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it from her bed and tucked it round her cousin.
    ‘No, you have it!’ Clementine tugged it out and threw it back across the room.
    Fan picked it up. ‘’S’okay, I don’t want it. I’m used to the cold.’ She looked down at Clementine. ‘Want me to come in with you?’
    ‘No!’ cried Clementine. And then she changed her mind and whispered, ‘All right then.’ She drew the covers back and Fan slipped in beside her. They lay close together, so close they were all tangled up, and Clementine could feel the grains of gritty red dust on her cousin’s legs and arms.
    ‘Soon I’ll take you to see my friend,’ promised Fan.
    In a little while they were both asleep, a single hump beneath the thin sheet and worn grey blankets. The old house creaked in the cold and outside the window the big stars grew closer and closer, till they were like cold faces peering through the glass. And the winds of heaven sprang up and blew above the paddocks and rocked in the great spaces of the sky.

Chapter Three
    Fan marched out through the back gate and began to walk away quickly down the lane, so fast that Clementine had to run to keep up with her.
    ‘Wait! Wait for me!’
    At the end of the lane Fan stopped and turned round. Her beautiful face, which was always so bright and lively, had gone pale and still. Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears.

    At breakfast that morning something bad had happened. In Clementine’s house at Willow Street it wouldn’t have been bad, only a little accident which could happen to anyone and didn’t matter in the least.
    Fan had knocked over her cup of milk. Clementine’s mum had been sitting next to her, and some of the milk, only a little bit of it, had spilled onto Mrs Southey’s skirt.
    Aunty Rene had jumped up from her chair. She was like a match being struck. ‘Get the cloth!’ she’d screamed at Fan. ‘Get the cloth!’
    Her scream flew into every little nook and cranny, exactly as Clementine had imagined when she was coming up in the train. It got into things and made them weak: you felt that if you picked up your cup it would shatter, a spoon might give off an electric shock.
    ‘Get the cloth!’
    Fan got to her feet. Usually sure-footed, she stumbled now, as if the scream had sucked her balance away.
    She brought the wrong cloth, the dirty dish one from the sink instead of the clean tea towel, and it made greasy streaks all down Mrs Southey’s skirt. ‘It doesn’t matter, Rene,’ Clementine’s mum had protested when Aunty Rene began shrieking some more at Fan, telling her she was a dummy and a retard, a thing that should never have been born. ‘It’s only an old skirt, no harm done. And Fan didn’t mean to – it was an accident, Rene.’
    ‘Nothing’s an accident with that little madam!’ Aunty Rene’s eyes had glittered. ‘They say she’s backward up the school.’
    Backward. There’d been a kind of triumph in the way she’d spoken that word; she’d licked her lips on it as if it was chocolate, rich and sweet. A wave of bright crimson had flooded Fan’s cheeks, so quick and sudden you barely caught it before it was gone again and Fan’s face turned pale as milk. She’d dropped the cloth on the floor and run out of the room, and Clementine had run after her, out of the house, across the yard and out into the lane.
    ‘Wh-where are you going?’ Clementine asked this silent, angry Fan.
    Her cousin said nothing for a moment. With the big toe of one bare foot she drew a curved shape in the red dirt of the lane. Then she drew lines around it, like the rays of the sun.
    ‘I’m going to see my friend.’
    ‘Can I come?’
    Fan took a long time making up her mind. Clementine could have said, ‘You promised!’ but she knew today wasdifferent, the kind of day when you didn’t remind people of the promises they’d made.
    Fan raised her eyes and looked at her cousin. She studied her.
    Clementine stood very still.
    ‘All right,’ said Fan at last. ‘You can