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greens for the chooks and the rabbits.’
    ‘Sure, Ollie. Sorry, I was half-asleep. You want me to come and get you now?’
    ‘That’d be excellent. Thanks, Dad. See you soon.’
    Angus put the phone down and stared at it. My god, Olivia asked for a lift , he thought. ‘Dee!’ he called, and quickly corrected himself. ‘Deborah!’ But she wasn’t in the study, or the bedroom. Must’ve gone for a walk. He wanted to tell someone this startling piece ofnews, but then realised how dopey it would sound. ‘My daughter asked me for a lift.’ Yes? And your point is?
    My point is , Angus thought, getting into the car, my point is, this child never asks for anything. You have to beg to help her.
    The year she started school, for instance, he and Deborah arranged to flex their work hours on alternating days. The local primary was not far away, true, but still a fair trot for a five-year-old. Olivia tolerated being driven to and fro or accompanied on foot by one of her parents for the first term. Then she announced that she was going to walk by herself. And once home she could get her own snack and ‘do things’ till one of them got home at six. They argued, suggested alternatives. But no, she would not go to after-school care; she wanted to be by herself. She compromised on the time: they could get home at five, then. Otherwise, she was adamant, and convinced them. Not for the first time. Not the last. Angus, a lawyer with a community legal aid group, told the women in his office with whom he exchanged kid-chat: ‘That girl of mine! She never loses a case!’
    In the first week of this new arrangement, there was a sudden cold snap: a day that had started out fine but turned nasty, with driving rain setting in just on three o’clock. Angus told the others in the office he had to go, and as he drew near the school he recognised his little daughter in her bright yellow raincoat slogging determinedly through the pelting rain, head down. He drew alongside, pleased with his own fatherly thoughtfulness, and wound down the window just enough to call, ‘Ollie! Hop in!’
    She looked towards him. Her expression didn’t change a bit, and she kept on walking. She doesn’t recognise the car , he thought. He drove a few metres on and stopped again, actually got half out of the car.
    ‘It’s Daddy, Olivia! Hop in, darling!’
    She climbed into the back seat, raincoat streaming, didn’t greet him or say a word until they pulled into the drive at home. When Angus had switched off the engine she said accusingly, ‘You said I could walk by myself.’
    ‘It’s raining, Olivia! It’s teeming !’
    Her face was implacable. ‘It’s only weather, Daddy,’ she said in a withering tone. ‘And I brought my raincoat.’
    He watched, speechless, as she got out of the car, climbed the steps to the porch and opened the front door with the key secured on a long ribbon in her bag. Then she turned as if she’d forgotten something and waited for her father to join her. She took his hand and stroked it several times, consolingly.
    ‘But thank you for coming to get me, anyway.’
    He told Deborah about it as they prepared dinner together that evening. She, too, had fretted about Olivia walking home in the rain, and had rung his office just moments after he left. As he finished the story she closed her eyes and shook her head slowly, knife stilled on the chopping board.
    ‘Honestly, Dee,’ Angus went on (he could still call her Dee, then), ‘She all but said, “There there, Daddy, you meant well”.’
    Deborah gave a shuddering sigh and her eyes snapped open and held his.
    ‘Do you ever think, when you’re looking at her, She’s weird ?’
    ‘Weird? How do you mean?’
    ‘I don’t know. Eerie. The way she’s so self-contained.’ Deborah shook her head again, her face clouded. ‘Why can’t she just be a child? Happy, carefree? Isn’t that what children are meant to be?’
    ‘I think she is happy, Dee,’ Angus said, but he felt