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felt larger. The backyard looked huge, and a mess, the lawn a checkerboard of flattened, sickly yellow-green where the tents had been, of grass worn down to dirt and too-long grass elsewhere.
    They worked that morning, Robert mowing, Cara and Myrtle stripping beds, tossing sheets into the washing machine, sweeping, washing floors while the machine laboured. Two or three times Cara almost told her mother what Gran had said. When she helped make up her bed with clean sheets, she tried to say something. Didn’t, just wiped Gran methodically from every surface of her bedroom.
    Then at one-thirty Rosie came around.
    ‘Coop and Dino want to meet us at the milk bar,’ she whispered.
    ‘I can’t, Rosie. Dad said I’m not allowed to go near Dino.’
    ‘Chicken.’
    No one wanted to be called chicken, and if she didn’t have Rosie to hang around with, she’d have no one. She went to the milk bar, and the boys weren’t even there, so they shared a chocolate milkshake and she told Rosie what Gran Norris had said.
    ‘Promise not to tell anyone.’
    ‘Spit my death and hope to die,’ Rosie said.
    At fourteen, secrets are easily shared, promises easily given. They have as much substance as the froth sucked noisily from the bottom of a milkshake container. At fourteen, her father’s warning was treated like so much froth and bubble, sucked down and forgotten by the time Dino and Henry Cooper came in. Coop a panel-beater apprentice and always broke, Dino fed the jukebox and they practised rock-and-roll steps.

T ENANTS
    T here are good tenants, then there are the other type. For sixty years, Charlie White had been collecting rent from half-a-dozen properties; he’d known a few of both types. These days he considered himself an expert, swore he could pick a good tenant from a bad by the way they kept the inside of their cars.
    The Hoopers had been lucky. Every Sunday, instead of going to church, their tenants were out washing and vacuuming their car or mowing lawns. Vern’s garden looked like something out of a magazine. Joe Dolan had kept the garden, to the east of Charlie’s house, looking nice – until he’d dropped dead of a heart attack at fifty-four and his wife moved in with one of their city sons.
    Mrs Fulton rented the house to the west of Charlie’s. Charlie didn’t like many, and trusted less. He liked and trusted Mrs Fulton, and when she complained about the new tenants he’d put into the house to the east side of his, he listened, not that there was much he could do about it. He’d given them a twelve-month lease.
    He bathed and shaved at home, but rarely slept there. Always woke up there feeling lonely for Jeany. He didn’t wake up feeling lonely in his storeroom bed.
    He’d ridden home to clean up for Christmas, to spend Christmas Eve in Jeany’s bed, and found out what Mrs Fulton had been complaining about.
    The rowdy buggers had started arriving around nine and they’d kept on coming, loud Melbourne louts, in cars, on motorbikes, and they’d brought their dogs with them. A man with poor hearing can tolerate a barking dog – if it doesn’t spend all night doing it. A man with poor hearing can tolerate a wild party next door – if the revellers go to bed at midnight. The party had continued until morning, when it moved out to the street, where two maniacs roared motorbikes and the rest of the party yelled encouragement while their dogs howled.
    Someone had rung Jack Thompson. He’d been out of town. The party continued into Boxing Day when someone called Jack again. He’d moved a few of them on.
    Charlie had waited until a few more left, then he’d gone next door to give the noisy coots their marching orders. The male tenant waved his lease in Charlie’s face and told him to piss off.
    Which he’d done, though not quietly.
    He’d returned to his storeroom and hadn’t gone home again until New Year’s Eve, which was a repeat of Christmas Eve, with fireworks. Not a soul in the street got a