was desperate to reach the creek that snaked through the gorge.
Nobody else knew it, but the creek was magic. There was one bend in particular where the banks widened to form a craggy circle; the bed beneath had been formed millions of years ago when the earth sighed and shifted and great rock slabs were brought together jaggedly, so what was shallow at the rims, deepened and darkened suddenly at its centre. And that’s where Vivien had made her discovery.
She’d been fishing with the glass jars she’d pilfered from Mum’s kitchen and kept now in the rotten log behind the ferns. Vivien stored all her treasures inside that log. There was always something to find within the creek’s waters: eels and tadpoles, drowned cats sometimes, kittens tied in bags and dumped upstream by farmers who didn’t want them, rusted old buckets from the gold-rush days. Once, she’d even found a set of false teeth.
On the day she found the lights, Vivien had been lying on her belly on a rock, arm stretched deep into the pool, trying to catch the biggest tadpole she’d ever seen. She’d swept at it and missed, swept at it and missed, and then she’d reached deeper still so that her face was almost touching the water. And that’s when she’d noticed them, several of them, all orange and twinkly, blinking at her from the very bottom of the pool. She’d thought at first it was the sun and squinted up at the distant scraps of sky to check. But it wasn’t. The sky was reflected on the water surface all right, but this was different. These lights were deep, beyond the slippery reeds and moss that covered the creek bed. They were something else. Somewhere else.
Vivien had given the lights a lot of thought. She wasn’t one for book-learning, that was Gerald’s thing, and Mum’s, but she was good at asking questions. She’d sounded out Old Mac, and then Dad, and finally she’d run into Black Jackie, Dad’s tracker mate, who knew more than anyone else about the bush. He’d stopped what he was doing and planted a hand on the small of his back, arching his wiry frame. ‘Ya seen them little lights down deep in the pool, did ya?’
She’d nodded, and he’d looked at her hard without blinking. Eventually, a slight smile had skimmed his lips. ‘Ever touched the bottom of that pool?’
‘Nah.’ She swatted a fly from her nose. ‘Too deep.’
‘Me neither.’ He scratched beneath the rim of his broad hat, and then he made to start again on his digging. Before he drove the shovel into the ground he turned his head. ‘What makes ya so sure there is one, if ya haven’t seen it fer y’self?’
And that’s when Vivien had realised: there was a hole in her creek that ran all the way to the other side of the world. It was the only explanation. She’d heard Dad talking about digging a hole to China, and now she’d gone and found it. A secret tunnel, a way to the earth’s core—the place from which all magic and life and time had sprung— and beyond that to the shining stars of a distant sky. The question was, what was she going to do with it?
Explore it, that’s what.
Vivien skidded to a halt on the big flat rock slab that formed the bridge between bush and creek. The water was still today, thick and mucky in the shallows round the edges. A film of sludge from further upstream had settled across the surface like a greasy skin.
The sun was directly overhead and the ground was baking. The limbs of the towering gums creaked in the heat.
Vivien tucked her lunch beneath the thick ferns arching over the rock; something in the cool undergrowth slithered away unseen.
The water was cold at first around her bare ankles. She waded through the shallows, feet gripping to the slimy rocks, suddenly sharp in places. Her plan was to catch a glimpse of the lights to begin with, make sure they were still where they ought to be, and then she was going to swim as far down as she could to get a better look. She’d been practising holding her breath for weeks and had brought one of Mum’s wooden clothes pegs for her nose because Gerald reckoned if she could stop the air escaping through her nostrils she’d last for longer.
When she reached the ridge where the rock floor dropped away, Vivien peered into the dark