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next Saturday at St Pauls, the marriage of Wilhelmina Wilson, daughter of blah blah, and Douglas Gordon, son of et cetera.
    ‘The Gordons, see, were a Preso family hereabouts, and very God-fearing, and it was said that Menie Wilson only got Dougie Gordon to go to the altar with her because old Mr Gordon was an Elder of the Church. I mean, there were lots of others in the queue, but it was Dougie Gordon copped it. Course, that’s all ancient history now.’
    Not quite, Liv thought, remembering how the witch had come oh-la-de-da over Mum on many an occasion, and how she’d sneered at Liv for only having Mum’s name.
    ‘But you said about the blast furnace. Your dads working here.’ Liv was still trying to imagine it all blasting and furnacing away. ‘What was it like?’
    ‘Like?’
    Earth shudders. An engine throbs upon its pier. Coke burns inside the stoves. Air blasts through pipes and tunnels. Smoke belches out the flues. Molten iron, red hot, pours down through the furnace and out into the slits and channels and pools. And above it all, the noise roars through your Summer House and your Winter Quarters, through Hilltop Grove and Elvey Dell. This isn’t a playhouse, girl. Think of the photograph.
    ‘Like? It just was . And then suddenly it wasn’t here any more.’
    ‘Where did it go?’ Liv had never really thought about what had happened to the blast furnace. She had somehow imagined it slowly, slowly, subsiding back into the earth . . .
    ‘Don’t you know, love? Late 1920s it was, start of the Great Depression, they just closed down the industry here, and everything moved to Port Kembla, down near Wollongong. By Christmas 1929, I remember, this whole site here was a ruin . . .’
    Liv reeled. To think that the power of something as great as the blast furnace could be broken, snap, like a twig.
    ‘And speaking of moving,’ the stranger was saying, as she got up from the step, ‘I’d better be making camp for the night . . .’
    Alone now, in near darkness, the ruins that surrounded Liv felt for the first time like – ruins. And she felt helpless and betrayed. If the blast furnace could be beaten so easily, what hope had she: a fat, plain, ordinary girl?
    Walking back across the wasteland, Liv noticed that there was a tarpaulin strung out from the roof of the yellow van, and that the old woman was setting up a camping stove on a card table, on which the poppies sat in a jam jar.
    She’s senile, Liv told herself. She’s a crackpot, a weirdo, a nutter, a real loony.
    Back home, the click of the flyscreen door unleashes the tirade.
    ‘Where’ve you been girl? Waltzing back in, free as you please, at this hour! Look at her, will you . . .’ Gramma was in her wheelchair in the lounge room with the others, and making the most of her audience.
    ‘. . . Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But you can’t tell me she’s been off by herself all afternoon . . .’
    (Ha! If only you knew!)
    ‘. . . Oh no, like mother like daughter . . .’
    Mum flinches, but Liv is impervious now to Gramma’s slanders. For if Liv is not a princess, and the tower is not a tower, then the witch is not a witch, and cannot harm her.
    ‘. . . No better than she should be . . .’
    (If only you knew what I know about you!)
    Liv goes to the kitchen and makes herself a bowl of cornflakes, takes it to the sleep-out and eats it in bed.
    Waking from a dream she can’t quite remember (a beach, was it? Something wide and open, full of sky?), it seems only minutes later but must be hours, for the house is quiet and a shaft of moonlight funnels in through the louvres.
    Idly, just wondering, Liv rummages through her school bag and pulls out the geography text. There’s a map of Australia printed across the front endpaper. She finds SYDNEY, then Lithgow, in tiny letters, a bit to the left. No Port Kembla . . .but here’s Wollongong, just below Sydney on the coast. She measures the distance between Lithgow and Wollongong: about 250