water. It took a few seconds, a bit of squinting and a lot of leaning, but then—there they were!
She grinned and almost lost her footing.
Over the ridge a pair of kookaburras chortled.
Vivien hurried back to the edge of the pool, slipping some-times in her haste. She ran across the flat rock, feet slapping wetly, and dug about in her pack to retrieve the peg.
It was while she was deciding how best to fasten it that she noticed the black thing on her foot.
A leech—a big fat whopper of a thing.
Vivien bent over, gripped it between her thumb and finger, and pulled as hard as she could.
The slippery mongrel wouldn’t come off.
She sat down and had another go, but no matter how she squeezed and tugged, it wouldn’t budge. The body was slimy in her fingers, wet and squishy. She steeled herself, screwed her eyes shut, and gave it one last wrench.
Vivien cursed with every forbidden word (Shit! Bloody! Bugger! Bum!) she’d gleaned in seven years of eavesdropping on Dad’s shed. The leech had come free, but a stream of blood flowed in its place.
Her head spun, all woozy-like, and she was glad she was al-ready sitting. She could watch Old Mac take the heads off chooks, no worries; she’d held her brother Pippin’s severed fingertip all the way to Doc Farrell’s place after it got chopped off by the axe; she gutted fish faster and cleaner than Robert when they camped down by Nerang River. Faced with her own blood, though, she was worse than useless.
She limped back down to the water’s edge and dangled her foot in, swishing it this way and that. Each time she withdrew the limb, blood still streamed. Nothing for it but to wait.
She sat on the rock slab and unpacked her food. Sliced silverside from last night’s roast, gravy glistening cold on its surface; soft potato and yam that she ate with her fingers; a wedge of bread and butter pudding with Mum’s fresh jam smeared on top; three Anzac biscuits and a blood orange, fresh from the tree.
A clutch of crows materialised in the shadows as she ate, staring at her with cold unblinking eyes. When she’d finished, Vivien tossed the last of her crumbs into the bush and a weight of heavy wings beat after them. She dusted off her dress and yawned.
Her foot had stopped bleeding at last. She wanted to explore the hole at the bottom of the pool, but she was suddenly tired; extra tired, like the girl in one of those stories Mum read to them sometimes in a faraway voice that grew less like theirs with every word. It made Vivien feel strange, that voice of their mother’s; it was fancy, and while Vivien admired Mum for it, she was jealous too of this part of their mother they didn’t own.
Vivien yawned again, so wide that her eyes smarted.
Maybe if she lay down, just for a little while?
She crawled over to the edge of the rock and crept beneath the fern leaves, deep enough that when she rolled onto her back and shimmied a little to the left the last patch of sky disappeared. Leaves lay smooth and cool beneath her, crickets ticked in the undergrowth, and a frog somewhere panted the afternoon away.
The day was warm and she was small and it wasn’t surprising that Vivien fell asleep. She dreamed about the lights in the pool, and how long it would take to swim to China, and a long jetty of hot wooden planks, her brothers and sister diving off its end. She dreamed of the storm that was coming and Dad on the veranda, and Mum’s English skin, freckled from a day by the sea, and the dinner table that night with all of them around it.
The beating sun arced over the earth’s surface, light shifted and sifted through the bush, humidity pulled the drum skin tighter and small beads of sweat appeared at the little girl’s hairline. Insects clicked and clacked, the sleeping child stirred when a fern leaf tickled her cheek, and then—
‘Vivien!’
—her name came suddenly, skimming down the hillside, cutting through the undergrowth to reach her.
She woke with a start.
‘Viv-i-en?’
It was Aunt Ada, Daddy’s elder sister.
Vivien sat up, brushing strands of hair across her damp fore-head with the back of her hand. Bush bees hummed nearby. She yawned.
‘Young miss, if you’re out here—for the love of God, show yourself.’
Most times, obedience was of no concern to Vivien, but the voice of her