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alert, certain she would hear a handle’s click, that someone would open the door to the cell rooms, that her father and mother would walk in to take her home and put her to sleep among the bundar skins.
    When she finally heard the click of the door, it was not her parents but another man in a black uniform. “Well, Poppett, how are you this morning?” he boomed in a thick voice.
    Garibooli looked up at him with his bushy eyebrows, hairs peeping out from his nostrils and twinkling brown eyes. The kindness in his voice made her eyes swell with tears.
    â€œAh, well, I’ll fix yer a nice cup o’ tea. How’s that then, eh?” he continued and she nodded, gratefully.
    When he returned, he unlocked her cell and handed her a tin cup hot from the liquid. He watched her as she sipped the tea tentatively. “There’s a nice Missers Carlyle here to see you, Poppett, who’ll look after yer now. So drink that tea and wipe them eyes. How bout that, eh?” he said with a tender voice and a comforting wink.
    He walked with her to the office where one of the policemen who had struggled with her the day before sat writing as a tall, thin woman in a dark blue dress, white gloves and a straw hat looked over his shoulder. She turned and gestured Garibooli to her, “Come here, child.” Garibooli walked towards the outstretched hand.
    The woman with skin the colour of milk was silent for a moment as she gave Garibooli a penetrating look. Her ice-blue eyes surveyed Garibooli’s coffee-coloured face, high forehead, full lips, and deep sorrowful eyes. Garibooli felt as though her whole body was exposed, as though her skin was somehow dirty. But when she looked back into Mrs Carlyle’s eyes she could see in the watery blue that there was something inside this woman that wanted to help. To Garibooli, it meant she would assist her in getting home.
    â€œWrite: ’Removed at child’s own request’.” The woman looked at Garibooli again. With a sigh she added, as she adjusted her stiff woollen jacket, “She may not have asked for it now but you can be sure that she will be grateful to be brought up in a Christian home. Now if you will excuse me, I have to put this child in some decent clothes and a pair of shoes before I put her on the train. The filth they live in … A pity. A real pity.” The woman took Garibooli outside and ordered her to wash her feet at a water pump beside the station, then handed her new clothes and told her to change.
    â€œYou can burn these,” the woman told the officer who had now finished typing. She handed the pile of Garibooli’s clothes over, her arm outstretched and her face turned to one side as though they were stained with the urine that had burned Garibooli’s nose as she had breathed during the night.
    With the paperwork finished, the officers returned to discussing the latest news of the war, ignoring Mrs Carlyle and her young charge. Mrs Carlyle looked to Garibooli’s bare feet still caked with black soil. Mrs Carlyle’s gaze swept across Garibooli’s new clothes and back to her bare feet. “Well, we better get you ready for the train. It’s a long way we have to travel.” Her tone was gentle, but firm enough that Garibooli could not summon the courage to ask where they were going and how long they would be gone.
    Euroke and Garibooli had always marvelled at the trains. The railway was new to the area, slowly replacing the steamships along the river. The two siblings would lie in the long grass by the track and wait for a train to come by. Few came so they had many hours to muse about travelling in the pod-like carriages and imagine the places the tracks would carry them: a circus with magicians like the one that had been to the town and had a man who ate fire, a rodeo with horses that danced with ribbons on them, or a magical place where the rivers tasted like honey.
    Now Garibooli was getting to