‘I am trying to contain my annoyance here, so let me double-check this with you. Did you leave this house when you were babysitting Amelia on Saturday?’

  Eep.

  I don’t need to answer; she can tell just by looking at me that I did.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘How did I find out? HOW DID I FIND OUT? That is not the question here, Eleanor. The question –’ She stops to take an enormous breath. ‘The question here is, what on earth were you thinking?’

  ‘How did you find out, though?’

  ‘Because I finished early today, I bought a babka on the way home and took half of it in to Mr and Mrs Gruber.

  ‘Mr Gruber was asking me if you were in training, or if school sports were coming up. Because he had never seen you running so fast as when you ran home on Saturday, around lunchtime. You were running so fast, apparently, you didn’t even hear him say hello.’

  She cuts some babka and pushes a slice towards me.

  Thankfully we are a family that does not neglect to eat in a crisis.

  ‘And I gather you were alone. Was Plum still here looking after Amelia?’

  I don’t know where to begin. I turn my plate in a full circle while I think.

  ‘Is this ringing any bells?’ she asks.

  I’m looking down at the chocolate swirls in my babka. They’re hypnotic. ‘I’ve been very irresponsible.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘I wasn’t gone for long. And I realised that I shouldn’t have gone at all. So I came straight back home.’

  She looks a fraction more relaxed.

  ‘That’s why I was running so fast.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘The cockatoo park.’

  ‘Were you meeting someone there?’

  ‘Some kids from school. I didn’t even want to go . . .’ Uh-oh. Now I’ve dragged Plum into it.

  ‘I see.’ She chews a mouthful of cake and puts on the kettle.

  I get up and pour myself a glass of milk.

  ‘I can’t believe that you thought it was okay to leave a seven-year-old all by herself. I honestly thought you were mature enough to do a two-hour daytime babysitting job in your own home.’

  ‘I should never have done it. I’ll never do it again.’

  ‘Imagine if a babysitter had deserted you at that age!’

  ‘I would have been scared. But I promise Amelia didn’t even know I was gone. She won’t be traumatised. You don’t need to tell Ted, do you?’

  ‘I certainly do. And I need to work out an appropriate punishment.’

  I gulp some milk.

  ‘Is it still okay for you to drop me at spelling bee?’ I ask in my most polite voice.

  ‘You are not going anywhere except your room, young lady.’

  ‘But you said . . .’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘You’re really sending me to my room?’

  Another huge breath. ‘I need some space to think about this and calm down.’

  I put my bag down very quietly, flop onto my bed, and text Cecily. Huge trouble. Not allowed out of my room. Tell you tomorrow. Good luck! That’ll be hovering in space until she finishes her saxophone lesson.

  I’m hanging out for that blue double tick, proof of connection to someone who’ll understand, forgive, and be on my side.

  Default on-my-sider is my mother, but I’ve blown that for the time being.

  Glancing at my Tom Holland poster, I know I’m completely unworthy.

  He deserves to marry a woman of integrity: someone like Greta or Malala, if she hadn’t just got married, and I’ll be out in the cold.

  Deservedly so.

  My mother calls me down for dinner, but doesn’t eat with me. She is finishing some work and says she’ll eat later. I hear the buzz of her voice talking on the phone.

  Impending punishment is circling me like a large shark.

  It’s out there.

  It’s coming for me.

  It’s just a matter of when, and what the damage will be.

  General hopefulness level has plummeted to ocean-deep doom.

  Shark attacks are incredibly rare.

  But if it happens and a shark is coming for you and you haven’t fainted with fear, you’re supposed to try for a hard punch or poke in the eye; this frightens sharks away. Would also be frightening to do.

  Also, don’t swim alone.

  And don’t swim at dusk, shark feeding time.

  Stone fish. Know what they look like and avoid stepping on one.

  Stingrays. I hate swimming over them. You can’t put your feet down in case they spike you.

  Blue-ringed octopus. Never run your hands along the underside of rocks in rock pools.

  In piranha-infested water, the main thing to do is not bleed: they are attracted to blood; so, associated, stay away from where people might be fishing.

  Irukandji jellyfish. Man, you do not want to run into one of these. They are lethal.

  If you are stung and don’t die, you are likely to be sick and in excruciating pain. Vinegar straight onto the sting and removal of tentacles is good first aid.

  When I did a talk on Irukandji jellyfish in grade four, my presentation included a first-hand account of the pain of a sting victim who had said, Just let me die, and Hannah Lewinsky’s mum rang my mum to complain, because Hannah refused to swim in the ocean after that.

  But jellyfish are seasonal, so you can just try to avoid them.

  Or swim in pools.

  Punishment

  My mother and Ted sit side by side on the sofa. I hate the way they are looking at each other, as if they are a double act.

  I prefer Mum cross and alone.

  We have been through the details of what happened. The facts, or the ones I’m prepared to share, are on the table.

  The scroggin bag left on my bedroom floor will go with me to the grave.

  At the end of all the hashing through, my mother asks me what I have to say.

  The words are there but they sit at the back of my mouth, little aeroplanes refusing to leave the runway.

  That metaphor class has really stayed with me.

  One aeroplane is full of the bits I can’t say about why I went to the park. Who I am, or who I sometimes want to be, or worse, who I want to look like, or be seen as.

  That plane has my insecurities sitting up front in business class, with Plum wandering the aisles deciding who’ll get food and drinks.

  I don’t like it.

  Another plane contains my apologies. They’re buckled up, in every shape and size, and they are all sincere. I am old enough to know that what I did was wrong with no get-out clause.

  Plain, big, full caps wrong.

  WRONG.

  Neon-signed wrong.

  Embroidery stitched and made into a cushion wrong.

  Written in the sky wrong.

  Another plane is screening this scene as if it were film or television.

  I’d either cry and say I was sorry, or I’d huff and puff like a wolf, raise my voice, stamp my foot and say to Ted, You’re not even my real father.

  One plane carries a solo passenger, my little-kid self, convinced that she is suddenly and completely unimportant. As though there’s a competition for my mother’s attention, little-kid me wants to shout, look at me me me me me me me me me me me, don’t look at him.

  In my heart is something looser and more out of control. More like, how come you are suddenly in my life? Who let you in? Why didn’t I get a vote here?

  Just two words comes out, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Two little packages on the luggage carousel.

  Maybe they are the only words that count.

  But I can’t even get that right; they emerge with a half-swallowed squeak.

  ‘What did you say?’ my mother asks.

  I clear my throat and push the words out a bit harder. ‘I’m sorry.’

  When we get down to the nuts and bolts of punishment, it’s another exchanging glances moment.

  They’ve discussed it.

  They’ve talked about me behind my back.

  They’ve workshopped the best way for me to make amends.

  I am going to help out at Ted’s café.

  Thrice.

  This Thursday after school, Saturday afternoon, next Thursday after school.

  And I’m grounded for the same three weeks.

  They are making the punishment do the extra work of me getting to know Ted and his world better, of me liking Ted better, of me accepting that we’ll all move in together and blend.

  They wish.

  I am nodding when a final plane turns up and shows me who’s on board.

  It’s my dad, with his great smile.

  But I don’t know what he’s saying. What would he say? I can’t hear him, no matter how much I long to hear him. No matter how much I hope he’d understand and be the one on my side.

  His plane makes me cry.

  It’s the crying that grabs you unexpectedly and fills your eyes so they’re brimming over before you’ve even realised what’s happening.

  When my mother and Ted see that I’m crying, they think it’s because I feel so rotten about what I did, and that I’m so sorry, but it’s not that, it’s that I’m alone.

  They have each other but I’ve only got me.

  I hug my mother back and agree that we can all put this behind us and I’ll prove that I can be the responsible person they both knew I was when they first suggested that I could look after Amelia.

  I ask if they’ve told Amelia. They do the glance again. No. They decided that she didn’t need to know.

  To be clear, that’s not to spare me; that’s so they can keep going with their blending plans and minimise the hiccups.

  A terrifying thought: I ask if I can still go to the School Strike 4 Climate if I’m grounded.

  They look at each other again. They have talked about this, too.

  It’s a ‘no’.

  The Other Woman Isn’t

  On the first Thursday of punishment I make my way to Oliver and the Bean straight after school.

  Ted might teach me how to make coffee.

  I can totally see myself working in a cool café handing delicious café lattes over the counter, and the word spreading about how good my coffee is.

  A TV station might want to come and do a story on me – ‘Youngest barista in town wows the locals’, something like that.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ asks Ted.

  ‘Will I be making coffee?’

  ‘It depends how long you work for me. Say if you apply for casual work when you turn fifteen and prove yourself to be dependable, maybe you could start some training after a year or two. I’ve never had someone that young making coffee, but who knows?’

  Training?

  Fifteen?

  I’m not offering to perform brain surgery.

  ‘To be honest, Nell, you’ve got a bit of ground to make up before I can think of you as being dependable.’

  That stings. I am The Unreliable Babysitter.

  I’m also one hundred per cent against our families moving in together.

  I must be about his least favourite person in the world.

  The person behind the bar, Addison, makes Ted a coffee and hands it over without being asked.

  It is moody in here – a long bar of dark timber, polished concrete floor, and a ceiling that looks like it belongs in a factory.

  It’s just after three thirty and there aren’t that many people here. Ted says peak hour is between eight and eleven am with another spike between noon and two.

  The customers are mostly hipster-y looking twenty-somethings, couples, and solos with laptops, and a few mothers giving kids an after-school hot chocolate.

  ‘Would you like something?’ Addison asks.

  I remember Amelia’s information about marshmallows and wouldn’t mind a couple, but I’m too shy to ask.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  Ted is looking at stuff on his iPad screen – tables of information that he scans and swipes through while he has his coffee. ‘Let’s see if Lizzie can take on some more shifts while Maeve is away.’

  ‘All good,’ says Addison. He takes a phone from his back pocket and starts texting.

  I look at the big blackboards behind the bar area, their messages in coloured chalks. One is the menu, the other one reads: Thank you, Oliver and the Bean fam, this year our profits are going to Ethiopia, educating girls from families living in poverty.

  ‘What’s that about?’ I nod towards the blackboard.

  ‘Oliver and the Bean is a not-for-profit company,’ Ted replies.

  ‘I thought it was yours.’

  He nods. ‘I take a salary, and pay overheads, like food, coffee, staff, rates, utilities, and then every year I donate the profits to education projects that benefit girls.’

  I have nothing to say.

  My mother is dating Jesus.

  And I hate him.

  ‘You should give a TED talk about that.’

  Ted smiles. ‘I don’t know you well enough yet to register the level of sarcasm.’

  Two women enter the café, one of them blowing a kiss in Ted’s direction as they sit at a table in the window.

  IT’S HER. The other woman.

  I stare at Ted, my heart pounding. This is happening! He follows my eye-line.

  ‘That’s my sister, Ivy. Would you like to meet her?’

  Heart stops pounding.

  Heart sinks.

  Drag heart along behind me as I troop over to meet Ivy – who is as nice as pie, who has heard so much about me, who has met my lovely mother.

  At this exact moment I realise that there is no way out of this. I don’t mean the café punishment, I mean the family blend punishment, the one that will last forever.

  The one I will never accept, even if I am forced into it.

  Now we head to the back of the café and through to some big storage rooms just behind the kitchen.

  This space is crowded but organised, lined with shelves stacked with crockery and trays of cutlery and metal baking sheets and sacks of coffee beans. There’s an industrial fridge running along one wall.

  ‘What’s that?’ I point to a steel machine I don’t recognise.

  ‘A roaster.’

  ‘What’s in there?’ I’m pointing to a couple of huge containers standing on the floor.

  ‘Coffee grounds. What’s left after we make a coffee. I keep it for customers who want it for their compost. If there’s any left over a local nursery takes it.’

  My job is to stamp the café’s logo onto the takeaway coffee cups.

  Ted points out that they use a premium brand that can be recycled, so he likes to keep the stamping neat and not have any wastage.

  He sets me up at a bench with cups, a stamp and an inkpad. He stamps a couple of cups to show me the right position: directly opposite the seam, in the lower half of the cup, but not right at the bottom.

  Because the cup is curved, you need to apply pressure with a gentle roll of the stamp.

  And then you leave them for a while before you stack them so they don’t smudge.

  ‘If you need me, I’ll be in there.’ He points through a doorway into a small office. ‘Or out there.’ The café. ‘And let me know if you want anything to eat or drink.’

  I’m starving but too proud to ask for anything. I’m going to have to survive on the banana and muesli bar that I ate on my way here.

  I get into a rhythm after the first twenty or so cups.

  While I’m stamping, I realise what Ted’s funny smell is: coffee beans, which is a different smell from coffee itself.

  I can’t win.

  Depths of Despair

  ‘My life is a disaster. Even Ted’s smell came to nothing.’

  ‘What was it?’ asks Gus.

  ‘Unroasted coffee beans. It must seep into his clothes. Now I know what it is, it doesn’t even seem that bad. Just unusual.’

  ‘No luck with him wanting your mum for her money?’ asks Cecily.

  I groan. ‘A, she’s not rich anyway, and B, he’s some former banker who now gives money away to good causes.’

  ‘What about the woman?’ asks Gus.

  ‘It was his sister.’

  Plum, Cecily, Gus and I have been sent to Philosopher’s Corner to finish colouring in the diorama of ancient Rome, the last item being pinned up for Marcus Aurelius month.

  We are looking at how the words of the ancient philosopher might be relevant to people in grade six blue.

  ‘If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it,’ Plum is reading one of the Marcus Aurelius quotes.

  ‘It is true. And I’ve said it a hundred times: I don’t want to move in with Ted and Amelia.’

  ‘You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you,’ offers Gus.

  ‘I’m already upset! I’m being forced to live with people I hardly know, I’m not allowed to go to School Strike 4 Climate and Marcus Aurelius can’t help me.’

  ‘Just do what I do,’ says Plum. ‘Lie low, be nice, and assume you’re allowed to do it. Parents are busy; they forget.’

  ‘You don’t know Anne,’ says Cecily. ‘She has a mind like a razor.’

  Plum bristles.

  Finally, something Plum and Cecily have in common: they both like knowing best.

  ‘I do know you shouldn’t give in without a fight, like a weak baby,’ says Plum.

  ‘I didn’t say Nell should give in.’

  ‘It sounded like it.’

  Plum and Cecily glare at each other.

  Oil and water.

  ‘On the morning of school strike, just say it’s compulsory,’ says Gus. ‘It was your idea. It won’t be fair if you don’t get to go.’

  ‘Have you told Alex you can’t go?’ asks Cecily.

  ‘I’m leaving it until the last minute, in case there’s a miracle and Mum does change her mind. We’ve got to colour in the Tiber or Alex will come over.’ I sigh. ‘Should we use blue or green?’

  ‘Both.’ Cecily and Plum say it at the same time.

  ‘So, it’ll be –’ Plum starts.

  ‘– turquoise.’ They say that at the same time, too.

  If they were friends, it would be a pinky-pull moment for sure.

 

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