Page 18 of Darling Girls

‘I don’t like the dark.’

‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’ She seemed delighted to be able to help, marching downstairs and returning a minute or two later with a lamp. ‘Will this do?’

Norah took the lamp. There was a white wooden bedside table next to her bed, and a power point was visible beside it. ‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Is there anything else you need?’

‘Nope,’ Norah said. She crossed the room, plugged in the lamp, and climbed into her bed, pulling the blankets around her. To her surprise, Miss Fairchild followed, sitting on the edge of her bed. When she bent to plant a kiss on Norah’s forehead, Norah held her breath.

After she’d left the room, Norah wiped furiously at the spot Miss Fairchild’s lips had touched.

‘That was a mistake,’ Jessica said.

Norah rolled over in bed. ‘What was?’

‘Telling her what you were afraid of,’ Jessica said. ‘One day, that will come back to bite you.’

9

NORAH

BEFORE

For the first few weeks at Wild Meadows, Norah just watched. Having been a foster child for most of her life, she’d learned it was a good idea to get the lie of the land early. The more information you gleaned in the early days of a placement – a foster father’s pet peeves, the fact that meals only came once a day, or that the first one up got their pick of the shared clothing – the better. So she learned that Miss Fairchild was a woman of routine who spent most of her time cleaning. She drank wine, but not a worrying amount, and thus far it had not preceded violence or rage. She liked conversation to revolve around herself. And she was exceptionally frugal.

‘It’s not cheap to run the farm and to feed and clothe you,’ Miss Fairchild said as she served up a meal that seemed to Norah to be lacking in both quantity and nutrition. After a few weeks of it, Norah felt hunger gnawing day and night.

Also notable was the fact that Miss Fairchild knew things. Things she shouldn’t rightfully know – like the fact that Norah ate her entire lunch at recess rather than splitting it into recess and lunchtime, or that she’d stopped at the skate park for a few minutes on the way home from school to play on the abandoned board she’d found.

Miss Fairchild also appeared to like Norah, which was both good and bad. She’d had foster parents who had taken an instant dislike to her and that never worked out well. At the same time, she’d learned to be leery of adults who liked her too much.

‘You did the laundry?’ Miss Fairchild would exclaim when Norah performed her allocated chore. ‘What on earth did we do without you?’

It was bizarre. Norah might have written her off as one of those oddly nice people – like Dulcie, the receptionist at her previous school, who called everyone ‘sweet babycakes’ – except that, unlike Dulcie, Miss Fairchild wasn’t nice all the time. She was unpredictable, lashing out unexpectedly – usually at Jessica, who followed her around like a puppy dog, working overtime to get her attention. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. For the life of her, Norah couldn’t work out why she bothered.

Still, Norah fell into a routine eventually. (It was annoying, because getting into a routine usually guaranteed she’d be yanked out of it without notice or explanation and planted somewhere new. For this reason, she hadn’t bothered asking Scott if this would be a permanent placement. She knew the answer would be, ‘If you’re lucky,’ and if Norah had figured out one thing by now, it was that she wasn’t.) School was part of this routine. Unlike most kids her age, Norah enjoyed school immensely. It was one of the few places where she could know with reasonable certainty what was going to happen. At her new school – one of those small country town places housing prep through to Year 12 and grouping two or even three year levels into one classroom – each day started with circle time, then literacy, then maths, then sport. As usual, maths was her favourite subject, but she enjoyed nearly all the lessons, apart from art, which was unnecessarily messy and had no discernible point.

Norah was aware that she was extremely intelligent. The teachers were always saying so. Norah and Jessica were grouped together, so Norah knew that Jessica was (surprisingly) smart too, and (unsurprisingly) extremely eager to please, always putting her hand up, always volunteering to help the teacher. Like Norah, she seemed happiest in the classroom. Jessica spent most of her lunchtimes in the library or alone in the playground, while Norah spent them scavenging for leftover food or picking fights. One such lunchtime, she had just discovered an uneaten apple on the grass when she heard a commotion.

Turning towards the sound, Norah saw a large girl pointing a menacing finger at Jessica, who was sitting on a swing. The large girl was Sandra. Sandra was the youngest child of a dairy farmer and had six older brothers; she was as tall as Norah, with wide shoulders and hips, and as strong as one of her father’s cows.

‘I – I’m sorry,’ Jessica was stammering.

Norah moved closer.

‘Not sorry enough.’ Thrusting her hand forward, the girl knocked Jessica backwards off the swing onto the tanbark. A couple of onlookers shrieked, high on the scandal of it.

When Sandra advanced on Jessica, now sprawled on the ground, Norah sprang into action. It wasn’t that she was a fan of Jessica. Truth be told, she found her annoying and whiny. But a strange code existed in foster care. While you could torment your foster siblings all you wanted at home, out in the real world, you were a pack.

Norah easily knocked Sandra off balance with barely a push. Once the girl was on the ground, Norah kneeled heavily on her side.

‘Get off me!’ Sandra cried.

‘What’s going on?’ Norah asked Jessica, who was crab-crawling away from Sandra. When she stood, tanbark hung from her like ornaments on a tree.

‘I said get off me!’ Sandra shouted, trying to wriggle free. ‘What’syourproblem?’

‘That’s what I was about to ask you,’ Norah said.