She was just where they said she was, in the car park outside Woolworths, rattling her tin under everyone’s nose. Why ever would she have come home with me? For a kitten? For a puppy? To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I remember which, but a greedy little girl she was. She ate a whole packet of biscuits on the way, and they all had cream fillings.

What it was Norman sought in their company, I never understood, but they took his sweets, and his hands, and they climbed into his cars and ruined everything.

Oh, I know it wasn’t their fault. It was his, all his, but still, there was something about that little girl, that day, which set my blood simmering. It was Valentine’s Day, and that brought enough memories on its own of days I’d never get back—cards and dinners and bunches of flowers. I’d thought we’d grow old together properly, not the way we were, hiding in a salt-crusted box miles away from everything.

And there she was in the middle of the footpath, in my face and in my way.

‘How many boxes do you want?’ she asked me. Not: ‘Would you like to buy some?’ There was that sense of entitlement that so many youngsters have these days. They push in, and push past, and look you right in the face demanding your attention and assuming your interest. I just wanted to knock her down a peg, that’s all.

‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ I said, and her face fell, and I liked the way that made me feel.

There was no one else around. It was the middle of a Monday morning. I’d just come out with my shopping, and it was starting to rain. I said, ‘Your shoes don’t look like they fit you very well,’ and her face fell even further, and I felt better than I’d felt in years. ‘Your mum mustn’t care very much that your toes are all squashed like that.’ That’s when she started with tears in her eyes, so that’s when I mentioned the puppies or kittens, I really don’t remember which, but the promise of a cuddle from a bundle of them put a little smile back on her face.

Not too many people passed to see us chatting. I told her I’d buy every box of cookies she had as long as she helped me put them away, and as a bonus I wouldn’t call the police to report her truancy.

I didn’t plan to keep her. I was just enjoying that little taste of being nasty.

We had the driver who never talks. I’d thought I’d ask him to wait half an hour and run her back to town. I didn’t think he’d mind, and I didn’t think he’d charge me the waiting time. He could have his sandwich and read his book. I’d seen him do as much before. But she sat so quietly in the taxi—her mouth was too full of biscuits for talking—I could see he’d barely noticed her and wasn’t at all interested in who she was, or why I had her with me, and I began to wonder how good it might feel to be just a little bit nastier.

I shoved her out quickly when we got home, and I paid the driver through the window, so I don’t know if he even realised there’d been two of us in the car. Old women often mutter to themselves, don’t they? And there’s a lot of focus needed on the road when it’s raining.

There was the whistle of a kettle boiling as we started along the path.

I thought I’d maybe catch her finger in a drawer, that’s all.

And I did that.

I bent another one back a bit. And then I bent it back a bit more. I didn’t think I’d go much further, but I was so very angry, and the scissors were so very sharp.

Afterwards, I knew I’d let rage get the better of me, but what’s done was done, and sometimes you just have to get something out of your system, don’t you? Though I’d not known it was in there till that day.

It was the next day we took her up into the bush. Norman had to help me, even though he didn’t want to. It needed the two of us, and: ‘It’s not like I’ve never had to clean up your mess,’ I told him.

She was a chubby little thing, but still not terribly heavy, and once I’d tied her up a bit it was easy enough to get her in a bag. I wore my gardening gloves, so they wouldn’t get a print off the plastic if they found her, which of course I hoped they wouldn’t, but I’d seen enough crime shows to know there was a chance someone would stumble across her eventually—a dog walker, or a jogger, or teenagers staggering off the beaten track to take drugs and have sex.

The bag tore with the weight of her inside it, so I pushed the bundle into a duvet cover, which I worried might be traced, but it never was. We got the whole thing into the wheelbarrow and covered it with sticks, and we pushed it as far as we could—which wasn’t very far. We carried it then between us, though I did most of the heavy lifting. Norman wasn’t much help, even when it came to digging a hole. We settled on an old tree, in the end, and burrowed between its roots like wombats.

‘This is yours,’ he said. But it wasn’t.

‘This is because of you,’ I reminded him. I had to remind him often. Show him cuttings of the things he’d done. All of it was on him, every move we made. Every rock he hid beneath, I’d had to throw. This was just another one.

‘I’ll tell the police,’ he threatened once or twice. ‘I’ll tell them what you did.’

But I knew he wouldn’t, because he knew I was the only thing that stood between him and a life in prison. And he knew, because I’d told him, what they did in there to people who did the sort of things he liked to do with little girls. Still, I helped him let it go. Made his cocoa a little bit stronger, of a night. There’s so much you can get without a script. A bit of this, a bit of that. (More than a bit, does wonders.)

Was I sorry?

I felt sorry for her parents when I heard them on the radio or saw them in the supermarket. I ran into the mother once. We came up face to face and she looked me right in the eye, and for a split second I thought she could see the guilt in me—see what I’d done, what I’d taken from her—and I felt something then, and bile rising in my throat, but I don’t know that I’d call it sorry. I was scared I’d be found out. I would have died of shame to have it all dragged into the open.

I know what I did was wrong. A sin. I lost my temper, plain and simple.

I have reflected, and I have prayed.

All that hate. I will say that I kept it better-focused after that.