It was blistering hot already. The wind was picking up – it gathered up the dust and hurled it at Cathy. She shut her eyes but the grit still got in. God this place sucked. What a hole. In summer there was always wind – hot, coming in from the north, dropping a plague of flies right on top of them, carried across from the cow country further inland. Where there was cow shit, there were flies. Bloody farmers. Bloody country living.

She moved to the corner of Bromley Cairn, to the shaded and sheltered side that faced the road. At least the ratty old lump of house was good for something – blocking the wind and the sun and the view of her from the house.

She heard the slap of the screen door echoing across the gravel driveway. She peered around the corner of the bluestone wall and saw her dad heading out in a singlet top towards the stables where he had four horses newly pregnant. He was there every minute, fussing over them, watering them, grooming them. They all had their fingers crossed that none of the mares would slip their foals like last year – a horrible January heatwave, like now, and only two weeks apart they found two out of the four foetuses just lying in the dirt of the paddock. Hessel discovered the first one and made such a scene that when Cathy found the second one two weeks later – a translucent fleshy lump, all gelatinous and hairless and pink with flies all over it – she left it exactly where it was and took off to Becky’s for a couple of days. Let her dad find it himself. She wasn’t going to stick around to be the bearer of that bad news.

She leaned back behind the wall into the shade again and peered down the road. Nothing. She wished they’d hurry up. It was unbearable sitting out there. She picked up a shard of stone and began chipping at the mortar between the bluestone blocks – anything to amuse herself. Her mum would have had a fit if she’d seen her, but Cathy didn’t care. She just couldn’t care about the old house, no matter how much her mum went on and on and on about it, the history and the name, trying to impress upon Cathy how important it was. How important they all were. ‘The place, and our name,’ Bette would say, ‘they mean something to the people around here.’ It all meant shit to Cathy. Bette was trying to get the house heritage-listed under its original estate name, ‘Bromley Cairn’, so Cathy had to hear, all the time, about how beautiful Bette thought that was and how the words together meant ‘Dweller in a meadow of stones’. ‘Isn’t that just right?’ Bette had said to Cathy, more than once. ‘Isn’t that perfect?’ And Cathy thought, but didn’t say, that the whole place was about as far from perfect as you could get.