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and they made this special dress, satin and pearls, with you know …” She gestures with her hands.
    â€œLarge mammary inserts,” he says drily.
    She laughs. “Yeah.” She looks at him sideways. “You seem like you should be an English teacher, not a dentist.”
    â€œWhat!” he says in mock outrage, his brows working furiously. “Fie on thee! Out, out, damned spot, you’re fired.”
    â€œYou’re funny.”
    â€œYou’re pretty funny yourself, Bethesda.” He smiles and she swings her eyes away, nervous. She focuses on the Green Island ferry, in the distance, nosing in toward the wharves.
    â€œLook, Beth,” he says, “I don’t want to pry, but I’ve been making a few inquiries, and from what I hear, that hostel is pretty awful. I wondered if you’d like me to –”
    â€œIt’s okay” she says. “I don’t mind it.”
    â€œAnd another thing. I’ve been looking at your application and your references again. God knows, I don’t want to lose you at the clinic, but you got a Commonwealth Scholarship, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t you take it?”
    The ferry is bumping against the pylons now. Men will be wheeling the gangplanks into place. More tourists – people who are free to go anywhere they want, free even to go home again – will disembark and others will board.
    â€œAll right,” he says quietly. “I just want you to know, if you need any help … I’m worried about you, that’s all.”
    â€œNo one needs to worry about me,” she says politely, swinging her legs back over the sea wall in an arc, away from him. “But Mrs Wilkinson will worry about you if we don’t get back.”
    Every Thursday afternoon, last thing, he gives Mrs Wilkinson and Beth their pay envelopes, and every Thursday she saunters along the esplanade, pretending to browse, in the opposite direction from her bus stop until she’s about three or four blocks from the clinic. Then she crosses over and makes for her spot on the sea wall behind the pandanus palms. She takes the pay envelope out of her bag and opens it. Four crisp fifty-dollar bills, brand new, straight from the bank every time, a miracle that makes her hands shake. She puts them back in the envelope, back in her bag, and takes her bank book out. Its balances, marching forward line by line, entry by entry, shimmer. Already she can see the way the page will look tomorrow morning at the teller’s window. She kisses the open book, slips it back in her bag, and hugs the bag to her chest. She can feel a warm buzz against her ribcage.
    On Thursday evenings, she feels as though she could walk across the water to the marina. She feels as though she would only need to lift her arms and she would rise, float, up to the decks of the big catamaran, the one that goes to the Outer Reef. And out there on Michaelmas Cay where the seabirds are, where they rise in vast snowy clouds, she would feel the lift of the slipstream, the cushion of air beneath, the upward swoop of it, climbing, climbing, We are climbing Jacob’s ladder…
    She is singing the old hymn triumphantly inside her head, or maybe belting it out loud – why not? – because here she is, Sunday night in Mossman again, after the minister and his wife have taken her in. Here’s the small Sunday night congregation, the ceiling fans turning sluggishly, moths thick around the altar lights, everyone fanning themselves with hymnbooks, singing their hearts out, Every rung goes higher, higher, her mother loving every minute of it, one of her mother’s favourite hymns, her mother turning and smiling … Oh no, wait, this isn’t right, she’s mixing things up, she shouldn’t have thought of this. Wrong track.
    She swings her legs over the sea wall and crosses the road and runs all the way to the bus stop, her feet thud thud thudding on the