The next night I’m up in my room re-reading Catch-22 in the hope that it’ll make sense to me on a second reading. So far, no dice. I hear banging out the front, and peer through my window, expecting to tell off Stanley for jumping around on the deck. I’ve seen it on YouTube videos, those jumping goats. It’s hilarious. Our goats don’t jump but if anyone is going to try new things, it will be Stanley. When I look down, though, it’s Clancy, tap-dancing on the front veranda.

He’s wearing a skin-tight leopard-print dress, and by his feet is a green plastic box with a handle and holes in the top.

‘You happen to have a blonde wig?’ he calls out.

I laugh, and head downstairs to let him in. At the door he gives a spin. ‘What do you reckon?’ Maude plonks herself in the doorway, wagging her tail for a pat. Clancy obliges her.

‘Magnificent. Suits you to a T.’

‘I feel like I could be a spokesmodel.’ He picks up a bar of soap from an open box by the door and holds it up to his face and speaks in dulcet tones. ‘Goat’s milk soap. Natural. Beautiful. Family-owned. Farmed and processed in the splendour of rural Australia. This fantastic product has cured my eczema, acne, rosacea, cirrhosis…’

‘Psoriasis,’ I correct him. ‘Cirrhosis is what alcoholics get.’

He returns the soap to its box. ‘I’m a model, not a doctor.’

‘Where’s the dress from?’ I ask.

‘Would you believe my mum owns this? I didn’t think she was a fan of animal print.’

‘I can’t believe she let you borrow it.’

‘I sorta told her I was lending it to you. Not that you ever wear a dress unless somebody’s died. She didn’t seem to remember that. How about that wig?’

‘Do we have any wigs?’ I shout into the house.

‘Inside voice!’ Mum yells from the kitchen.

In the lounge room, Clancy slaps Grandad on the shoulder. ‘Cyril!’ He has this whole blokey routine with my grandad, totally out of character—he isn’t sure how to deal with Grandad’s memory problem, and tries to disguise his unease.

‘It’s Clancy,’ I say.

‘Good to see you,’ says Grandad. Clancy could just as easily be a plumber as far as Grandad is concerned. He doesn’t even acknowledge that Clancy is wearing a leopard-print dress. He just keeps staring at the TV. It’s hard to tell how much he takes in; tomorrow he won’t be able to tell me what film he watched tonight, but he can probably tell you every single movie he saw in 1976.

Clancy is uncomfortable but trying not to look it. I nod for us to go upstairs and he returns to his usual unusual self. My room is a mess: precarious piles of books on the floor, desk and bed. I make a mental note to ask Mr Pool if I can build some bookshelves. Clancy clears a space and sits down.

‘I’ve worked out that we can’t afford the rights to legally perform the musical,’ he announces. ‘So, there’s a bit of criminal activity already. Hopefully no one dobs us in because I don’t want to get sued. I’ve also worked out that we’re probably not going to get any more actors than the three of us. So I’ve decided which characters can be cut and what roles each of us will have. There’ll be some gender bending but it’s the only way it’ll work.’

I shoot Clancy a look. ‘I’m not going to act. I can’t act. I certainly can’t sing. And, between Year Twelve and working at the restaurant, you do not have the time for directing and starring in a play.’

‘I know you don’t see this now, Kirbs, but this is an important part of your personal evolution. Think of your character arc.’

I shove my clothes into two clear piles (wearable and in bad need of a wash), so my room has less of a disaster-zone vibe. ‘I’d rather not. And I don’t think Iris agreed to be in the musical, either. I’m not even sure what musical you’re putting on.’

‘It’s got alien space plants. And we’ve got aliens. It’s like…Serendipity. Synchronicity. One of those. I would’ve gone with Rocky Horror but singing about being a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania might be pushing the boundaries of what’s considered good taste in this town.’

‘And the animal-print dress isn’t?’

He is excited, and I’m having trouble keeping up with him jumping topics.

‘I can’t tell you how glad I am Iris is here.’ He is gabbling now. ‘And that she’s going to be in the play. Before we were just two friends. Now we’re a group.’ Then he adds, in a tone that suggests absolute authority on the matter: ‘A triad is the strongest formation.’

I shake my head. ‘I think you just made that up.’

‘We’re going to be like the three musketeers,’ he pronounces. ‘And I don’t want to speak prematurely but I have a very strong feeling that Iris is probably the love of my life. She’s beautiful, she likes musicals and, against all odds, she has arrived in our town. It’s the hand of fate at work.’

I ignore the last part. ‘You realise The Three Musketeers is a novel about soldiers, right? Which we are not?’ There are increasingly odd noises coming from the green box Clancy has now placed on my bedroom floor. ‘Do I want to know what’s in the box?’

‘I’ve been collecting cane toads. We’re going to plant them in people’s front yards, then offer to sort out the problem for them. Cane-toad removal specialists. Of course, they can’t see us put them there. They just happen to be there and we just happen to show up, saying, hey, Mr Atkinson, it appears you’ve got yourself a cane-toad issue. We can help you out. For a modest fee.’

‘That sounds illegal. That sounds like a bad idea.’

‘What’s your plan to get enough cash to hire out the pub, then?’

‘I’ll save the money Mr Pool pays me. I can resist the urge to buy books for a couple of weeks.’ I leave out the fact that I owe Mum money because she lets me use her credit card to order books online. The only books you can buy in Alberton are from the op shop, pulp romances published in the eighties. I like a little variety.

‘It’s not fair for you to do all the work.’

‘I’d rather pay than use your dirty cane-toad-extortion-racket money.’ It is sort of a joke but also not. Clancy has had a lot of insane money-making schemes over the years. The trouble with living in a town of our size is that your pool of potential customers is small to begin with, and smaller still once you’ve already sold them something that was a bit crap, like the scones we made when we were eleven and accidentally used salt instead of sugar.

‘It’s not a cane-toad extortion racket. I don’t think you know what extortion is.’

‘Why don’t you just offer to mow people’s lawns?’

‘Ugh. Boring.’

‘And catching, releasing, then catching cane toads again is exciting?’

‘It’s got that undercurrent of we-might-get-in-trouble thrill. Do this, and if it doesn’t work out, we’ll do something reasonable. How about that?’

My lack of response is taken for agreement.

It becomes apparent the next morning, once the plan is enacted, that this is surely the worst plan Clancy has ever concocted.

Clancy has got us both wearing overalls, as Cane Toad Removal Specialists do, apparently, and he’s just dinged the doorbell at the Kingstons. He turns back to me and gives a thumbs up. I am standing at his shoulder like a backbencher at a political press conference. I stare down at a recently released cane toad hopping over my shoe.

‘I wonder if there’s a cane toad god,’ I muse aloud. ‘Or a cane toad heaven. Do their lives have meaning and significance? Do they have karma or reincarnation or nirvana? Do you think when cane toads go really still, they’re meditating?’

‘Shut up, cane-toad philosopher,’ hisses Clancy, who then beams at Mr Kingston as he opens the door.

‘If you’re asking if we need a party-planner, Clancy,’ says Mr Kingston, through his very excellent white moustache, ‘we don’t.’ That was one of Clancy’s schemes last year. It did not go well.

‘Mr Kingston,’ says Clancy, sticking to the script. ‘It appears you have a cane-toad problem.’

‘Hi, Kirby,’ says Mr Kingston.

‘Hi, Mr Kingston.’ A cane toad starts croaking near the bird bath. It is not a pleasant sound.

‘There’s a cane-toad problem because you just released the cane toads into the yard, is that right?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I tried to keep them away from the rose garden and that. I’m sorry. I was under duress.’ I nod towards Clancy. Clancy glares at me.

Mr Kingston nods. ‘We’ll let this go then, shall we?’

After we’ve collected the cane toads and released them over near the football oval, we wander back into town. Clancy is sulking.

‘What’s your grand plan, then?’ he asks. ‘Since you had to sabotage the cane toad operation.’

‘We could sell alien-themed merchandise at the crop circle site,’ I suggest. ‘Screen-print some T-shirts.’

Clancy has a sudden change of mood at this idea. He claps his hands with excitement. ‘We could conduct clairvoyant readings. I could be an alien medium. I’ve always been very intuitive.’

‘We weren’t really visited by aliens, Clancy,’ I say. ‘You wouldn’t have anyone to channel. What am I saying? You’re not psychic.’

‘Be that as it may, we still need to head up to Mr Jameson’s and do reconnaissance. Establish through our own investigations whether aliens really were involved, and whether there’s money to be made. We could sell our story to a magazine. I could be interviewed on the news. Or on a late-night talk show on community television. Everyone has to start somewhere.’

When we reach Mr Jameson’s place, there is no one around. No customers for an alien-related business. Perhaps we left our run too late. Clancy still wants to inspect the crop circles. We can’t see them from the road.

I turn to Clancy. ‘We should ask if we can go into the crop. He wasn’t very keen on all the attention. We don’t want to upset him.’

‘We shouldn’t give him the opportunity to say no,’ says Clancy, who is already climbing over the fence of the property. ‘It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, am I right?’

I shake my head. ‘You’re really not.’ I follow him anyway.

It’s hard to get a good view of the crop circles. A drone would be handy. Once we’re standing within the circles, it’s obvious to me that it’s simple enough for a human to create, so I don’t know what everyone in town is on about. It’s a series of interlocking circles in a geometric pattern, several metres across. The edges are too sharp and the circles too symmetrical to be caused by a cow. It’s not the right shape to have been caused by lightning. But alien-generated it is not.

‘I’m sort of underwhelmed after everything I’ve heard,’ says Clancy, surveying the area. ‘A crashed UFO would be more exciting. If it was aliens, why wouldn’t they abduct someone while they’re here? You wouldn’t travel all this way just to leave an imprint in Mr Jameson’s wheat field.’

‘What if Mr Jameson sees us and thinks we’ve done this?’ I ask.

‘Why would we be here now if we had?’

‘Returning to the scene of the crime,’ I say. ‘Reliving our transgression. Exactly the sort of behaviour one would expect of a wrongdoer.’

‘You watch too much Criminal Minds. Besides, we have no motive. No one would suspect us.’

‘We’re the only teenagers in town. And there’s no such thing as a motive for a hoax.’

Clancy sighs. ‘Stop worrying so much.’ He turns to head towards the road. ‘The great tragedy here is the lack of tourists. We clearly need more alien visitations before we classify as a hotspot and the sightseers include us on the circuit.’

‘Maybe there is a motive,’ I say. Whoever is responsible could be someone who would be happy if we were suddenly overrun by holidaymakers. Have you considered your parents as suspects? The restaurant game is tough.’

‘I would never point the finger at my own parents,’ he says. ‘This isn’t 1984. Anyway, it can’t be them. They’re always in the restaurant. It’s an airtight alibi.’

‘It’s always the person you least expect,’ I say.

‘We still have to find a way to raise money for our play,’ Clancy says. ‘I had so hoped I could become Alberton’s first alien mystic.’

I’m not thinking about the play or a moneymaking scheme at all. I’m not even thinking about the crop circles. I’ve spent days with only two people on rotation in my head: Iris, and my dad.

The paper in which the article about my father appeared has likely been sitting on the compost pile of goat manure all week. Fortunately, his new name is seared into my brain, and, now that I’ve decided to do something about it, it takes me a micro-second to find his work email address. But I can only look at his face smiling out at me from the university website for a few seconds before it’s just too weird and I have to close the window. It’s an uncomfortable feeling: I want to think about my dad, find out more, know him, but then I immediately feel awkward. I don’t know if it’s because I wonder if Mum would disapprove, or if I disapprove myself of my wanting to know my dad. Why anyone would disapprove is probably the real question.

I’m not being secretive, per se. I always use my laptop up in my room anyway. But I am prepared to slam the lid or lie about what I’m looking at should anyone come in. Although that would probably be suspicious.

I compose fifteen different emails, but all of them sound wrong.

How do you address an email to your long-lost father? Hi, Dad!? Dear Sir? Heya, Prof? After half an hour of musing on it, the only one I’ve ruled out is To Whom It May Concern.

I don’t even know what I want to say. I don’t even know what I want, or what I should want. Whether the questions I’m thinking of asking are too strange. Like, are you ever struck by how bizarre thumbs are? Or the backs of knees? What’s your opinion on string theory? Do you get scared about going to new places? Did you always know what you were supposed to do with your life? Do you think people’s personalities are decided by nature or nurture? I want to know whether I am nothing more than an assortment of genes fulfilling their potential. Cellular memory. I am in so many ways so different from my mother and my grandfather and the rest of my family, and I want to know whether it can all be explained away by the fact that I share these traits with my father. It’s like I’m a research experiment, and after seventeen years I finally have the possibility of collecting some solid data.

I use too many exclamation marks, but when I cut them all out, the email reads like it’s in a monotone. You are my father. It would be nice to know you. I am a robot. So little space for nuance in text. There is no font for earnest or genuine or not crazy. No font for I’m not just coming out of the woodwork because I’ve seen you’re successful now and I’d like some cash.

Smilies make it seem flippant. Spelling out my full name makes it sound like spam. The operation is not assisted by the fact that Marianne sits on the keyboard at random intervals, resulting in lines and lines of gibberish. I panic and shove her off the keyboard in case she hits send with her bum on my half-formed email. The gibberish seems as suitable as actual words. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if she hit send; I might never do it myself.

Nobody ever explained to me how to go about being estranged from my dad. I guess it’s not that big of a deal these days, having a parent nick off. But I never got a sit-down chat like you see in films where the parents get divorced: this doesn’t mean we don’t love you anymore! This isn’t your fault! I don’t know about being loved by my father. It seems sort of impossible that a parent who hasn’t seen or spoken to you since before you could talk could love you. I didn’t get two sets of presents at Christmas, or awkward trips to see my dad every other weekend. I just got Mum. Which is enough. I’m lucky to have her. But it also feels like half of something.

For a few minutes, I indulge in the fantasy of my father receiving the email at his desk, dumbfounded. My daughter! he thinks. My long-lost, beloved, exceptional, amazing, wonderful daughter! Oh, how splendid that we shall be able to get to know each other and become family once more! Then he cries, great gushing tears, and calls his new family and tells them the marvellous news: that the daughter he has told them about for so long has finally reached out to him. They all come to Alberton for Christmas, and we have a great big Christmas lunch together, with Clancy’s family, and half the town, and we laugh and overeat and dance to the Max Bygraves Christmas record that Grandad has put on every Christmas for as long as I can remember, except for the last couple, because that’s Mum’s job now. And my life is whole.

Given that we live in the same house we lived in when he left, and have the same phone number, and we’re only a four-hour drive from Sydney, it seems unlikely that he’s been unable to get in touch for fifteen years, especially now that I know he hasn’t been lost in the South American wilderness or conquering mountains in Antarctica or trapped in a cult. The only reason he wouldn’t call or write or take a weekend trip here is if he simply didn’t want to.

It seems far more likely that he’ll delete the email without bothering to open it.

Marianne reaches up and paws at my face, claws stretched out. My legs are going numb with her weight on me. I should probably see if anyone wants a cup of tea. Tea-making is my best procrastination strategy.

I delete the drafts.

‘I hear Clancy’s behind these crop circles,’ Judy tells me the next time I’m in the bakery.

I’ve spent several minutes in the queue trying to decide between a cream bun and a vanilla slice. Fortunately, Judy gossips to the people ahead of me. Now I’m at the front of the line. ‘Who’d you hear that from?’ I ask.

‘I have my sources,’ she says. ‘And I’m not going to give them up. I do have professional standards.’ Then she appears to remember that she is not in fact a journalist and clicks her tongs above the cabinet of pastries. ‘What did you want?’

‘A cream bun. And this.’ I wave the iced coffee I took from the fridge. It is now room temperature.

She puts the bun in a paper bag. I pay with small change. She bangs the drawer of the cash register shut with her hip. ‘So? What’s the word?’

‘I don’t think it’s Clancy. He’d get me in on it and I’m not in on it. And he’s putting on a play at the pub. He’s too busy.’

She seems unsatisfied. ‘I heard there’s supposed to be auditions, for this play,’ she says.

I shrug. ‘Don’t reckon anyone’d want to be in it.’

‘It’s nepotism if you don’t hold auditions,’ she informs me. ‘Who knows who has thespian aspirations in this town? Who are you to deny them their moment in the spotlight?’

‘Right,’ I say. The spotlight being the incandescent bulbs with the mouldy lampshades hanging from the ceiling of the pub.

Judy waves me on. She behaves as if she is queen and every person buying a pastry is one of her subjects visiting court.

I sit at a table by the drinks fridge. I’m decimating the cream bun and washing it down with the iced coffee when a hand brushes my shoulder.

‘Kirby the Carpenter,’ says Iris. ‘How are you?’

My mouthful of cream bun sticks in my throat. Her hair is in two braids and she’s wearing a strappy dress with a skirt that fans out as she turns, patterned in little cupcakes with pink swirled frosting and cherries on top.

I do an inventory in my head of how I look: hair in messy ponytail, frizzy from humidity; oldest, most worn-out jeans; one of Mum’s T-shirts, likely from when she was pregnant with me; terrifying pimple on my chin; probably some cream smeared somewhere on my face. I am not a pretty picture.

‘Good.’ I cough mid-word. I am devoid of any grace or composure whatsoever.

She nods. ‘Are you still planning that play of yours?’

‘Yeah,’ I stammer. ‘Venue’s booked and all. Clancy’s started working on costumes.’

‘Clancy’s an interesting character, isn’t he?’ she remarks. She takes the seat across from me.

‘Clancy’s my best friend.’

‘I meant it in a good way.’

‘He’s very interesting. And nice. I’m not just saying that because he wants me to talk him up.’

‘To me?’ She seems surprised.

‘I shouldn’t have told you that he told me to talk him up to you. Don’t mention it to him, okay?’

‘I won’t. Here’—she reaches towards my face and brushes the tip of my nose with her thumb—‘you had cream on your face.’ She sucks the cream off her thumb, then looks surprised, as if she realises what an oddly familiar thing that is to do. ‘I’m sorry. I should’ve asked before I touched your face.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say. My heart has yet to return to its normal rhythm.

‘What do you guys do for fun?’

‘I…read.’

She grins, like I’ve made a joke. ‘Around here, I mean. When the oldies complain about the unsavoury youth loitering, where do you hang out?’

‘The river, mainly, or the footy oval. You’ve pretty much met the unsavoury youth already, all two of us. And I don’t think any oldies think we’re unsavoury. Clance and I still get treated like kids.’

‘So there’s no solemnly swearing you’ll get up to no good?’

I shake my head.

‘It was a Harry Potter reference. The Marauder’s Map?’

I’m so nervous I missed it. I nod manically. I feel like a bobble-head on a car dashboard.

‘Is the river far?’ she asks.

‘Not at all. You go to the end of the shops, then left, follow the road down to the footy oval. There’s a path down near the clubhouse. It’s pretty clear. Hard to get lost. Just keep an eye out for snakes. I’m not saying that to frighten you. There genuinely are snakes. Be careful.’

‘I have an awful sense of direction. I used to get lost in Coles. Lucky the shops are smaller here. You fancy a swim?’