Alice faltered. She wavered. The shadow of the black and bottomless pit out of which she had dragged herself was at her shoulder, but if she walked briskly she might outrun it. She was collecting the two missing loaves, was she not? There was no reason her clever lie should be discovered.

Alice pressed on, comforted and enveloped in her lie, though each step was charged with dread.

As she made her way southwards the stream of elegant carriages and sleek horses became draymen’s carts and coalmen’s carts, and men with nothing better to do than lounge on the meanest of street corners and outside gin houses stared at her and called out. One stepped into her path and would have waylaid her but she shoved him roughly aside. She approached the Hollow cautiously, as she had the night before, and in the sickly yellow semi-daylight of a smoke-filled Surry Hills morning all the nameless and unseen terrors of the place seemed no less terrible. Indeed, they were worse, for now a person could see them more clearly: the angry-hungry eyes of men who watched her, keeping one hand inside their coats on the blade of a razor; the vacant faces of women selling themselves for a shot of gin. A young mother too weak to stand, huddled in a doorway with her children clustered about her and with barely the strength to hold out a hand to beg for help.

Alice hurried past. She had escaped this and they had never, she and Mum and Milli, not ever sunk as low as this. Alice had her dignity, though it would have surprised her to realise it.

She slowed her pace to descend the stone steps as she had done the night before and the woman who had lain dead on the lower steps was gone and Alice was glad. She stepped carefully because the mud, which elsewhere had dried out, was ankle deep here, and she lifted her skirt rather than soil her clothes.

‘Milli?’

She had found her way back to the shack and someone had pulled the plank away from the entrance, perhaps to let the sunlight in, though little enough light of any sort penetrated this dismal place even on the longest day of the year. But someone had removed the plank. A flicker of fear flared inside Alice’s head and ran the length of her spine. She stepped inside and the place was deserted. There was not a stick of furniture: not the makeshift table nor the rescued chairs nor the wooden pallet bed; all of it was gone. And no sign of Milli. For a moment Alice stood peering into the gloomy interior, disbelieving. Then she ran outside and called out, ‘Milli! Milli!’

A head appeared above her in the doorway of the shack that was balanced, precariously, on top of this one.