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left, watching for other intruders. One hand rocks the little sheeting hammock that holds her sleeping daughter, the other kneads a lump of dirt. Then, standing, she lobs it expertly across the road and one door down onto Donny’s roof. She can just hear the rumble as it rolls down the corrugated iron. She grins. ‘Possums on the roof, what a shit. Gonna keep you up all night.’ She lobs another.
    Later she creeps over in the dark to stand under Donny’s kitchen window. The curtains are only half drawn. She can see Donny’s broad back; he’s standing at the stove, stirring something — eggs it looks like — while that lazy slut lies on the couch, drinking.
    ‘Bitch,’ whispers the Virgin. ‘Can’t you even cook the man a meal?’
    She watches for a while, hoping for explosions, but the scene inside is disappointing. Donny seems easier than she remembers, happy even. She tramps back over the road, kicking stones, unhooks the hammock and goes inside.

    The size and remoteness of Manawa suit the Virgin’s needs. Three streets parallel to the railway line, each named after the timber trees that once made the town prosperous; three roads crossing these at right angles, pointing towards the mountain, each named after the men who cut and milled the trees. A simple grid along whose lines most houses are empty or destroyed. The Virgin Tracey has lived in Manawa for maybe a year. It’s always hard to nail her for sure, the way she moves from squat to squat, hiding signs of habitation and then sneaking into another one of Manawa’s several owners-unknown derelict homes. When she first trudged into the settlement, Vera thought she looked like that waif on the poster for
Les Misérables
. Her hair, once peroxide, stuck out untidily from her head like dry grass. Legs and arms angular as a spider’s. Vera watched from her garden as the Virgin clumped along in heavy lace-up boots. They seemed to anchor her to the ground like magnets. The way she walked — arms flailing, knees at all angry angles, cursing into the wind — might jet-propel her into space, if it weren’t for the boots.
    ‘Here’s trouble,’ muttered Vera back then, but was not entirely right. So far, the Virgin has avoided brushes with thelaw and antagonised the locals only spasmodically.
    Her limbs are always tightly clad in black. Over this unchanging skin she wears a tatty petticoat. There are several of these, all satin, all with lace, in mauves, pale pinks and dirty cream, stretched almost obscenely over her belly when she was pregnant — any stranger could have watched the baby kick. Now the garments hang loose.
    She might be beautiful; how could you tell, with the black mascara and black lipstick? And the lack of flesh? Not to mention the rings in her nose.
    The Virgin has always insisted that the baby, little Sky, has no father. ‘There wasn’t a father, end of story,’ she would snarl if someone at the pub or at Hoppy’s Takeaways asked. Back then, she worked a few hours at both those places. Vera asked once, partly out of concern for their welfare, but there was no reply, just a hard stare and a rude face. The Virgin Tracey likes to poke her tongue out like a child. Since the baby’s birth, she has avoided everyone, pretty much. The nickname’s a black joke: virginal is definitely not Tracey’s style.
    She lives in the only habitable room of number 16 Hohepa Street. The front of the house has given in to the weather — once a window or two are broken, it’s all downhill in this harsh climate. But the back kitchen is still snug enough and the old coal range will throw off a feeble warmth. In one corner is a large plastic bucket which the Virgin keeps filled with water stolen from other houses’ tanks. The guttering on this ramshackle place droops in sad rusty swathes, depositing precious rainwater to the ground where it runs under the house and rots the piles. Anyway, the old water tank is holed in too many places for repair.
    The truth