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come.’
    The house in Palm Street was on the very edge of town. At the end of the lane real country began. On their left lay blazing paddocks, to their right a narrow red road that led towards the steely sheet of water that gave the town its name. Lake Conapaira.
    ‘This way.’ Fan turned onto the red road. It was hot. There was a sky like a brass band. From here the lake seemed far away, yet glittered so fiercely you had to narrow your eyes to look. It was so bright the sun might have fallen down beneath the water and be lying on the muddy bottom with the leeches and little fishes, the rusty old tins and jagged stones. The lake was dangerous; however hot the day was, you could never swim in there.
    A dust-filled shimmer hid the farther side. ‘What’s over there?’ asked Clementine. She wanted her cousin to talk; she wanted her to be the Fan she knew again.
    ‘The land,’ replied Fan, and her voice lingered on the word, so that it seemed to come out in two falling syllables,
la-and
, like part of some mysterious song.
    ‘Oh,’ said Clementine.
    They turned off the red road onto a clay track between tall banks of reeds. Water gurgled in amongst them, and Clementine heard small quick scurrying sounds, and then a single, heavy ‘plop’. A line of black ants crawled in single file along the dry edge of the track.
    Clementine stooped to pick up a small white pebble. It felt warm and smoothly perfect in her hand. ‘Look,’ she said to Fan. ‘Look what I found.’
    Fan took the pebble and examined it closely, turning it this way and that, holding it up to the light. ‘Reckon it might be one of those teeth them bad spirits lost,’ she said at last.
    Clementine dropped the pebble onto the track. She shuddered.
    ‘Hey!’ Fan touched her arm. ‘It’s all right, I was only kidding.’ She picked up the pebble and began tossing it from hand to hand. ‘Those teeth didn’t fall down here. It was some other place, honest, miles and miles away.’ She held out the small white stone and Clementine took it and thrust it deep into the pocket of her shorts.
    Fan was kind, reflected Clementine. And she was clever, too, no matter what Aunty Rene said, or those kids who sang stupid songs in the street. It didn’t matter that she read badly and had to repeat at school, you could tell from her face and the things she said that she was clever. She knew all the secret tracks and places round the lake, and words from another language, and stories other people didn’t know. And she was clever with thoughts and feelings, too: she grasped things no one else could see. When Clementine had told her about the
Griffiths Tea
signs, Fan had understood exactly how Clementine had imagined the jewelled palace and the tea that tasted like ambrosia, and the way she’d felt when she’d missed the place and begun bawling like a little kid.
    Even Mum hadn’t understood about
Griffiths Tea.
She’d told Clementine it was just an ordinary old tea you bought in an ordinary grocer’s shop and the signs along the railwayline were only advertising. ‘You haven’t missed a thing, sweetheart,’ she’d said. ‘There’s nothing to cry about.’
    But Clementine thought there was, and Fan had agreed with her.
    ‘You were crying for
gadhaang
,’ she’d said.
    Gadhaang.
It was the kind of word you just knew meant something important.
    ‘That’s happiness,’ Fan had explained. ‘Proper happiness.
Serious
happiness. That’s what you thought
Griffiths Tea
might be.’
    Serious happiness. Even Clementine’s best friend Allie wouldn’t have understood so well, and as for girls like Lizzie Owens and Christa Jorgensen, if Clementine had so much as breathed a word to them about
Griffiths Tea
they’d have said she was barmy and the green cart would be coming to her house that very night to take her to the loony bin for ever and ever, amen.

    They walked and walked and there was no other sound except their footsteps and the rustle of the reeds and