘I didn’t say it wasn’t.’

Isla sat down on the step. Mrs Walker opened her front door and threw a bucket of dirty water over her roses. The Walkers had a car and Mr Walker drove it to work and back every day. The only other car on their street was Steve’s truck. Isla could see it from here, parked up with one wheel on the kerb. The windscreen was dirty with red mud.

‘Isla?’ Mummy was calling her. ‘Come in and shut the door.’

Isla tried not to look at Steve as she turned around. Her greatest fear was that he would try to take her away in his truck. Mandy had explained that Steve only took children from problem families. You don’t need to worry, she’d said. But Isla had not been reassured by this. Not at all. At the edge of her vision, Steve was a dark shape, hunched over, watching her.

6

Sydney, 1997

Isla and her mum sit in traffic at the lights crossing Anzac Parade. The sky is bright blue and the streets are over-lit, artificial-looking under a strong sun. Telegraph poles cast sharp shadows. The buildings are low, the streets are wide and the schoolkids laugh easily, keeping to the shade in their wide-brimmed hats and cotton dresses. Isla regrets her black jeans and heavy boots. Nobody wears black in Sydney. She feels like a tourist. A sullen, tired, uncomfortable tourist in a city with the brightness turned too high. She’d forgotten it was this hot in May. And she’d forgotten – maybe she’d never faced it before – that she doesn’t fit in here.