One more year and then she’d be gone: down in Melbourne, soaking up the fly-free city life. She knew exactly what she was going to do down there. First, she was going to get a job in a funky cafe – her job at the bakery counter had to count for something, right? – and then she’d take a year to figure out what the best course at uni was to get her in with the right crowd. So maybe, like, management, or commerce, or something, she didn’t know yet. But nothing with computers. She wouldn’t do chic geek. She was going to be an entrepreneur. She was going to have a great idea and make other people worry about all the details. She was going to be the boss. Of something. She was going to be one of those people who dressed sharp and went to work every day in the centre of the city, catching sleek trams that cut their way between glossy office towers.

Cathy waved the flies away from her face and squinted down the empty road and finally, in the distance, she saw the gleam of sun on moving metal and glass. She dropped her shard of rock and stood in the burning sun and wind on the far side of the old house, well out of view of the stables and the house and right under the secret room where they all used to play when they were kids. On that side, totally hidden from the small house by the ruin of Bromley Cairn, the ute could stop while Cathy ran and leapt in the back with Leonie and Danny.

‘Nice leap,’ said Leonie, laughing at her. ‘You’ll have to join me on the athletics team.’

Cathy opened her mouth wide in mock offence. ‘Bitch! Now, if you could just give me a minute to catch my flabby-arsed breath I’ll yell some other cusses at you.’

Arch hit the pedal and they grabbed at the sides of the ute. Leonie smiled. ‘Come on, you know you don’t really have a flabby arse, Cathy.’

‘Aw, thanks Leonie. That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.’

‘And even if you did –’

‘Get down, you bloody idiots,’ said Danny and he grabbed at them both and pulled them into the middle of the tray, pushing their heads below the side of the ute. They laughed together at his paranoia, but stayed that way until they were all the way down the road and well out of sight.

And that was how that day started. With heat and deceit and dreams of escape. Just like so many days that had gone before.

12

Two buses to the city passed by the front gate without me on them. My things were packed in my bag on the bedroom floor, but I lay on the bed again feeling numb and letting hour after hour of the afternoon seep away, until eventually, through the watery glass of the window, the light behind the clouds diminished until there was a kind of uniform tint to everything – grey forms of dark and less dark – and we were into evening. I heard Bette begin to fuss about outside the door, preparing dinner. And when she finally called me out to the table to eat it, it seemed so much easier just to go along with it all. I sat and shovelled in forkful after forkful of mash and cheap sausages and barely defrosted peas, hardly tasting it as I ate – which, thinking objectively, was probably a fortunate thing.