Mad Meg we called her. It’s what everyone called her when they thought to call her anything at all. She’d been who she was for such a long time that I doubt many people talked about her anymore. She’d been up the avocado tree again, thinking she was hidden in the leaves, her arms and legs wrapped around its trunk like a clip-on koala. It’s a wonder she never fell with that massive bag on her back. We saw her much more than she thought we did—picking things, burying, planting, digging things up. She leaped off like a deer if she heard us coming, but if she thought there was a chance we wouldn’t see her she just froze.

Sometimes she came to watch us, creeping closer in spurts until she was tucked up against the trunk of a tree or leaning awkwardly into the shadow of a broom or shovel. You’d think of waving or calling out just to let her know she wasn’t invisible, but that would only have embarrassed her and, really, I never wanted to do that. There was nothing Single White Female about her sneaking around. She didn’t spy on us showering or going to bed. Nothing went missing off the washing line. She watched us pour tea and puzzle over crosswords. She watched us brush cobwebs off the water tank and leaves off the porch. She watched me paint my toenails on the step. It was easy enough to guess her motives. There was no need to yank them out into the open.

‘You should ask her to go with you next time,’ Eddie said. But I didn’t think I would.

I’d thought about introducing myself when we first moved out, but I hadn’t wanted to intrude. We knew that it was our land now that she was squatting on, but neither of us minded her being there. There was enough sky for us all. We’d moved away from town for peace and space and privacy and, mad or not, we felt Meg had a right to keep whatever it was she’d come to Maggie Beach to find, though I knew that wasn’t loneliness.

She hadn’t always been alone. (She hadn’t always been mad.) There’d been a husband. Years ago, she’d been one half of a regular couple, shopping for groceries, ordering counter meals at Carney’s, laughing all the way down William Street with no one giving them a second glance. I don’t remember him, but I do remember the rumours that ran around once he was gone.

Eddie’s dad remembers them coming in together for their meat, just like everybody else did back then. People were more community-minded, his mum reckons, but if you ask me, there’s something to be said for people not minding the business of everyone in the community quite so much. Meg’s husband was good-looking, Tom said. He had tattoos, and a nice smile, and he liked to chat. Women stared.

He disappeared when I was still in primary school. The rumour was she’d killed him, but I don’t think anyone really believed it. Some people thought he’d run off with a backpacker, but I don’t know if anyone honestly believed that either. The sad part I think now, looking back, is that we really didn’t care. Tattoos, and a nice smile: he didn’t mean anything more than that to anyone but Meg, and Meg didn’t mean anything much to anyone other than him. I mean, she didn’t have family, she didn’t have a job—workmates to offer cups of tea and shoulders to cry on—and she didn’t even have a neighbour to keep an eye out. Who knows when she got the cat?

It is terrible but fascinating how Meg changed when she lost her husband. However it was that she lost him, whether he was dead from natural causes, or murdered and chopped up into little pieces, or run away with another woman (or man). People started seeing her out on the highway in her nightie at three o’clock in the morning, or on her knees outside St Anthony’s. She covered one grave in stripped twigs pushed into sand-filled jars and little stones she built up into piles, and that might have been understood and forgiven if it had been her husband’s grave, but he didn’t have one—which of course added to the mystery of what had become of him.

Kids at school said she was a witch. And then one day she began working in the library. People didn’t know what to make of that and whether to be worried, outraged or embarrassed. Dad had a word with Sergeant Scanlan and put a petition together to keep her away from children, but it never came to anything, and when he could see that it wasn’t going to come to anything, he pretended it wasn’t him who’d started it. I never understood what all the fuss was about. She wasn’t there very often, and when she was, all she did was push a trolley up and down the aisles and slot books back where they belonged. She didn’t talk. She didn’t bother anyone.

A couple of weeks after she’d spoken to Eddie, I was going to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Eddie knew it because I’d stuck the flyer on the fridge. I doubted Meg had honestly told him she wanted to see it, but I must admit, I was curious to meet her properly, so when Eddie told me for the umpteenth time I should invite her, I said I would.

‘You can’t ask her,’ he said. ‘She won’t go unless you tell her she has to.’

‘What, with a gun?’

‘If you ask her, she’ll say no.’

I couldn’t imagine her saying anything at all.

She’d lived at Maggie Beach as long as I remembered. There’d been a time when teenagers drove out on midnight dares to find her, but the novelty had worn away over the years. They still came occasionally but looking for other things now, buried in the folds of girls and boys on blankets and back seats.

There was no sign on the highway, but people knew Shank Lane would bring them out to Maggie’s. It was marked on some maps as a track, but it was wide enough for two cars to pass if neither driver minded a few scratches, and there were only a couple of dips deep enough to need a run-up and a Hail Mary in the rain. We just called it Shank. Its end frayed into the sandy soil where Eddie built our house, a fair stretch from the pancake flat where Meg kept her old, broken-down car, and she lived a couple of minutes’ walk past that, along a track worn through the bush. I don’t know how they got their caravan in there. Bush grows, I suppose. They could have burned it back.

I knew it was there, I’d glimpsed its roof, smoke through the trees, a yellowy light at night, but that morning was the first time I’d seen it properly. It wasn’t much longer than a garden shed, standing on blocks and surrounded by vines and creepers which ran up and along complicated stick-and-string scaffolds Meg had pegged into the ground. Gutters were held in place by cable ties and rigged to run into an old grey water tank which stood up on fat timber sleepers. There was a lean-to at either end (a smokehouse and a washhouse, I learned later), a wide window to the right of the door and, although she wasn’t up against it, I could see her face as clear as day behind a busy sill of jars and bottles and sprouts in plastic tubs.

I half-expected to hear the clatter of a back door and the dry crunch of leaves as she leaped off into the bush, but instead the blue door opened slowly and there she was, dragging to the side one of those fly-strip curtains and slipping off her glasses.

She was stick-thin. The scoop of her t-shirt hung lower than it should have, and her chest was bony and tanned. Tanned like leather, not in the Elle Macpherson way. No bra (no boobs). She had on board shorts that looked like they belonged to a man. She’d pinned them, I think, at one side, and it gave her the look of someone with a dicky hip. Come to think of it, everything I ever saw her in looked like it was too big—like she’d been bigger once, or else the clothes she wore belonged to someone else.

‘Hello,’ I said.

She gave me a very small nod of the head, but that was all. It was up to me to speak again.

‘I like your flowers.’

She looked at the plant nearest her feet and I thought I saw a slight colour light her face. Was she embarrassed by my attempt at conversation or flushed with pride that someone had noticed her garden?

‘They’re chillies,’ she mumbled. She had a soft voice, a little bit deeper than I’d imagined it. Her hair was long and thick and brown-streaked white, and when the plait of it swung around I saw that it was tied up top and bottom with purple bobbles.

‘I’m Rosemary.’

Another nod. Did she know that already? Until that point it hadn’t occurred to me that Meg might have heard some of the things they said about me. What did they say? I didn’t really care anymore.

I took a few steps forward. Close to, I could see she’d made the curtain out of plastic bags and sticky tape.

‘Eddie said you wanted to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’

A look of fright came over her and I remembered what Eddie had said about telling, not asking. I’d made it a question and I could see she was about to shut me down and send me on my way.

‘Eddie said you wanted to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ I said again quickly, a statement this time, and then I babbled: ‘The one with Audrey Hepburn? It’s black and white—old—I think it’s from the fifties. Anyway, the ticket’ll be six dollars because it’s Tuesday and there’s a special on. It’s called Film Club, but it’s not a club, not really. I mean, you don’t have to join anything, but it’s a special price …’ Racking my brain for anything else I could scatter at her. ‘I’ll be leaving at ten. Please don’t be late. I don’t want to miss the start.’ And I fled before she could say No, thank you or Get off my front step or whatever else she might have been thinking to say. ‘Bring a cardigan—it can get a bit cold!’ I shouted over my shoulder, but I’m not sure she heard it, I was practically running by that point.