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enough money for us to live.
    My earliest memories were about shoes. Vivienne wouldn’t leave me alone in a motel room and we never stayed in a town long enough to learn who to trust. She’d tuck me under the pool table with a blanket and a packet of chips; I’d doze to the sound of balls ricocheting off the cushion and the clink of pint glasses on teeth. I learned to reset the jukebox when a song played four times in a row and a drunk patron grew maudlin. I watched feetshuffle around the table: leather boots were working men; scuffed flats meant waitress-on-a-break; when stiletto heels got wobbly they went outside with leather boots; thongs were well-worn drunks who slipped me fruit-cups under the table; bare brown feet with splayed toes were indigenous locals. Sometimes, there would be a stranger in wedge heels or sandals, or black courts you could see your face in, which meant the Jehovahs were doing country service. There wasn’t much I couldn’t figure out without ever seeing a person’s face.
    Downstairs, only Darcy was still in the kitchen. She sat cross-legged on a crate, plucking at the laces on her sneakers. They had been white—now they were covered with puff-paint graffiti and black Texta symbols.
    ‘Are you in or out?’ she asked bluntly.
    Silence put his thumb up.
    ‘In, I guess,’ I said.
    ‘Oh goody, an induction,’ she said.
    ‘What happens at an induction?’ I asked. My stomach was doing flip-flops.
    Carrie breezed back into the kitchen. ‘You pledge your allegiance and we sacrifice a virgin. Oh, that’d be you, Darce,’ she said wide-eyed.
    I couldn’t help it. I laughed. All the emotion that had been boiling and festering since I’d left Grandfather’s house overflowed. I made my first enemy without even trying.
    Darcy fired a poisonous look and stormed out.
    ‘Don’t worry about her. She pulls faces at blindpeople. See you guys tonight.’ Carrie heaved a bag over her shoulder and left.
    Silence wrote in his notebook.
    Do you have a sleeping bag?
    ‘I have the swag,’ I said.
    He nodded and led me to a bedroom with scarred floorboards and a sagging ceiling. There were three mattresses. Two showed signs of occupation: pillows, unzipped sleeping bags and jumbled clothes. A make-up bag, an open book and a one-eyed teddy bear. The spare mattress, leaning up against a wall, was bare and stained.
    ‘Who sleeps here?’
    Carrie and Bree, he wrote.
    ‘How many of you are there?’
    Eight. Nine with you.
    ‘Are you all renting?’
    He shook his head. Squatting.
    ‘How long have you all been here?’
    Silence held up six fingers.
    ‘Six months?’
    I tipped the mattress onto the floor and a cloud of dust exploded in our faces.
    Silence sneezed. Upstairs a floorboard creaked and he looked up, holding his breath.
    Come on.
    ‘Where are we going?’
    Work.
    I went to pick up my backpack but Silence gesturedfor me to leave it. I stuffed the photo into my jeans pocket and followed.
    We left the way we came, through the cellar window. Outside, the sun was warm and the air was still, expectant. We scrambled through the trapdoor fence, into the alleyway. I noted the street name—Jacaranda Lane—and paid attention to landmarks as we made our way back into the city. Individual corner shops and houses gave way to office blocks and furniture stores. Then came the multistorey towers, malls and tramlines.
    Breathing felt like inhaling soup.
    Silence walked with his head down, shoulders hunched, as if he was heading into a gale-force wind.
    So, he picked up strays. I was officially a stray. A street kid. I’d heard about them, read about them. Maybe living on the street was a kind of freedom. Or was it a sentence? It felt like freedom to me then.
    We passed under a bridge and walked along a path next to a slow-moving brown river. I kept well away from it. Cyclists whizzed past. I felt lighter without my backpack, or maybe it was more than that. There was a weight gone, a physical burden. It was