With such freedom, house-cleaning seemed an adventure to be savoured. Every time Jenna demanded rest, Karli put her hands on her hips, fixed her with a slave-driver’s look and said: ‘But there’s still more dust.’

There certainly was, but it didn’t deter them. They mapped out a plan and worked methodically through.

They blocked the two bedrooms off, judging the whole house was beyond their capabilities. The rest of the house they sealed. Apart from the doors and windows in the lee of the wind, they covered every broken window, they stuffed every crack and they sealed it so not one speck of dust could enter.

Then they cleaned.

They removed dust by the bucketload, Jenna sweeping it from higher surfaces to lower ones, Karli coming behind her and sweeping it to the floor. Then they mounded it in huge piles and whooshed it out into the yard.

All the furniture was dragged outside, Karli heaving as gamely as Jenna. With it gone, they filled bucket after bucket with the horrid bore water and they scrubbed.

Jenna would have stopped if Karli hated it, but Karli loved it. It was like a huge game, making an appalling house liveable.

They wore the clothes they’d worn from the train, judging them unspeakable already, and by the end of two more days they were truly disgusting. Jenna tied their hair up in rags so they looked like two aging charladies, and they giggled every time they caught sight of each other.

They certainly didn’t look like Nicole Razor’s daughters. If Nicole could see them she’d have kittens, Jenna thought, and the idea was enough to make her feel a real pang of sorrow. Nicole had missed out on so much, she thought as she watched Karli chewing her bottom lip in concentration as she tried to scrub her bit of kitchen floor really clean.

Living in five-star hotels might be fabulous for a while, but it wasn’t really living. It didn’t want to make you hug someone because you felt so good at what you were achieving-together.

And they were achieving. They worked all through Friday and slept the sleep of the truly exhausted on Friday night. They worked all day Saturday, and, to their shared amazement, as Saturday drew to a close they were starting to see the house as it might once have looked.

Someone had loved it. A long time ago someone had taken pride in this house.

The kitchen, under its grime, was painted a pretty pastel green. Hanging over the windows was a nondescript cloth, but when they washed it the cloth turned into attractive floral curtains that exactly matched the walls. The benches were washed clean and they’d scrubbed out the stove. Karli’s floor gleamed.

It was as if the house were a treasure, hidden for years under ugly camouflage. The heat was almost forgotten as they grew more and more excited with their project. By the end of Saturday they were pounding the furniture and starting to drag it inside again, and the house was starting to look…welcoming?

‘Enough,’ Jenna decreed at six on Saturday night. She’d climbed up onto the roof and banged nails into loose tin to stop it clanging in the wind, and that had been her personal limit. Her hands were scratched, she was exhausted and even the slave-driving Karli was looking a bit wobbly. ‘Enough, Karli, love. It’s time to hit the pump. We’ve done more work than two people should have to do in one lifetime.’

‘It’s really pretty,’ Karli said as Jenna sat down on the back step beside her. Karli had been supervising her roof-mending, and now she tucked her hand into Jenna’s in a gesture that was entirely proprietary. ‘I’m glad you’re finished on the roof.’

‘I stopped it banging.’

‘Yeah,’ Karli said with satisfaction. ‘And I polished the doorknob.’

‘We’ve done great.’

‘Do you think Mr Jackson will come home tonight?’

‘He might,’ Jenna said, trying to sound as if she didn’t care.

She did care. Which was…a problem?


Riley arrived just after sunset. He walked into the kitchen-and stopped dead.

Things had changed so much he had to blink to convince himself he wasn’t seeing things.

For the last two days he’d been driving along the vast boundaries of his property, across mile after mile of drought-stricken country. He’d checked and repaired bores, he’d checked dams, he’d cleared troughs and he’d taken endless inventory. The dust, the silence and the monotony had seeped almost into his soul, leaving him blank and empty. And all the time, in the back of his mind had been the thought of this derelict house in such desperate need of repair, and his uninvited guests who were somehow his responsibility having to make do with living conditions that were dreadful. There’d been nothing he could do about it, but he’d felt appalling about them being here.

He’d returned home tonight with little anticipation other than a growing guilt that he was here just to refuel, shower and sleep before the endless work started again. That he’d find them despairing in the dust.

But what he’d walked into…

The place was transformed beyond belief. The lamp was lit on the kitchen table, sending out a soft, golden glow. A smell of baking-baking!-was wafting through the kitchen. The kitchen itself was gleaming. It looked clean and loved and even…pretty!

How had they done this?

Where were they?

There was a muted giggle from the back of the house. He heard a child’s voice, happy and chirpy, and then Jenna’s voice raised in response.

They were singing a sea shanty he vaguely recognised.

‘Pull, ye land lubbers, pull.’

Fascinated, he made his way through to the wash-house door. They were both in there. He could hear their splashing and their laughter and their crazy song.

It was like coming home.

The thought was such a jolt that he felt almost as if he’d been hit in the gut. The sensation of homeliness. A child’s laughter. Jenna…

She was in the shower. They were pumping together and using sea shanties to get the rhythm of the pump. They were singing and giggling and pumping and splashing-and Riley had to stand against the wall as a wave of aching need jolted through his gut so hard he thought he’d fall.

Hell!

‘Enough.’ It was Jenna’s voice, still laughing, with a hint of spluttering. ‘Out of here, you little water baby. I don’t know how much bore water there is-’

‘There’s plenty,’ he called. ‘Bore water’s not a problem. Splash all you want.’

There was a shocked silence from inside the wash house as they obviously heard and figured they had company. And then came Karli’s voice. Joyous.

‘Mr Jackson’s home. Jenna, Mr Jackson’s home. Mr Jackson, we’re having a pump shower. Do you want a pump shower? We’re really good at pumping.’

‘Um… Mr Jackson needs to wait for us to finish,’ Jenna said in a voice that was none too steady.

‘You still don’t need help with the pump?’ He smiled, but his smile was crooked. Something inside him was being touched that hadn’t been touched for a very long time and he wasn’t sure that he appreciated the sensation.

‘Karli has pumping down to a fine art,’ Jenna told him.

‘There’s rules about child labour.’

‘Don’t you dare tell Karli.’ She was laughing again, he decided, and he liked it. He liked it a lot. The guilt that had been with him for the last two days slipped away and he found himself grinning like a fool. ‘We’ll be out in a minute,’ she called. ‘Don’t dirty our tidy house.’

‘As if I would.’ He was gazing the length of the veranda and they’d been busy here, too. ‘What on earth have you two been doing?’

‘We’ve been dusting,’ Karli called out, proudly. The water had stopped and her voice was slightly muffled as if she was being towelled. ‘Me and Jenna don’t like dust.’

‘You come to Barinya Downs when you don’t like dust? A bit of dust does no one any harm.’

‘You bring one speck into this house, Riley Jackson, and we’ll hang you out like we hung out the rugs,’ Jenna said darkly. ‘How are your cows?’

‘Better for having some water,’ he told her and the feeling of domesticity deepened. What was the line wives used to their husbands? How was your day, dear?

Something was missing. The wind was rising, whistling round the house with the same eerie moan as it had since he’d arrived. But…

‘The roof’s not banging,’ he said on a note of discovery.

‘Jenna fixed the flapping tin,’ Karli told him. It was a strange conversation, on either side of the wash-house door, crazily intimate. ‘I held the ladder while she banged the nails.’

Jenna fixed the roof? ‘What with?’ he demanded, stunned.

‘With nails,’ Jenna said as if he were stupid-which was exactly how he was feeling. ‘We found them in one of the sheds with a bunch of old tools. I banged forty-seven nails and one thumb. One thumb twice.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Ouch is right.’

‘Jenna said a bad word,’ Karli told him-and she giggled.

He still wasn’t sure he was hearing right. He wasn’t sure that he was dreaming. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said and the door to the wash house swung open, to reveal two girls dressed in towels. They looked amazing. Karli was hugely respectable, wrapped in a towel that reached to the floor, but Jenna’s towel covered her from her breasts to her hips and only just at that. They’d plaited their hair and pinned it up so it was a coif on each of their heads. They looked a real pair, flushed and clean and mischievous, he thought. They looked really, really pleased with themselves.

So they ought if they’d achieved this.

‘What don’t you believe?’ Jenna demanded and Riley took an instinctive step backwards.

‘Um…the roof?’

‘Believe it, mister,’ she said darkly.

‘But you’re Charles Svenson’s daughter.’

‘Yeah, he should have been here to help, but he doesn’t make a habit of doing that,’ she told him. ‘And I would have called a roofer, but I couldn’t find a phone book. So I just had to do it myself. By the way, I wouldn’t trust your ladder too much. A rung broke as I came down.’ She held up a leg and motioned to a long, jagged scratch. ‘It messed up my designer clothes no end. That’ll cost you an extra can of beans.’