The Saturday morning before camp, it starts to rain. I go with Mum to the army disposals place and get waterproof pants and boots. They’ve run out of black boots, so I have to get bright green ones. They make me look like an elf. I wear them on the way home, though, because it’s pouring with rain and I don’t want to make my good runners wet.

When we arrive home, Dad is in a panic because the gutters are overflowing, and water is pouring into a line of buckets in the lounge room that he and Noah are emptying out in a kind of conveyor-belt sequence. Noah starts laughing when he sees my boots. He empties a bucket of water over them, which makes them shiny as well as green.

‘Have you seen your feet?’ he asks.

‘No one will notice them,’ I say, hopefully.

‘Oh, they’ll notice them,’ he says. ‘You look ridiculous.’

I look down at my shiny green feet and feel secretly pleased.

It’s only cost my dignity to make Noah forget he wasn’t talking to me.

Mum comes out from the linen cupboard with a million towels and stacks them around the door. I hope she’s not all the way back to the flowery sheets yet. I go inside to put saucepans underneath the drips coming down in the kitchen, my room and the laundry. I’m not taking my boots off. It’s raining nearly as much inside as out.

During the night it’s almost as bad, but by Sunday morning it goes from torrential to just really rainy. Every towel is soaking and there are big wet patches all over the ceiling. I look outside my bedroom window into the backyard. All my camp stuff is in a backpack floating around in the backyard like a chip packet on the Yarra. Milky’s standing on the deck watching everything drift past. Every time a stick or a bone appears, he leans out for a better look. But we don’t have to worry about him jumping in. He doesn’t even like getting his paws wet.

A woman on the news with a massive umbrella says it’s the most rain we’ve had in eleven years. Who cares what the weather was like eleven years ago?

The rest of the day we put towels in the dryer, soak up more water, then hang them over the line in the rain to dry. Everything in the linen cupboard is being used to mop up the water so I have to grab my replacement Grade 6 jumper from behind Newcastle Nanna’s flowery sheet sets. It’s been there for over a month. No one has even noticed I haven’t been wearing it.

It’s a bit strange, us all being home at the same time on the weekend. It’s like a special occasion, with the special thing being the roof leaking and the backyard underwater. We order pizza because the kitchen is a mess. Dad’s phone rings just as the pizza guy rings the doorbell. It’s a bit confusing because nobody ever uses the front door at our house and so we’re not sure what the noise is. Dad’s phone rings again when we’re eating, and this time he answers it after banging his knee on a chair trying to find it.

‘Yes, yes … I understand, Mrs Overbeek.’

Mrs Overbeek?

‘I’m sure he’ll be very disappointed but—’

Dad keeps nodding his head even though he’s on the phone.

‘Yes, yes, yes …’ he says.

Yes, what?

Dad gets off the phone and tells me the Ovens Valley Recreational Facility is currently under a metre of water and camp has been postponed until further notice! Woo hoo!

Mrs Overbeek told Dad his deposit will be returned within three working days. So it is refundable.

Five minutes later, Alex messages me. He’s so disappointed about camp I try to keep my industrial strength happiness out of the conversation. I ask him over to look at the place where our backyard used to be to cheer him up. Braden walks down the street from his house to see if our house is okay and to discover that it isn’t. I can tell he and Alex are impressed by the amount of water everywhere. The house looks like an island in the middle of a lake with a water pollution problem. That’s because our place is at the bottom of the hill and everyone’s rubbish has drifted into the corners of our yard. Alex notices right away that I’m wearing a Grade 6 jumper.

‘Which one is that?’ he asks. ‘The old one or the new one?’

‘The new one.’

‘Oh, good. I was getting worried,’ he says, laughing.

‘Worried? Why?’

‘Cause I thought you’d lost another one … and you’d have to get another one and then all three of them would turn up at the same time.’ He cracks up.

‘Yeah. That’s funny,’ I say, trying hard to laugh. I want to tell Alex where my old jumper ended up but Peta promised she wouldn’t tell anyone, so I had to promise, too. Braden isn’t laughing, either. He’s standing on the deck watching soft drink cans and coathangers drift past, looking sad. I keep forgetting that everyone else is upset camp has been cancelled.

We get the dinghy out of the shed and blow it up. It takes about a hundred years because for some reason Dad won’t help us look for the air pump.

It’s pretty cool drifting around the backyard in a boat. We keep bumping into stuff: the lawnmower, the clothesline, my backpack … We pretend the water is poisonous and dare each other to stick our hands in it.

It probably is a bit toxic. The little blue fertiliser pellets Dad puts on his roses are floating on the surface and also, Milky does his business in the backyard.

The fence between us and our neighbour, Mr Mancini, has come down in the flood. The stuff from his garden shed is floating into our garden. All his tools are really old, like him. There’s not a battery pack in sight. Even the lawnmower is a push-mower. It takes a while, but the three of us fill the dinghy with Mr Mancini’s things and then line them all up on his verandah to dry.

They look like museum pieces.

Mr Mancini gives us a chocolate biscuit each and a glass of lemonade from a bottle he takes out of the cupboard. He must not realise you’re supposed to keep in it in the fridge. It tastes like aspirin. He puts the porch light on and sits down with us for a drink.

He looks like a museum piece.

We go back to my house and tie the dinghy to the porch. We might need it again if it doesn’t stop raining.

Alex says, ‘Hey! Remember last year on camp when we went to the beach, but the tide was out? And there was no water?’

‘And Wesley stepped on a rock?’ I say.

‘Yeah. And he had to get a tetanus injection?’

‘And the bus got stuck in the mud …’ I say, starting to laugh.

‘… And we left half our stuff behind,’ says Alex, laughing too.

Now that this year’s camp has been cancelled, I don’t mind talking about all those good times. But I feel relieved and disappointed at the same time. It’s kind of like getting all prepared for doing a talk in front of the whole class then being told you don’t have to do it. Like the feeling you have after eating four chocolate eclairs. A bit pukey.

Alex and Braden stay a bit longer then go home to their drier houses. Both their parents say they’re more than happy to have me stay with them, but I’m more than happy not to. I want to lie in my own bed and listen to the plink, plink, plink of water dripping from my ceiling into the saucepan from the rice cooker.

And the clonk, clonk, clonk of all the neighbours’ stuff hitting the side of our house as the river flows past it and out into the street.