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And even with parents, it’s not as though it’s hard. Tell them what keeps them happy. Do what you say you’re going to do. Treat them like they’re reasonable creatures even, no,
especially
when they act unreasonably, and sooner or later they’ll respond and treat you the same. There: simple, really. Olivia listened to other kids complaining about their parents and how
insane
they were, how they’d completely lost it over this or that, and asked silently,
Why do you bother? I don’t get it.
But there were so many things she didn’t get about other kids.
Probably never will
, she thought glumly. She was just hanging in till she got to be an adult herself and could do what she wanted. Get a license to keep reptiles, for instance. And goats, she’d love to have goats one day. Those fantastic eyes, and their hard, nubbly little heads.

She ran through her pets’ care schedule in her mind. There had been some disruption. It was her last year in primary school, and Deborah had decided that it might after all be a good thing for her to go to a private secondary school,
given the appalling mess that bunch of crooks left the state education system in
, in which case Olivia should try for a scholarship. So there had been a lot of extra study, and her care schedule had got a bit behind. But nor had she been able to make this Saturday morning trip to her grandfather’s for a few weeks, and she missed it. She’d been gardening with Grandpa forever; since she was a baby sitting in her stroller watching him work, listening as he told her every single thing he was doing, and why. She knew Grandpa missed her visits, too. And the animals were all fine, really. She’d got extra pellets in before things got too busy; the latest litters of rabbit and rat babies had all just gone to the usual pet shops, and she would
bring home a load of leafy greens from Grandpa’s today. Tomorrow she would dust the hens for parasites. Next month, the dogs’ vaccinations, and she’d get the vet to look at Fly-by’s broken tooth. Yes.

‘All good, girls,’ she told the dogs, and Mintie turned her clever black-and-white face up to her for a moment and nodded. Or the dog equivalent. Fly-by, tearing about in true kelpie fashion, covering a hundred metres for every ten Olivia walked, was too busy to make a response.

Alex was in the kitchen when she came through the back door. He started a little. ‘Gosh, Olivia, I thought you were your mother for a second! The spitting image of her, you are now. Cuppa?’

‘No thanks, Grandpa. These were out by the roses,’ she said, putting the secateurs and gardening gloves on the table as he came over to kiss her hello.

‘Thank you, sweetheart. I just thought I’d check the roses for pruning,’ and indeed, as he said this Olivia was reading the very same words in the little notebook lying there beside the teapot.

‘But we pruned them in July,’ she said.

‘Of course we did.’

‘Is it time to give them a spring feed?’

‘Not just yet. Thought we’d tackle the vegie garden today.’

‘Excellent! My chooks really need some fresh greens. So do the bunnies.’

‘Wish I still had some chooks, Ollie. I really miss those girls.’

‘Me too.’

‘Rotten foxes.’

‘Rotten foxes,’ Olivia agreed, picking up the phone to let her parents know she had arrived. It went straight to message, so she left one.

‘Let’s get stuck into it then, shall we?’ said Alex. ‘Gloves?’ And like two surgeons eager for the blade, they turned with the same motion, pulling on the gloves as they strode purposefully out the back door and into the green spring morning.

CHAPTER 2

Angus was asleep on the couch, the Saturday papers adrift all around him, when the phone rang. He managed to lurch across and answer it before it went to message, although the sudden movement made his left quad twang threateningly.
Lucky I gave up footy when I did
, he thought.

‘Angus Hume,’ he said thickly, rubbing the sore spot in his thigh.

‘Dad, it’s me. Grandpa’s having a rest and I wondered if you might be able to pick me up.’

‘Uh? Uh-huh.’

‘If you’re not busy. Because I’ve got these big bags of greens for the chooks and the rabbits.’

‘Sure, Ollie. Sorry, I was half-asleep. You want me to come and get you now?’

‘That’d be excellent. Thanks, Dad. See you soon.’

Angus put the phone down and stared at it.
My god, Olivia asked for a lift
, he thought. ‘Dee!’ he called, and quickly corrected himself. ‘Deborah!’ But she wasn’t in the study, or the bedroom. Must’ve gone for a walk. He wanted to tell someone this startling piece of
news, but then realised how dopey it would sound. ‘My daughter asked me for a lift.’ Yes? And your point is?

My point is
, Angus thought, getting into the car,
my point is, this child never asks for anything. You have to
beg
to help her.

The year she started school, for instance, he and Deborah arranged to flex their work hours on alternating days. The local primary was not far away, true, but still a fair trot for a five-year-old. Olivia tolerated being driven to and fro or accompanied on foot by one of her parents for the first term. Then she announced that she was going to walk by herself. And once home she could get her own snack and ‘do things’ till one of them got home at six. They argued, suggested alternatives. But no, she would
not
go to after-school care; she wanted to be by herself. She compromised on the time: they could get home at five, then. Otherwise, she was adamant, and convinced them. Not for the first time. Not the last. Angus, a lawyer with a community legal aid group, told the women in his office with whom he exchanged kid-chat: ‘That girl of mine! She never loses a case!’

In the first week of this new arrangement, there was a sudden cold snap: a day that had started out fine but turned nasty, with driving rain setting in just on three o’clock. Angus told the others in the office he had to go, and as he drew near the school he recognised his little daughter in her bright yellow raincoat slogging determinedly through the pelting rain, head down. He drew alongside, pleased with his own fatherly thoughtfulness, and wound down the window just enough to call, ‘Ollie! Hop in!’

She looked towards him. Her expression didn’t change a bit, and she kept on walking.
She doesn’t recognise the car
, he thought. He drove a few metres on and stopped again, actually got half out of the car.

‘It’s Daddy, Olivia! Hop in, darling!’

She climbed into the back seat, raincoat streaming, didn’t greet him or say a word until they pulled into the drive at home. When Angus had switched off the engine she said accusingly, ‘You said I could walk by myself.’

‘It’s raining, Olivia! It’s
teeming
!’

Her face was implacable. ‘It’s only weather, Daddy,’ she said in a withering tone. ‘And I brought my raincoat.’

He watched, speechless, as she got out of the car, climbed the steps to the porch and opened the front door with the key secured on a long ribbon in her bag. Then she turned as if she’d forgotten something and waited for her father to join her. She took his hand and stroked it several times, consolingly.

‘But thank you for coming to get me, anyway.’

He told Deborah about it as they prepared dinner together that evening. She, too, had fretted about Olivia walking home in the rain, and had rung his office just moments after he left. As he finished the story she closed her eyes and shook her head slowly, knife stilled on the chopping board.

‘Honestly, Dee,’ Angus went on (he could still call her Dee, then), ‘She all but said, “There there, Daddy, you meant well”.’

Deborah gave a shuddering sigh and her eyes snapped open and held his.

‘Do you ever think, when you’re looking at her,
She’s weird
?’

‘Weird? How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. Eerie. The way she’s so self-contained.’ Deborah shook her head again, her face clouded. ‘Why can’t she just be a child? Happy, carefree? Isn’t that what children are meant to be?’

‘I think she is happy, Dee,’ Angus said, but he felt uneasy now.

His mother was still alive then, and although she and his father had moved to Queensland to be near his sister, her way with children was legend in their family. At a quiet moment the next weekend Angus rang and told her the story.

‘It’s just her nature,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t much of the child about her, that’s true, but it’s nothing to worry about. She was born old.’

‘But, Mum, for a five-year-old to
want
to walk home in the rain! It wasn’t just drizzle, it was really pelting down. Don’t you think that’s a bit… odd?’

His mother laughed. ‘She’s a Scot on both sides, don’t forget!’

‘Meaning?’

‘Two hundred years ago, that girl would’ve been out on the hills barefoot in weather far worse than anything Melbourne can dish up, bossing around a bunch of cattle with horns the width of your car bonnet. Little and all as she is, Angus.’

And indeed, as his mother said this Angus could see it, and it all somehow made sense to him. Olivia was only strange in the context of the cosseted, overprotected modern-day child; put her down in another century, or even today almost anywhere else in the world – in the Third World that is – and her implacable capability would be expected, and welcomed. And Angus decided there and then that he would welcome it, too, since that was just how his daughter happened to be.

All of this – the staunch little girl, his mother’s calm assurance, the sharing of concern that happened so effortlessly between him and Deb back then – it was all so vivid in Angus’s mind as he drove to his father-in-law’s house that it jolted him to see the tall slender girl waiting in the front yard, a dog on either side, bits of black hair escaping from her ponytail. Her serious look, almost a scowl, was just the same, but Olivia was no longer that small child.
My god
, Angus thought,
she’s starting to get a figure.
His heart swelled painfully.
I have so few years left to really be with her. And what the hell will Deb and I be, when she’s not there?

He glanced at himself in the mirror as he pulled up. His hair – he could remember Deb running her fingers through his hair, a very long time ago, murmuring, ‘It’s the same colour as leatherwood honey’. These days his hair was as much grey as any other colour, and thinning. As Olivia approached the car he had an urge to ask her, ‘Do I look old to you?’, but knew he wouldn’t. One doesn’t ask one’s daughter such a question.
Besides, it’s not her I want the reassurance from
.

Olivia slung the bulging black garbage bags of grass and weeds
into the boot. She held a rear door open and the dogs leapt in, Fly-by thrusting her head out the window the moment Olivia rolled it down, Mintie sitting plumb in the middle and gazing keenly ahead between the two front seats, paws neatly together.

‘You’d better leave a note for your grandpa, don’t you think?’ Angus suggested as his daughter settled into the passenger seat beside him.

‘Already have.’

‘He okay?’ he asked as they drove away. ‘Just tired from all the gardening?’

‘Yeah… I guess…’

Angus glanced at her quickly. Hesitation? Olivia?

‘What, Ol?

‘Just…’ She turned in her seat to face him, but Angus kept his eyes on the road, not to put her off.

‘When I got there the secateurs and gloves were lying on the ground by the roses. And when I brought them in Grandpa said he’d gone to check them for pruning.’

‘Ye-eah…’

‘Dad, we pruned them a couple of months ago, in July! But then, when we went inside for lunch, he saw this little note he’d written about the roses and he wanted to check them all over again.’

‘So…What did you do?’

‘Well, I reminded him we’d pruned them at the right time already so there was no need to check them. But he was so, kind of, determined. Like,
I have to do this
. It was just a bit weird. Grandpa’s usually so… nice.’

‘He wasn’t nice about this?’

‘He was just so, like,
insisting
. As if I was trying to stop him doing something important.’

Angus risked a glance. Olivia was scowling, but not in her usual determined way. Her mouth looked soft and uncertain.

‘And usually he only has a little nap, ten minutes, or maybe fifteen
minutes, and then he drives me home. Today he’d been asleep for nearly an hour when I rang you.’

Maybe he’s having a heart attack, Angus worried. Didn’t people get disoriented just before they had a heart attack? Or was that a stroke? Maybe his father-in-law had gone to lie down and had a stroke. Had fallen out of bed and couldn’t call for help.

‘Maybe we should go back there for a tick. I think I should look in on him.’

‘I already did, Dad, twice. Once before I rang you and then just before you drove up. He was sleeping perfectly normally. Normal breathing and all that. His face was, you know, the right colour.’

‘Good for you, Ol.’

‘Yeah. I did that first aid course, remember? But I… I think Mum should know.’

‘I’ll tell her. You want me to tell her? Or would you rather?’

‘No, you can, Dad. If you don’t mind, that is?’

‘Course not. Happy to.’

Olivia turned back to the dogs then, chatting animatedly, admonishing them. Her face relaxed.
That’s twice she’s asked me to do something!
It seemed his self-contained, resourceful daughter had decided something was happening with her grandfather that she didn’t want to tackle alone. She wanted her parents to handle it. Angus had a sudden thought, like a needle-prick:
I hope we’re up to the job.

Deborah didn’t get home till nearly dinnertime. Angus poured her a glass of the sauvignon blanc he’d been holding back from opening till she got home, and she perched on the stool at the island bench, sipping, as he chopped vegetables and told her Olivia’s story about Alex. But not that Olivia had asked him to tell her. Nor did he describe his own stab of doubt about whether they could manage it. Whatever it was.