The market in Calliope was the last Sunday of every month, but the biggest of the year was in November, and with Christmas galloping in behind it, that was the one Eddie took his horses to.

Rosemary left with him early on the Saturday, and they were back with more space in their trailer mid-Monday afternoon. Eddie was pegging up Christmas lights when I arrived that Tuesday morning, singing those of the Twelve Days he remembered, and wearing a singlet which read: I’m not Santa but you can sit on my lap. He invited Lily, Norman and me all at once, and there and then, to join them for Christmas Day.

‘Unless you’ve got other plans?’ Knowing we hadn’t.

‘It doesn’t feel like Christmas,’ Lily grumbled in the weeks leading up to it. It was too hot, it was too bright, and without an open fire, a turkey in the oven or a frozen river to skate on, it was clear she’d rather Christmas didn’t come at all.

But it did.

Stencilled snowflakes gathered in drifts at the corners of store windows, and blinking angels lit the length of William Street. Catherine set up the Nativity scene in the lobby of the library: a child-sized Mary flanked by Joseph and three kings, Tiny Tears Baby Jesus asleep between them in a manger filled with hay she bought fresh every year from the pet shop. We put a tree up by the front desk, and hopeful little hands dropped lists and letters in the box we stood beside it.

When we were children, my brother and I used to go with Dad to choose one of the stocky pines that grew in the forest. We ran behind him, really, his long legs covered so much more ground than our small legs could manage, and we stood where he told us while he swung his axe and brought the little thing down. All that effort taken to grow, all that rain and sunshine and push through a crust of forest floor, for what? I remember thinking. Only to be chopped down and propped up in a corner of our cramped little house and left to shake and shush a needle-shedding death. I preferred the un-trees of Queensland, in all their glorious colours, with trunks that snapped into pieces and legs that slotted together. Sonny and I bought a pink one barely the length of his arm. It came with its own coloured lights and decorations—plastic bells with velvet bows, and glittery golden baubles—and had spent thirteen years in the dark of its cardboard box, but even I was swept up in the spirit of the season.

December was dry and everyone blamed El Niño. Picnickers were photographed up to their necks in the soup of Lake Carney, holding beer bottles high. ‘I’ve lived here all my life and this is the hottest I’ve known it!’ they told the Courier, and FEELING HOT, HOT, HOT! was a front-page story. On another day they had the manager of Elliott’s Electrical lying in an empty chest freezer, underneath the headline CAN’T COOL DOWN! He was wearing a sombrero. The council voted to begin Carols by Candlelight an hour later than usual, and both supermarkets ran out of Rainbow Rockets.

There was no real news, nothing but the weather and Christmas fast approaching.

I passed Mr Else crossing the street, late one Thursday afternoon. Plastic bags full of groceries, he looked lost-in-the-middle-of-the-night. There was still no sign of his daughter, who seemed to have vanished into thin air. ‘It’s the not-knowing that would finish you,’ Catherine had said, and as I watched Mr Else half-trip up the kerb, I wondered if it would.

Mrs Else didn’t come to the library anymore, and I overheard she’d stopped going to church. I read somewhere that more suicides are recorded over the Christmas period than at any other time of year, and who wouldn’t believe it? It is the loneliest of holidays. I knew a boy who shot himself on Boxing Day, just after we moved to Christchurch. My brother was with them when they found Kerry Presland, floating down the Waimakariri with the left-hand side of his face blown off. He must have fallen on his gun, they said. Everyone knew he hadn’t, but he was buried on the right side of the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence.

A selfish little boy, my mother called him, though he’d turned eighteen and was no more a boy than my brother, who’d been out of school and working for two years, and who saw Kerry Presland in nightmares for a long while afterwards, but it was Christmas and He should have given more thought to his poor mother. I wondered, even then, if things might have turned out better for Kerry Presland if his mother had given more thought to him.

Stupid little bastard, my father said. It’s what he called all of us at one time or another, and especially around the holidays.

Eddie’s parents arrived only minutes before the rest of us on Christmas Day. They’d brought their caravan and were busy transferring bags and bins from its open door into the kitchen. Nola had already been settled into one of the chairs Rosemary had pushed around the tables pressed together on the deck.

‘Merry Christmas, Meggy!’ she called out, raising a hand and wiggling ringed fingers, in case I hadn’t seen her.

‘Merry Christmas.’ I was still trying it out, and it didn’t fit well, but she didn’t seem to notice.

‘Slow down, Norman,’ Lily grumbled behind me.

He was going to bruise the peaches that swung in the bag at his knees, and Rosemary skipped down the steps to take them from him, singing her own greetings.

Tom offered Norman his right hand for shaking and squeezed his shoulder warmly with his left. ‘Happy Christmas, mate,’ he said.

Norman nodded jerkily.

‘You look tired, Rosemary,’ Leonie said, and we all turned to see how tired Rosemary looked.

She rubbed a finger under each eye in a gesture that I remembered smudged eyeliner back into the beds of lashes. ‘Do I?’

I shook my head, but she was asking Leonie, who’d already decided for all of us that she did.

It was Lily who dusted that away. ‘Well, we made it!’ As if they’d come much further. She’d cut Norman’s hair and set her own, and she carried the shell of a pavlova carefully in a Tupperware container. I wondered if she might pretend she’d made it, and perhaps forget she’d told us that she didn’t have an oven.

‘Do you want to bring it inside?’ Rosemary asked her, and she snaked the hand that hadn’t taken Norman’s bag of peaches around my waist and drew me up the steps and back into the kitchen with them, fingering the ribbon I’d tied around my waist to keep my skirt from dropping. ‘I’m really glad you came!’ she told us together. There was coffee on her breath but mostly she smelled of apple shampoo.

Lily gave a deep nod that hid the chains around her neck for a long moment.

Eight swelled to ten when Rosemary’s friends Mary and Muddy arrived. They buzzed in on a scooter with lollipop helmets and sunglasses, like something that had broken from a swarm. I recognised Mary’s pretty face from Rosemary’s twenty-first, but I felt that I knew his from further afield.

‘I think I’ve seen you at the library,’ he said, shaking my hand. But that wasn’t it.

We functioned as a whole that day. There was no Can I help? What can I do? It was there to be done and we did it together: the chopping and whisking, spooning and carving and topping up and taking out. And although the day was hosted by Eddie and Rosemary, Christmas was shared, and cheer spread between us all like butter on cold toast.

‘Have another drink,’ Tom kept telling Lily, filling her wine from the box that Rosemary had to remind him, over and over, to put back in the fridge.

‘Chateau la Boîte,’ Lily called it.

‘What la what?’ Rosemary laughed, but she liked the sound of it, I could tell.

Plates were passed. I put enough on mine for no one to insist that I took more but not so much that anyone could think me greedy. Thick pink slabs of Tom’s ham with its cloved and honeyed rind; a salad like I’d never seen, with toasted nuts and noodles and crisp green shoots. There were other things: other meats and salads; corn I’d cut before breakfast and soft bread torn still steaming from the oven. Hats made their way from tight rubber-banded wads onto our heads, glasses were raised, thank yous exchanged, and praise heaped as high as Rosemary’s golden roast potatoes. Music played all afternoon, chestnuts roasting and snowstorms raging, but ours was the song of crickets and frogs, laughter heard on high, and the solstice bells of bottles tossed into an empty carton by the bin.

Still, it hadn’t rained.

‘Do you want me to bring the fan out?’ Rosemary asked Lily, who was dabbing her neck with the clean side of a napkin.

‘I’ll be right, love,’ she said, but still complained about the heat, the flies, and the ants. I wondered how long it had been since she’d sung a carol or bitten on a sixpence.

I gave her a rose-scented candle I’d been so pleased to see in the window of the Anglican shop beside the chemist. I knew she loved her roses; if she didn’t, she would have given up on them long before. Eddie was the only one who ever asked her why she grew the kinds of flowers that were bound never to grow in a place where the ground was hard as biscuit and all the rain fell in one go. She told him they reminded her of home, and Rosemary might have given him the crumbs of tales she told us about Calcutt, with its primroses and badgers, because I’d heard him wonder out loud more than once why Lily stayed; why she didn’t take Norman back to the England she so loved, where Christmases were white and gardens grew; but there was more to it than that.

I gave Norman a jigsaw puzzle. Complete the sticker on the box promised, and I hoped it was. In the picture, a castle held fast on a hill high above a harbour with bitter grey walls. ‘I’ve been there,’ Norman said quietly, and he pressed the flat of his hand on the box as if it were a window.

‘We didn’t get you anything,’ Lily said, as if to get was why a person gave a gift.

I sent a parcel home the first year we were gone, a brown-papered box with gifts carefully chosen but I don’t know if it was unwrapped, or if it was binned with the turkey’s carcass, or thrown onto a fire in a drum. I might have sent one again the following year, but Sonny stopped me. ‘Save your money,’ he said, meaning his money. ‘She’ll think what she wants to think, no matter what you do.’ Better to forget her, he meant. Better to forget them all. So, I bought for him, and he bought for me; and after him, and after a while, I bought for Catherine and for Mrs Robinson. Little things.

It was nice to give a little more.

Books to the Lambs. Emily Brontë, John Grisham, Sara Henderson, Di Morrissey and Wilbur Smith—I found them all in the Anglican shop.

‘I haven’t read a book in years,’ Eddie said (again). I don’t read, was what he meant. You shouldn’t have.

‘I know,’ I told him. But you should. I’d found something he’d like, if he’d only give it twenty pages.

Nola told him he ought to be ashamed of himself, turning her own book over as Eddie began to open something else.

They gave me a wide-brimmed hat that cast my whole face in the shade.

‘You can throw that other thing out now,’ Leonie said, laughing, but Rosemary was quick to shush her. I put a hand up to my head and felt the familiar thread and weave I wore beneath crepe paper.

‘Yes, I will,’ I said, but I was fairly sure I wouldn’t.

We played charades. Rosemary had filled a sock with movie titles handwritten on pieces of paper triple-folded into rectangles. She guessed right more than anyone else, but everyone took a turn, and she held her suggestions back so they were never first or loudest.

Nola fell asleep and Eddie woke her for the cake, which was hers to cut. Leonie carried it outside. Lily followed carrying her pavlova, and Rosemary came behind her with the trifle her mother used to make. In their creased crowns, they were like the three kings offering gold, frankincense and myrrh, and there was a quiet competition between them, so I had a little of everything, even though I would have been more comfortable squeezing in nothing more at all.

Norman reached for the trifle, but Lily pushed the big bowl out of reach and instead passed him a sliver of Jean’s frosted cake. ‘He’s not a fan of custard,’ she explained. ‘You’re not a fan of custard, are you?’ she reminded him, and he looked surprised, as if he hadn’t known.

‘I like a chocolate custard,’ Eddie said. ‘They should add it to the stuff they make here at the factory. It’d sell well at Christmas, chocolate custard. Your fella thought it was a good idea.’

‘Whose fella?’ asked Leonie.

Eddie flicked a hand at Rosemary and Mary, who were covering what was left of the pavlova. ‘Their boss, what’s-his-name—we were talking at the Christmas party.’

Rosemary’s shock was crystal clear. ‘This year? Last week?’ And we all laughed at her surprise.

The conversation wandered towards the factory, and which of what they produced were people’s favourites, and that’s when Lily touched my hand and whispered: ‘You can leave, you know.’

For a moment I thought she meant the party and, wondering why I’d thought to come, I half-raised myself up out of the chair I’d been comfortable in, before she pushed me back down with a firm hand on my knee and more than a hint of frustration.

‘This place,’ she hissed. ‘Magpie Beach. You’re free to go whenever you want. Just you remember that.’ She spoke quietly but her words were firm and formed carefully, one at a time, like bubbles. ‘You could go somewhere else and start again. There are other ways. There are other places. You’re not tied up here like she is.’

We both looked at Rosemary, who was still questioning Eddie, wondering what else he might have said to her boss at their Christmas party.

‘I’m too old,’ Lily said, ‘but you could do it, you know. All you have to do is drag that car out of the weeds and pull yourself together. There’s a big world out there, you know.’

I knew. I’d seen glimpses of it. Heard talk. Imagined myself once upon a time exploring its here and there. Re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo in the spring shade of the Eiffel Tower, Dickens with a cup of tea from a flask and my feet in the Thames.

‘Have a little faith in it,’ Lily said.

A little faith, like cream in an otherwise ordinary cup of coffee.

Lily left soon after that, which was time enough before the evening ended for it to seem too soon, the sweet mess of dessert not yet cleared and Norman knee to knee with Tom, laughing with his mouth wide open. Leonie was sitting back in her chair with her feet up on another, Nola had dropped back to sleep and was snoring softly. Muddy was telling a story, arms flailing, and face pulled into a look of shock or terror, Mary’s eyes wide as she nodded validity to the tale, which involved a spear gun and a triggerfish which charged with force enough to crack the tempered glass of Muddy’s mask. Lily stood up, quite suddenly, as if a whistle called her in a pitch too high for anyone else to hear.

‘We must be going,’ she said. ‘Time for cocoa and bed, I think.’ She thanked everyone, took Norman by the hand and led him away.

‘Hang on and I’ll walk you, love,’ Tom called out, pushing his feet into his thongs, but they were well on their way, ‘We’re right, thanks,’ thrown over Lily’s shoulder like salt.

‘There’s more to them than meets the eye.’ Nola was awake again.

‘You’re not wrong there,’ Leonie said. ‘Those shoes.’ She chuckled, but there was fondness in it.

‘She doesn’t like spiders,’ Rosemary tried to explain. That was why. That was why you never saw her in thongs or sandals. That was why she took them off at her own front door and banged them on the decking and sprayed them—so there’d be no nasty surprises for her next time.

‘She wraps them up,’ I said, and at once wished that I hadn’t.

‘She what?’ All eyes were on me, and Leonie, who’d sat up tall to straighten a kink in her back, leaned forward, all attention.

‘Nothing,’ I tried, but she put her hand in the hole I’d opened.

‘Not nothing,’ she said. ‘You might as well tell us now. She wraps her shoes?’ Fingers scrambling for purchase, she was laughing, and I looked to Rosemary for help.

‘She doesn’t like spiders,’ Rosemary repeated.

‘So, she wraps her shoes?’ Leonie gave a little snort of delight. ‘In paper?’

‘Maybe,’ I tried again.

‘In plastic,’ Rosemary cut in, and she gave me a tight little smile. In for a penny in for a pound, but it was gossipy and disloyal, and we both knew I had started it.

Tom just laughed, happy to stay barefoot and where he was. Muddy cleared his throat and Rosemary jumped in, prompting him to go on with his story, and the light of Lily’s torch dotted its way out of sight.

Tom and Leonie were spending the night in their caravan. Nola was sleeping with Rosemary, and Eddie was taking the couch.

No one wanted to drive after all the beer and wine and Baileys, and with Tom having one glass eye.

I never learned how he’d lost the real one. It was one of those rare secrets swallowed like a ring on a beach. If Catherine knew, she never told. I never asked, and for everything she shared there was plenty she kept in her pockets.

‘He shouldn’t really drive at all,’ Leonie said.

‘Bullshit,’ Tom began to argue. ‘Six-twelve vision, in one eye or two. There’s nothing that says I can’t.’

‘Well, there’s that bit about peripheral vision, Dad,’ Eddie reminded him.

‘There’s too many fucking rules is what there is!’ Muddy grumbled, and he raised his bottle towards Tom in quiet solidarity, though sitting where he was, on Tom’s left, I don’t know that Tom could see it.

‘There are too many kangaroos,’ Rosemary said.

‘Twice as many after what he’s drunk,’ Muddy joked, and Tom was lost to a fit of coughing that hadn’t been his first.

‘You need to get that checked, Dad,’ Eddie said, but Tom wiped the comment away with a tissue he dug out of his pocket, and Leonie changed the subject.

‘I hit a cow once.’

Tom was still clearing his throat but, ‘We don’t want to hear about that now,’ he managed. Something you say when you don’t want to hear it again yourself.

‘He was a big bastard. Made a helluva mess.’

‘We really don’t need to hear this story, Mum,’ Eddie said, and he and Tom shouted her down with jolly jeers and sweet distractions. I remember thinking that if it was a cow she’d hit, it would have been a she.

I slept in my clothes that night—beneath the bottlebrush, not even on a blanket. It was the first Christmas in twelve years that I had not spent alone. Company came on the breeze. Laughter exploding as Muddy shouted the punchline of a joke. I don’t know how late he and Mary stayed, or which of them drove the little yellow scooter home. Perhaps they spent the night on chairs pressed together, or cushions patched together on the floor, and left with Tom, Leonie and Nola in the morning.

Right before I fell into the treacle of sleep, there came a high and rasping scream. I heard Mary’s and Rosemary’s fright, and laughter reassuring them. Others knew the barn owl’s call, the sweetheart markings on his face, his ghostlike spread of wing.

Twice he called.

I knew the rhyme—One only maybe, two brings a baby, three for no bread, four someone’s dead—and I smiled at the thought of a baby among us.

There was a distant, over-ocean rumbling. Black cockatoos were roosting low. Leaves had rolled. The barn owl shrieked again.

And again.

Something of a storm was coming.