An instant before the doors of the school bus clanged shut, Zidra Vincent hopped down the three steps and onto the pavement. She’d just caught sight of her parents’ car parked near the hotel, which meant they must be here in Jingera. Ahead of her were the other Jingeroids, the girls and boys who, like her, travelled to and from Burford each day. Among them was her friend Sally Hargreaves, whose family had moved to Jingera last September. Though, at fifteen, Sally was a year older than Zidra, they’d struck up a friendship on the school bus.

‘Want to come home for a while?’ Sally asked. She had freckled skin, blue eyes and long dark hair, and a laugh that could make even the grumpiest of people smile.

‘Thanks but I might miss my lift. Saw Dad’s car there and thought I could avoid an extra ten minutes on the bus with the Bradley boys.’ Once the Jingeroids alighted, the Bradley boys were the only other kids on the bus. Living on a property a few miles north of where Zidra lived, their idea of sport was baiting her until she could get off at the entrance gate to Ferndale.

Now she strolled across the square in Jingera, around the war memorial with its wreath of red paper poppies from Remembrance Day, and down towards the post office. For a moment she stood next to the car, a vintage Armstrong Siddeley, and looked around. The new pub that had opened three years ago was a hideous building, everyone agreed on that. Walls an ugly brick, as yellow as jaundice, and a speckled red-and-ochre-tiled roof that fortunately could be seen only from the headland. There was a new clientele too, the surfer boys who, a year or two back, had got the message that the surf at Jingera beach had a good curl to it.

The car was unlocked but her parents were nowhere to be seen. She scribbled a note on a scrap of paper from her school-case and left it on the dashboard, before placing the case on the floor in front of the passenger seat, where they could see it.

After strolling by the war memorial, she accelerated past the post office – hoping Mrs Blunkett wouldn’t catch sight of her, otherwise half an hour would be lost in idle chatter – and turned into the unkerbed street leading down to the lagoon. Weatherboard cottages lined the road; some were semi-concealed by hedges and others had no gardens at all. Several hundred yards down the hill she stopped at a gate, on each side of which was a glossy-leafed hedge studded with sweet-scented white flowers. She used to live with her mother in this cottage. She still thought of it as theirs, even though they’d stayed there for less than a year. They’d moved out nearly four years ago, after her mother’s marriage to Peter Vincent and the adoption that had made him her legal father. The house, what you could see of it behind the vines, seemed shabbier now. Someone from Melbourne had bought it as a holiday cottage but it wasn’t much used. Its windows gazed blankly at her without even a glimmer of a welcoming reflection.

She opened the gate and walked up the brick path. It had been several months since she’d last visited the cottage, and the verandah floorboards seemed more weathered and splintered than ever. Yet she found it reassuring that they still squeaked in exactly the same places as when she’d lived there. Though she loved everything about Ferndale homestead, visiting the cottage felt like coming home. She sat on the verandah’s edge. The only sounds she could hear were the surf thudding onto Jingera beach and seagulls wailing.

At this point, Zidra saw her father passing by the front gate, marching purposefully up the hill. He had a rolled-up towel under his arm and wet hair.

‘You’ve been surfing. You could have taken me!’ she called, leaping up from the verandah.

‘You were at school,’ he said, giving her a hug. ‘Anyway, what are you doing hanging around this place? You’ve got a new home now, remember?’

She laughed.

‘Your mother and I decided to come into Jingera on an impulse. So I thought I may as well have a swim after collecting the mail. There are two letters for you today; they’re in the glove box of the car.’

‘Good. Where’s Mama?’

‘Seeing Mrs Cadwallader.’

‘Oh, that means she’ll be ages yet.’

‘She said she’d be back at the car by 4.30. I think one of your letters is from Jim Cadwallader, by the way.’

Zidra tried to conceal her delight, and to saunter to the car rather than rush at it as she really wanted to do. She took the letters from the glove box. She wouldn’t open them yet. She would postpone that pleasure until after she’d thoroughly examined the envelopes.

The first letter had a Vaucluse postmark and Zid Vincent, Ferndale nr Jingera scrawled across it in Jim’s spiky handwriting.

He’d started addressing her as Zid from the time of his first letter to her, after he’d gone off to Stambroke College in Sydney as a scholarship boy. She knew it was to make all his new friends think that Zid was a boy.

She looked at the second letter. Her name and address were written in block capitals sloping from left to right, in a hand that she didn’t recognise. ZIDRA TALIVALDIS, LAGOON ROAD, JINGERA. The old address and her former surname, but Mrs Blunkett had known which postbox to put the letter in. The envelope was of poor quality paper and very thin. There couldn’t be more than a page inside and there was nothing written on the back of the envelope. She squinted at the postmark that was faint and smudged, and tried to decipher what the letters said. Her heart lurched as she made out the word GUDGIEGALAH.

Lorna Hunter had written at last.

Or maybe it wasn’t from Lorna at all. That backward sloping printing wasn’t in Lorna’s style. The message must be about Lorna, and a little worm of anxiety turned in her stomach. Glancing around her, she saw that her father was heading across the square and into Cadwallader’s Quality Meats.

With shaking fingers, Zidra ripped open the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of lined paper that had been roughly torn from an exercise book. The pencilled message was sloping from left to right for only the first few lines and after that the writing changed. It was now unmistakably Lorna’s hand, although still written in cramped capital letters. Lorna must have been in such a hurry that she’d given up the attempt at complete anonymity.

Lorna used to attend Jingera primary school with Zidra in the days before the Hunter family had been sent to the Reserve. Soon after that, Lorna had been taken to the Gudgiegalah Girls’ Home. She was a half-caste, that’s what they called her, and Tommy Hunter wasn’t her real father.

Zidra read the letter again. There were no names to identify the writer, or the recipient either, apart from Dizzy, and who would realise that this was short for Zidra? Yet if the message had been intercepted at Gudgiegalah Girls’ Home, anyone would have been able to guess who’d written it. Zidra wondered how many letters had already been written and never gone out. The girls there were banned from all contact with their past.

According to the postmark, this letter had been posted less than a week ago. It was several months until the bus trip to Jervis Bay. She’d have to figure out how to get the message to the Hunter family, though like Lorna she had no idea if they were still at the Wallaga Lake Reserve.

‘What are you reading?’

Her mother’s voice startled her. For a moment she’d forgotten where she was and now felt irritated at being distracted from her thoughts. Her mother opened the back door of the car and sat down on the seat next to Zidra. She made a face to herself, but not so that her mother would see. It was doubly annoying that there was no Hello darling, have you had a nice day at school?

‘Hello, Mama,’ she said, kissing her on the cheek and folding over the letter. ‘Have you had a good day?’ Mama’s hair was pinned up in some sort of topknot and her even-featured face, without its usual frame of exuberant fair hair, appeared tired. Zidra would tell her about Lorna later. She needed to digest the contents of the letter herself first.

Her mother smiled, apparently oblivious of Zidra’s veiled reproof. ‘It was bonzer.’

Zidra winced. An expression like this sounded ludicrous when spoken in a thick Latvian accent. After nearly a decade in Australia, her mother had acquired the local slang but not the diction. You’d think her musical training might have made her more receptive to the rhythms of speech.

‘I just had tea with Mrs Llewellyn and Eileen Cadwallader,’ her mother continued. ‘Where’s Peter?’

‘At the butcher’s.’

‘What for? He killed a sheep only two days ago.’

‘Same reason as you went to see Mrs Cadwallader and Mrs Llewellyn,’ Zidra said. ‘To have a chat.’

Her mother’s grin was reflected in the car’s rear-vision mirror above the windscreen. The brown dress she was wearing was almost the same colour as her eyes.

At that moment, Peter opened the front passenger door and settled himself into the seat. Her mother climbed out of the back seat of the car and into the front. After she turned the ignition and preselected first gear, the car kangaroo-hopped several feet before stalling.

‘Foot on the change gear pedal,’ Peter said mildly.

You weren’t allowed to call it a clutch. That was because the Armstrong Siddeley Whitley was so special that all its parts had different names to ordinary cars. Zidra knew this because Peter had also been teaching her to drive around the home paddock, and she reckoned she was already a better driver than her mother. But it would be two years at least before she could sit for her driving test.

Her mother muttered something in Latvian that was almost certainly indecent, and turned the ignition key again. She’d been driving for three months so you’d think she’d have got the hang of it by now. She insisted on practising, and Peter didn’t seem to care. In fact it was almost as if he enjoyed it, in spite of all the jerking and stalling.

Zidra’s mother began to drive so slowly along the Jingera to Ferndale road that soon there was a queue of cars behind them. When Zidra mentioned this, Peter suggested that she give her mother a break. When she’s had more practice she’ll get her speed up and on no account are you to pressure her to go any faster. Fat chance of that, Zidra thought. Even the bus with the Bradley boys might be better than this slow crawl north.

Once home at Ferndale, Zidra went to her room in the attic. It had originally been used as a boxroom until she’d persuaded her parents to have it painted and insulated and made into her bedroom. Three dormer windows illuminated the space, which was large with steeply raked ceilings. Each window was rather small, but together they shed sufficient light that the room never seemed gloomy, even on the most overcast of days. One dormer looked to the east and the ocean, the other to the north with Mount Dromedary rearing up in the distance, and the third to the west. That was her favourite view, of the folds of hills rising to the distant mountain range, all framed by the pine trees that had been planted when the house was built in the late nineteenth century.

After throwing her school-case onto the bed, Zidra stripped off the Burford Girls’ High School uniform – the navy blue tunic and white shirt – and put on old trousers and a shirt. She glanced quickly at her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. Several months ago she’d decided that she might actually be quite good looking – she’d been lucky to inherit her mother’s regular features and even that high forehead could be disguised by allowing her dark curls to fall forward. Curls that periodically her mother said were just like those of her real father, poor Oleksii, whom Zidra herself always thought of as Our Papa Who Art in Heaven.

With the two letters now in her pocket, she clattered down the stairs and out to the kitchen, where the family’s outdoor boots were lined up, in regimental order, near the door to the back verandah. Her piercing whistle summoned the two dogs, Rusty and Spotless Spot, who knew without being told that she was off to the stone stairway leading down to the beach. Here she perched on the top step while the dogs bounded down to the strip of white sand below.

Carefully she unfolded Lorna’s letter and read it again. She had no idea whether or not the Hunters were still at Wallaga Lake. She certainly hadn’t seen any of them in Jingera lately. Glancing around her at the vast dome of the sky and the ocean in front of her, she thought of how much Lorna must loathe being incarcerated at her school. Training Centre was how it was described. Mama had snorted when she’d learnt that. Training to be domestic slaves, she’d said.

Zidra put the letter away and slit open the fatter envelope from Jim. Three sheets of closely written paper, which she began to peruse with great eagerness. After reading a couple of paragraphs, however, she puffed out her cheeks in exasperation. It wasn’t that liking cricket was evil as such, it was more that inflicting lengthy descriptions of it onto others was deeply inconsiderate, especially when he knew how boring she found team sports. She skimmed through the letter until she reached the final paragraph.

She laughed out loud at the Yours sincerely, wondering how long she would have to know Jim before he could write anything a bit more affectionate. She always made a point of signing her letters to him With love from Zidra, just as she did with all her friends. With love from Zid mightn’t go down so well if people thought she was a boy, though.

Jim’s abbreviation of her name was nice and no one else ever thought to use it, although it wasn’t as nice as Lorna’s name for her, Dizzy. Together the nicknames made a good combination, she thought: Dizzy Zid. There was something glamorous and light about the name Dizzy.

Now she found that thinking about Lorna was bringing back all those feelings she’d been keeping squashed down ever since reading her letter and, having forgotten a handkerchief, she sniffled into her hands.

Lorna had been taken from her family almost four years ago. Zidra remembered waking from a nightmare at that time, convinced that Lorna was telling her something. Telepathy was how her mother had described it. Of course Zidra hadn’t known then that Lorna was being taken away, only that she was in trouble. After that, Zidra’s own life had become difficult. It wasn’t just the loneliness and fear that she felt after her best friend vanished, but also the vulnerability. It was only Jim’s friendship that had kept her going.

And she hadn’t spoken to Lorna about any of this. Although longing to, she hadn’t seen or spoken to her for years.