After a while, tyres crunched to a halt on my gravel drive. I didn’t recognise the beaten-up station wagon. Its doors opened and out climbed Leanne Beckwith, author of the local history manuscript in my room and mother of three of my pupils. She clutched a baby that obviously hadn’t been in a safety capsule for the drive. Her mascara was running. Some poor plastic leopard had needed to die for her printed vinyl pants. She carried orange shopping bags overflowing with clothes. A small army of children floated around her and the station wagon growled behind. A bearded man at the steering wheel waved, and began to reverse.

I opened the door and quickly approached Leanne.

‘The kids get in his way,’ she said. ‘You said to come to you for help.’

I may actually have gasped. ‘I meant help dealing with Harmony.’

Harmony Beckwith, aged eleven, began peeling flakes of house paint off the wall near my door. A smaller version of her mother, her hair a less brassy blonde, it never took Harmony long to find something destructive to do.

‘I don’t know where else to go,’ Leanne said.

The car continued reversing. I beckoned the driver. ‘You should be at home,’ I told Leanne.

‘Peter has to save our house. He says we get in the way.’

‘Hey!’ I broke into a run like pushing into hot wool. My words, intended to ignite some decency in Peter Beckwith, were whipped away in the eddies and whirls of willy-willies and leaves crackling. ‘Hey!’

They came inside, of course. Leanne sank, dejected, into Claire’s pink floral sofa. A grubby toddler, Isla, climbed over her and the baby and clawed at Leanne’s top until a breast tumbled free and she latched on, sucking greedily. Harmony pulled off a long shard of wallpaper.

‘Have you had a chance to look at A History of Brunton yet?’ Leanne asked. ‘If you say it’s good, a lot more people will read it.’

Her book was appalling. In pages I’d skimmed, she twice described her own family as Brunton’s first residents, ignoring millennia of Aboriginal history. Also, she had no concept of how sources needed to be accurate or, indeed, exist. ‘My field is really art history.’

Her toddler sucked greedily, eyes glazed. The baby was asleep. A voice on the radio repeated the total fire ban warning. ‘Yes, but history,’ Leanne said. ‘Things that happened.’

‘You haven’t got many toys,’ Harmony informed me.

‘Harmony,’ Leanne said mildly.

‘You said she’d have stuff cause she’s a teacher!’ Harmony grabbed a Roman oil lamp I’d brought home from Italy long ago. It was two thousand years old. I sprang to save it from her sticky fingers, her unthinking ability to break things.

Leanne sighed. ‘We had to leave in a hurry. I did kind of assume.’

‘You got some stuff in that old box?’ Harmony demanded, pointing at the cedar chest I used as a coffee table and reaching to raise the lid.

‘No!’ If guilt were flammable, I’d have caught alight. No one could discover the collection I kept in that chest. Fortunately, I’d left a teacup on top – I could pretend to be saving my carpet, not my reputation. ‘I have some of Caleb’s old toys. Not in there.’ To emphasise that the chest was to remain closed, I arranged a row of glasses and candles on top. ‘Will Peter come back for you?’