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‘I’m ringing Dad. I’m going to tell him what you’ve done,’ she said, straightening.

‘I’m not giving you the number at that bloody flat!’

Olivia sneered. It was the first time, Deborah thought with an odd, disconnected clarity, that she had seen her daughter look like a teenager. ‘A: he does have such a thing as a mobile phone. And B: I happen to know Marion’s phone number. I’ve dialled it plenty of times already, you know.’

And yes,
that
made her mother wince.
Ha!
Olivia stalked past her to the phone in the kitchen and dialled the number from triumphant memory. She was trying to look nonchalant but her hands were trembling. Marion answered, and Olivia told her politely who was calling and asked if she could speak to Angus. Her father came on the line.

‘Dad, Mum’s got rid of Congo,’ she said urgently. ‘She’s taken him to live on some farm.’

There was a silence, and in that silence Olivia knew that what Deborah had said was true. Her father was in this, too, up to his neck.

‘Olivia, sweetheart,’ Angus said. ‘I know you’re unhappy about this. I know it’s all a shock. But it’s for the best. He was getting to be too much, really he was.’

‘He wasn’t too much
for me
!’ Olivia hissed. ‘And don’t you ever,
ever
call me “sweetheart” again.’

She slammed down the phone and without a glance at her mother she called Mintie and Fly-by to her and headed for the park. It was already dark and she didn’t have a jacket, but Deborah didn’t dare say a word. Instead she went to the fridge, poured herself a glass of white wine and downed a big gulp of it. She leaned her head against the fridge door so that her forehead was resting on the white enamel, between a school notice and a Gary Larson cartoon. The cartoon showed a dog standing flattened against a laundry wall, hiding. A cat was peering curiously, cautiously into the clothes dryer, to the open door of which had been taped a roughly lettered notice saying ‘CAT FUD’.
Oh please
, the dog was praying fervently.
Oh please
.

‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ said Deborah, eyes closed. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

The next morning Olivia waited until her mother had left for work before she emerged from her bedroom. There was a note on the kitchen table:
Olivia, please call me at the office, love Mum
. She dropped it in the bin without even screwing it up.

Fleur was in separate classes until recess, and then she was in the library frantically finishing an essay. ‘Lunchtime?’ she asked, seeing Olivia hovering in the doorway. Olivia nodded. At lunchtime they made their way over to the school hall for a backstage meeting about the end-of-year play.

‘What’s up?’ Fleur asked as they entered the hall. ‘Were you reading all night again?’

‘Nup,’ said Olivia, but that was all she could manage. She sat
through the meeting, trying to look interested, but she barely heard a word that was said. Finally one of the Year 11 girls asked her if she was feeling all right.

‘Not really,’ she admitted. She was staring at the floor and didn’t notice everyone turn to look at her.

‘What’s up?’ the same girl asked.

‘You know that dog of mine? The basenji?’

‘Sure, that one that’s been stalking the school, uh?’

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles!’ said one boy, lifting his chin and howling like a wolf. It was a good wolf howl but it sounded nothing like Congo’s strange cry from the jungle depths.

‘Yeah,’ Olivia said, smiling wanly. She looked up then, into a circle of curious faces. ‘Well… my mum got rid of him while I was away at the weekend.’

‘How do you mean,
got rid of him
?’ asked Fleur.

‘She’s sent him to live on a farm.’ She saw several of the kids’ faces contract. There was an exchange of knowing glances between them, and Fleur, too.

‘Ah, right,’ said one of the boys from Year 10. ‘The old “he’s gone to live on a farm” routine.’

‘What do you mean,
routine
?’ Olivia asked. She felt strange. There was something happening that she didn’t know about.

‘That’s one of the oldest bits of bullshit in the book,’ he said carelessly. ‘Don’t you know? It means,
we had him put down.
’

Olivia’s mouth literally dropped open.

‘Oh, great, Bosco,’ said one of the older guys. ‘Break it to her gently why don’t you?’

‘Sorr-y,’ said the boy Bosco, grimacing. ‘I thought everyone past fourth grade knew that.’

‘Put down?’ repeated Olivia. No one said anything. She got up. Fleur got up, too, and was one step behind her as she left the hall. The schoolyard was teeming with kids; it stopped Olivia in her tracks. Fleur took her elbow and guided her back into the hall, up the narrow
stairs at the side to the lighting booth high in the back wall. It was locked. They slumped together on the narrow piece of floor, against the door.

‘
Put down
,’ Olivia said flatly. ‘She killed him.’

‘Not with her own hands,’ Fleur pointed out.

‘No. Not with her own hands. She got someone else to do that. She paid some bloody vet
money
to have him killed. And my dad took him there.’

‘Your
dad
? No, he wouldn’t have!’

‘He did. He told me last night. And he’s gone to live with Marion. He’s left home.’

‘Oh, Liv.’ Fleur sounded stricken, too, and Olivia couldn’t bear to look at her. It made it all too real. The tan and white body so vibrant with life being held on the steel table, the needle slipped with professional ease into… where? His rump? His foreleg? The wrinkles on his permanently questioning forehead suddenly smoothing out and the legs giving way. Slumping. Had anyone spoken? Had her father said,
Goodbye, Congo?
Had he said,
I’m sorry?
Olivia brought her knees up and buried her face in them, wrapping her arms around her head. After a while she muttered, ‘Could you get me a cheese sandwich?’, so that she could have some time completely alone without hurting Fleur’s feelings. Then she sobbed.

That night she avoided any contact with her mother, even a glimpse of her. She took Mintie and Fly-by for a long run in the park, aching for Congo’s demanding, complicated presence, and went straight to her bedroom after they got back. Deborah tapped on her door and asked her to come and eat dinner, but Olivia ignored her. Later, when she heard the TV go on, she went to the kitchen. There was a meal set out on a plate with a note saying
Microwave me!
but she ignored this, too, opening a can of creamed sweet corn and toasting some bread to go with it instead. She thought she would be sick
if she ate the food her mother had cooked. She took the toast and sweet corn back to her room, with a glass of milk, and ate it there.

She heard the phone ring and her mother answer it. After a few minutes of unintelligible murmuring she heard Deborah’s voice get louder.
Who’s she fighting with now?
Olivia wondered.
Probably Dad. Arguing about who’s to blame.
She opened her door quietly to listen in.

‘That is
ridiculous
, Robert!’ she heard Deborah say. She wasn’t talking, she was yelling. ‘How can Meredith
possibly
look after him? She wouldn’t know if her own arse was on fire!’

Oh, great
, Olivia thought,
now she’s on the warpath about Auntie Meredith.

‘Oh yeah, right,’ she heard her mother sneer. ‘AA. On the wagon. Turned over a new leaf. What
crap
! She’ll be asking him for money in two seconds flat, if she hasn’t already! If she even
bothers
to ask and doesn’t just help herself.’ Her voice went up several notches, wild with complaint. ‘What is it with you bloody men, always a soft touch for the helpless female with a sob story? Hey? The
poor, poor, pitiful me
line! They are the worst sort of predators, can’t you
see
that?’

‘You should know about good lines. Like
gone to live on a farm
,’ Olivia murmured softly. While Uncle Robert spoke, her mother stood there with shoulders hunched and the phone jammed to her ear, staring at the kitchen floor and tugging hard on a strand of her own hair. Then she erupted again.

‘No! No, no,
no!
If Dad can’t cook for himself, if he can’t remember how to use the bloody washing machine, then he’s not safe on his own. He’ll be setting fire to things next. He has to go into residential care and that’s that! Which means we have to find a nursing home.’

Olivia stiffened.
Grandpa.
Now she saw it. Her mother was going to do it to Grandpa, too. Not kill him outright, but she might as well.

‘I am
not
upset! I am
not
shouting! A
therapist
? Of course I’m not going to see a therapist, don’t be ridiculous! Have you gone mad, Robert? I’d always credited you with commonsense at least, until now.’

Olivia could feel her mother’s anger coming in waves up the hallway, even though she was being quiet again as Robert talked. But not for long.

‘This is complete rubbish!’ she burst out. ‘If no one else in this family will make a sensible decision, it’s obviously up to me. Again. As usual.
I’ll
find a decent nursing home for Dad. There’s an agency that handles these things, I’ve already spoken to them. I’ll ring them again tomorrow. Meantime you toddle off to your massages and aromatherapy and whatever else you bloody occupy your time with these days!’

Deborah slammed the phone down and stormed up the hall, Olivia just getting her bedroom door closed before she passed by.
‘Affirmations!’
she heard her mother snarl disgustedly. Deborah went into the study and slammed around in there for awhile, then all was quiet and Olivia knew she’d settled in front of the computer.

She sat down on the side of her bed, feeling that her mind had closed in, sharpened to a hard, still point. So much had happened since she got back from the Prom just yesterday evening, and worse, she knew now, was about to come.
No!
she thought fiercely.
She’s not going to do this!

CHAPTER 28

The house was exactly as Uncle James had described it.
Inverness
. It had taken such a long time to get there. First they had to walk with Olivia’s bike up to the nearest station and catch a train in to Spencer Street. There, in the dauntingly busy terminal, Olivia found the right place to buy their tickets for the train to Castlemaine. The trip took ages; there were delays,
works on the line
announced a laconic voice over the train’s crackling speakers, and apologised unconvincingly. Olivia tried not to think about the look on Mintie’s face when she’d hugged her goodbye.

Finally they arrived in Castlemaine and started walking again, wheeling the bike, and Grandpa was quite sure of the way but he started to get tired, and Olivia was exhausted, too. She had hardly slept for the past two nights. She managed to juggle her pack and Grandpa’s bag and Grandpa himself onto the bike and actually dinked him, while she stood on the pedals, for several kilometres along the flat country road. Grandpa rested his hands on her shoulders and laughed with delight. Currawongs called to them,
Arrah! Arrah!
as they wobbled by. Only a couple of cars passed them and
Olivia was glad of that, she didn’t want to attract more attention than she could help.

‘Turn off here!’ Grandpa said, gesturing excitedly. ‘This is the track to home!’

They had to dismount, the track was too bumpy for the overloaded bike. As they went on Grandpa started to walk a bit faster. ‘I used to live down here, you know,’ he told Olivia.

‘I know, Grandpa,’ she said.

‘Oh, I remember one day when I was just a little feller I found a cow standing beside this track, just right about here! She had a rope halter on. She was a Jersey, such a pretty thing, I led her home and I told Mother, “Look, this is Buttercup!”’ He laughed. ‘I thought we could keep her and she’d be my cow. Such a pretty thing. But she belonged to someone else and I couldn’t keep her after all. The farmer gave me tuppence for finding her though.’

‘Did he?’ said Olivia, smiling.

‘Tuppence was quite a bit in those days, you know.’

The tops of the two big date palms came into view. ‘Over there! Over there!’ he cried. When they actually came in sight of the house Alex stopped and said proudly, ‘Will you look at that! The old homestead, eh? I feel like I was here yesterday.’

Olivia got in through one of the bedroom windows, just like Uncle James had done, and unlocked the back door. The big old-fashioned key was sitting there in the inside lock. It was now late afternoon and Alex set to work immediately gathering kindling wood and getting the old wood stove in the kitchen fired up. It smoked a bit at first but Grandpa soon had it burning beautifully.

‘By golly, I’m glad that flue’s clear,’ he said. ‘I was a bit worried there for a minute. Now let’s have a look at the tank.’

He went out the back door and sure enough, at the side of the house was a large corrugated-iron water tank on a wooden stand. Alex picked up a long stick and tapped it firmly at various points. There was a heavy, flat sound from within.

‘Oh, I think it’s full,’ he said, looking pleased. ‘Just check the tap in the kitchen would you, lovey?’

At the sink, Olivia turned the tap and out poured the water, no problem. She let it run for a few moments and then filled a glass, which she carried outside to Alex. He took it and held it up to the last rays of sunlight, peering.

‘Clear as crystal. Not even any wrigglers,’ he said with profound satisfaction. ‘That’s good, eh?’

‘It’s excellent, Grandpa. And look, there’s a kettle and a teapot and everything.’

‘Well, of course there is, darl! What sort of home would it be if I didn’t have a teapot!’

She had brought tea, bread, tins of sardines and baked beans from Alex’s own pantry, and a small carton of milk, trusting Uncle James’s description of a kitchen equipped with utensils and crockery. They cooked their meal as dusk began to settle. There was no electricity, a possibility which hadn’t occurred to Olivia, but there were plenty of candles and matches in the kitchen drawers, and a bottle of lamp oil which Grandpa used to top up three lanterns he found in various rooms. There were blankets on the beds, and pillows, and Olivia found sheets in a big old wardrobe in the larger bedroom. They smelled rather musty and dusty and a few silverfish fell out when she shook out the bedding, but they weren’t dirty or mouldy so she made up two beds. It was fine.