and a larger spot, a gold foil coin, resting in the scoop along its spine. With a shout of delight, she reached for it.
Michael and Daniel sat on the side of the bunk reading a floppy, faded comic, their heads close together. Daniel scratched. ‘You got cooties?’ Michael asked, but he didn’t move away.
In the comic an advertisement offered them the chance to earn money by selling another magazine, ‘Sunshine’, to their local community. Daniel already had a paper round. ‘I could sell Sunshine too,’ he said.
‘Sunshine’s for little kids,’ Michael said. ‘Babies.’
‘What do you know, you’re only fourteen.’
Michael didn’t say anything.
‘What?’ asked Daniel. He turned the page. Michael said, ‘Hey I haven’t finished.’ He turned the page back. The air in the cabin smelled like hot dust, but here in the shade of the bunk it was cool. A blowfly stuttered at the rust-clogged window screen. Michael said, ‘Which superhero do you want to be?’
‘Hey.’ Daniel closed the comic. ‘Let’s go frog hunting. It’s always good after rain.’
‘Nah.’
‘We should make our own Sunshine and sell it.’
‘OK.’ Michael leaned over to check the praying mantis that was in a jar on the bedside fruit box, its matt apple green different from the blades of grass they had provided it with to climb on. The mantis waggled front legs at the cling film covering the jar top, as though to poke more holes in it.
‘That campground shop’s got paper. Come on. Let’s get some now.’ Daniel stood and stretched, his stripy T-shirt pulling up over his lower abdomen, the stomach muscles that pointed in a wide V down into the waistband of his shorts.
‘We’ve got no money,’ said Michael.
‘So?’
He thought a moment. ‘Rena’s got loads of money,’ he said. ‘In her room.’
‘Have you been in her room?’
Michael shrugged and gathered the collar of his polo shirt – Firestone Tyres – and bunched it around his neck. ‘No.’
Daniel reached up to pull the collar aside. Michael swatted him away. ‘Fuck off,’ he said. ‘Are we going to the shops or aren’t we?’
‘Hang on,’ said Daniel. He moved the praying mantis jar out of the sunspot on the bedside cabinet and into the shadows, the glass warm beneath his fingers.
Lee was somewhere in the bush, helping dig the new long drop, when a strange station wagon drove up. It parked by the cattle stop, on the other side of the chain-link gate that marked the commune’s boundary. The back doors of the car opened and Daniel and Michael got out. Without a backward glance Daniel trotted over to the cattle stop, leapt the chain and disappeared behind the cookhouse. Michael stayed by the car, staring a hole into the ground, and Frank emerged from the driver’s seat. A baseball cap shaded his eyes from the afternoon glare. He called for his wife.
‘I found these boys two miles down the road,’ he shouted. ‘The camp owner wants them for shoplifting. What kind of operation is this?’ Leaning into the car, he honked the horn. The purple spiral on the commune entrance sign sent out a force field, keeping him from crossing the gate.
Dorothy and Evelyn ran up and stopped shy of the chain, waving. ‘Hi Daddy,’ they called. He looked American again, he looked bigger and different and so much more like a man than anyone they’d seen for a long time. The boys were young, Dorothy realised: the boys knew nothing.
Frank took off the cap and waved it. His hair was plastered to his head with sweat. ‘Girls! Go and get your mother!’
They stepped closer together and Dot reached for Eve’s hand. ‘What happened to New York?’ she asked.
An emergency meeting gathered outside the cookhouse to decide whether to let him onto the property. Wimmin stood on the sunflower-seed sheet in their dirty, cracked bare feet. Everyone went silent, and Dot turned to see that Rena had emerged from the tool shed. She lifted her arm to reveal the communal shotgun. From the distant estuary came the sharp whine of a speedboat. The shotgun was thin and dark, catching the light as she shook off a hovering fly.
‘What do you want?’ she called.
Their father had raised his palms in surrender and now lowered them again, as though he’d realised what he was doing. ‘Rena, put that down. I just want my family.’
‘You sure about that? You’re a family man?’
Frank’s words fired from him separately, crimson. ‘I caught these boys in the camp store. Shoplifting. The owner saw them.’