‘Anna!’ he roared. ‘Anna! Where are you?’

I froze, a strange and sudden instinct keeping me still and silent. I watched through the window as he stood on the porch waiting, listening for my response. And then he roared again.

‘Where are you, you little bitch?’

17 January 1996

That day

Cathy sat with Becky at the edge of the res on towels spread out on the rock-hard claypan. The sun bounced off the water and hurt Cathy’s eyes. She dropped her large-framed Jackie O sunglasses down off her forehead over her eyes, then reached across and pressed play on her CD player. She’d filled it with the requisite eight D batteries so they could stay here as long as they liked, her and Becky. Jen and the others would arrive at some point, she supposed – you didn’t have to arrange a meet-up with friends around here, they would turn up eventually; there was nowhere else to go. She hoped they would get here soon – Cathy had her new bathers on.

She squinted out at the pontoon. It was the only way to actually have a decent swim here; the water from the beach was so shallow for so long, and the mud underfoot was a beige brown that turned the water to caramel milk the moment you stood on it. Every step bubbled with the gas trapped by rotting leaves and grass under the thin layer of clay mud that stuck to the sole of your foot like a thong. It was hardly glamorous. But once on the pontoon the water around was deep enough and far enough away from the scungy bottom to be clear and actually appealing. So all summer a little crowd, mostly guys, some girls lounging in bikini tops, collected there. But you had to get out there first. And that water would ruin her bathers, would stain brown the white lines in the red tartan. She should have opted for plain black.

At the start of the summer some enterprising boys had taken a CD player out there, floated it across on a tractor tyre’s inner-tube, wrapped it in a plastic bag and tied it to the pontoon so that all you had to do was put your batteries and CDs in a lunch box and swim out with them. Which was fine, but it meant you had to fight for your music, and really, out there, Madonna or Kylie were never going to win against The Offspring, or Green Day, or Silverchair.

Danny and Leonie were out on the pontoon, doing backflips off the side, Leonie in board shorts and a black T-shirt so she didn’t have to care about the mud.

‘She’s got such a great figure,’ said Becky, watching her. ‘I’d be showing it off if I was her.’

‘Yeah, you would,’ said Cathy.

‘She looks like Naomi Campbell. I’d kill for that skin.’

‘No. You wouldn’t.’ Cathy was remembering last year, when Danny smuggled Leonie into their house, looking for the first-aid kit, Leonie bleeding profusely from a split above her eye where some yob had launched a beer bottle at her from a car as she was walking with Danny along the road.