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uneasy now.
    His mother was still alive then, and although she and his father had moved to Queensland to be near his sister, her way with children was legend in their family. At a quiet moment the next weekend Angus rang and told her the story.
    ‘It’s just her nature,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t much of the child about her, that’s true, but it’s nothing to worry about. She was born old.’
    ‘But, Mum, for a five-year-old to want to walk home in the rain! It wasn’t just drizzle, it was really pelting down. Don’t you think that’s a bit… odd?’
    His mother laughed. ‘She’s a Scot on both sides, don’t forget!’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘Two hundred years ago, that girl would’ve been out on the hills barefoot in weather far worse than anything Melbourne can dish up, bossing around a bunch of cattle with horns the width of your car bonnet. Little and all as she is, Angus.’
    And indeed, as his mother said this Angus could see it, and it all somehow made sense to him. Olivia was only strange in the context of the cosseted, overprotected modern-day child; put her down in another century, or even today almost anywhere else in the world – in the Third World that is – and her implacable capability would be expected, and welcomed. And Angus decided there and then that he would welcome it, too, since that was just how his daughter happened to be.
    All of this – the staunch little girl, his mother’s calm assurance, the sharing of concern that happened so effortlessly between him and Deb back then – it was all so vivid in Angus’s mind as he drove to his father-in-law’s house that it jolted him to see the tall slender girl waiting in the front yard, a dog on either side, bits of black hair escaping from her ponytail. Her serious look, almost a scowl, was just the same, but Olivia was no longer that small child. My god , Angus thought, she’s starting to get a figure. His heart swelled painfully. I have so few years left to really be with her. And what the hell will Deb and I be, when she’s not there?
    He glanced at himself in the mirror as he pulled up. His hair – he could remember Deb running her fingers through his hair, a very long time ago, murmuring, ‘It’s the same colour as leatherwood honey’. These days his hair was as much grey as any other colour, and thinning. As Olivia approached the car he had an urge to ask her, ‘Do I look old to you?’, but knew he wouldn’t. One doesn’t ask one’s daughter such a question. Besides, it’s not her I want the reassurance from .
    Olivia slung the bulging black garbage bags of grass and weedsinto the boot. She held a rear door open and the dogs leapt in, Fly-by thrusting her head out the window the moment Olivia rolled it down, Mintie sitting plumb in the middle and gazing keenly ahead between the two front seats, paws neatly together.
    ‘You’d better leave a note for your grandpa, don’t you think?’ Angus suggested as his daughter settled into the passenger seat beside him.
    ‘Already have.’
    ‘He okay?’ he asked as they drove away. ‘Just tired from all the gardening?’
    ‘Yeah… I guess…’
    Angus glanced at her quickly. Hesitation? Olivia?
    ‘What, Ol?
    ‘Just…’ She turned in her seat to face him, but Angus kept his eyes on the road, not to put her off.
    ‘When I got there the secateurs and gloves were lying on the ground by the roses. And when I brought them in Grandpa said he’d gone to check them for pruning.’
    ‘Ye-eah…’
    ‘Dad, we pruned them a couple of months ago, in July! But then, when we went inside for lunch, he saw this little note he’d written about the roses and he wanted to check them all over again.’
    ‘So…What did you do?’
    ‘Well, I reminded him we’d pruned them at the right time already so there was no need to check them. But he was so, kind of, determined. Like, I have to do this . It was just a bit weird. Grandpa’s usually so… nice.’
    ‘He wasn’t nice about