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had to go to the dole office, to get my file transferred over from Campbelltown.’
    That had taken so long she’d run the risk of being late picking Sammy up on Sammy’s first day.
    ...Finding her way to the post office, looking up the phone book to find out where the local dole office was, going home to get the street directory, remembering when she got home that of course the directory was in the car, finding her way to the Newtown library, looking up the street directory there to find out how to get to Parramatta Road, Camperdown…
    By that time it had been half-past one and there wasn’t time to get there and then back in time for Sammy.
    ‘Okay,’ Ted said. ‘So you fixed all that up. Then what?’
    ‘But I didn’t fix it up.’ Evie didn’t bother with the details because Ted hated details. ‘I did it on Tuesday.’
    Again not bothering to explain that you walk about four kilometres to get down there and then you get a number and then you sit down and wait an hour or two till it’s your number’s turn, and then you talk at the desk and fill in forms. So it was half-past one again when she finished and there was no time to go all the way up to the Commonwealth Employment Service at Newtown to fill in the other set of forms that had to be transferred.
    ‘Okay, so after two days Miss Brilliant had her form filled in. And on Wednesday?’
    ‘No,’ said Evie, ‘on Wednesday I did the other form. Up at the other office.’ Admittedly that only took an hour, and then she’d spent half an hour wandering around the noticeboards, reading ads for qualified plumbers and couriers with their own vans and à la carte chefs and factory hands with seventy-nine years experience and well-groomed temps with refs. Then she’d gone home and slept.
    (Slept. Or maybe not slept. It hadn’t
felt
like sleep, to feel like a flame; it felt more awake than most of Evie’s time.)
    ‘And on Thursday,’ Evie went on (skipping over the sleeping), ‘I went down the Newtown CYSS centre, to see what was going on.’
    Mum knew that CYSS was some sort of government thing, so it was always a good alibi, when talking to her. Back at Campbelltown, Evie used to go to CYSS sometimes with Roseanne; Ted called it the Dolebludgers’ Club. Like going down the Catholic Club, or the RSL.
    ‘Going down the Dolebludgers’?’ he’d say, his eyes sarcastic on her. ‘Be sure to tell me, when you get a good win on the pokies.’
    Ha ha. Very funny. The real joke was the CYSS itself. Commonwealth Youth Support Scheme. As if a fancy name would work some sort of magic. Mum thought it was something about training you, or teaching you how to get a job. Ha, ha, Evie laughed to herself.
    Ted snorted now at the mention of CYSS, but Mum said, ‘Oh good, love’ – encouraging but vague. She was taking up the curtains from the old place to fit the windows here. ‘Anything useful?’ Mum sometimes tried to feed Evie lines, to get Ted off Evie’s back. (Off Mum’s back too.)
    ‘Oh. Yes. No. Maybe.’ Keep it vague. Evie had screwed up her courage and gone down there. She felt shy, going somewhere full of strangers. She went in, and there was a guy running around with a video camera, and a fattish-sort-of girl running after him with a sound-thing. The girl was like a dog on a leash, connected to him via the sound-cord. They looked about twenty-five and you could tell they were in charge of the place. The guy was good-looking.
    Evie had looked at the noticeboards to see what was going on. Macrame, yoga, the usual sort of stuff. Training you for all the yoga and macrame factories out there in the world.
    ‘G’day,’ the good-looking guy smiled.
    But Evie felt shy and said nothing; she went home and had a little sleep.
    (A little sleep; a little nightmare. A little nightmare, not a big one this time. More like an angry dream.
    Bang bang.
    Evie was hammering. Hammering at a piece of board.
    But the nails were going in crooked, getting stuck, and as soon