It was the end of April; they’d been in lockdown for five weeks. People were meant to stay at home all day unless they needed to buy food, see a doctor, or had certain types of jobs. There were lots of other rules and people were always arguing about them on the news. Harper hated the arguing almost as much as the virus.

The good thing was that it wasn’t hard at all to do remote school. They didn’t have many lessons at Riverlark, but they had to check in each morning to get the work, and again in the afternoon to send it to Mr Kumar. Harper got into Angus’s wi-fi using Ro’s tips about commonly used passwords. This meant subtly asking Lolly some questions about their neighbour and experimenting with names and numbers. Names were often family, pets or streets Angus had lived on. Numbers could be birth years or ages or something simple like 1234.

Did Angus have any pets? Lolly said he had fish. Did he name the fish? Not as far as Lolly knew. What about children? Yes, a son called Jack. How old was Jack? About thirty, Lolly guessed. Harper tried ‘Jack’ with a range of possible birth years. The password turned out to be Jack1989. It was that easy.

Every morning when they logged in, Mr Kumar told them that he missed them and that he was always around if anyone needed him. Harper didn’t think she would need him but it was still comforting when he said it. The Riverlark teachers made a video about staying positive. Even Mr Glass was in it, holding his tabby cat, as well as Barb the secretary, Mr Mandy, bouncing a ball on his head, and Greg from IT. It was very interesting seeing inside teachers’ kitchens and gardens, but by the end Harper felt like she was going to cry, so she turned it off.

Harper woke one morning to familiar sounds: the fluty whistling of Lolly’s stovetop kettle, the rattle of the cutlery drawer that always jammed. Lolly was getting ready for work. Her routine hadn’t changed; she was still in people’s gardens almost every day, which was either breaking the law or pretty close, Harper wasn’t sure. She’d questioned her grandmother about it, but as she was no match for Lolly it was simply added to the list of things she worried about.

Sometimes Lolly didn’t seem to take the virus seriously. Then again, she’d bought a lot of cans of baked beans, and the linen cupboard in the hallway was stuffed full of toilet rolls.

At breakfast, Harper was miles away when Lolly put something beside her: a worn leather case with hints of dark red. Inside was a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

‘Wow, these are cool.’

‘Good, take them, thought you deserved a present.’

‘Really? They look like an antique.’

‘1900s by my reckoning. I dug them up months ago. At your school, as it happens, so they may as well be yours.’

‘You found them? At Riverlark? What were you doing there?’

‘The garden, of course! Goodness, doesn’t Liz tell you anything?’ Then her expression changed. ‘Or perhaps I forgot to tell her…’

Harper was stunned. ‘You made the new garden? That’s where my year level sits every day, Lolly. Wait, was it you who cut the gum tree down?’

‘Not personally, no, but I was there. Found the glasses tangled in the old roots, would you believe? Absolutely mysterious. Try them on.’

Harper was still stuck on the image of her grandmother at Riverlark.

‘But they must belong to someone, Lolly. We can’t just have them.’

‘Blimey, don’t kids believe in finders keepers any more?’

Harper took them out carefully. The frames were octagon-shaped with rounded corners.

‘Who should they belong to? A museum?’ Lolly continued. ‘They might as well go to someone who’ll appreciate them. That’s my philosophy.’

Liz thought that finders keepers was nonsense. But what Lolly said made sense, too. Sort of. Harper really liked the glasses. The thin arms wrapped around her ears. There was a minuscule crack in the corner of one of the lenses. Apart from that, she was sure she could read with them. Lolly swivelled a gardening manual around so she could test them.

‘They’re super clear just like they were made for me. But don’t you want them, Lolly?’

‘I don’t need glasses, pet.’ She handed Harper the case.

As Harper took it, there was a high-pitched ting against the glass doors at the other side of the room. They both turned to look. One of the cats was over that way, arching her back, her black fur on end along her spine. She was staring at something on the carpet. Lolly got there before Harper.

‘Well, well, how did that happen?’

When Lolly turned, holding a small object, Harper gasped in fright. It was the cadet badge.

‘What is it, Harps? You’ve gone a funny colour.’

‘Nothing,’ she said, covering up her shock. ‘I just got up too quickly.’

Lolly chuckled. ‘You’re a delicate thing sometimes. We’ll have to toughen you up. Now then, I can’t for the life of me think…’ Lolly looked at the badge in that way that old people do, holding it half a metre from her face and tilting it to the light, the corners of her mouth turned down.

Harper remembered each time she’d found the badge.

First time: under her bicycle wheel at Riverlark.

Second time: in her bedroom, here at Lolly’s.

Third time: in this room.

Fourth time: Riverlark netball court.

Then she’d thrown it in the river.

And now, fifth time: back in Lolly’s living room again.

The cat who’d been playing with it pressed her body against the wall and let out a long hiss.

‘This was a mudlarking find,’ said Lolly.

‘Are you sure?’ said Harper. Lolly had hundreds of objects like this, and she’d been mudlarking for decades. Surely she wouldn’t remember finding every single one.

‘The cats are always taking things off that shelf. Or at least one of them is. I never catch them up to no good at the same time. Naughty things.’ Lolly held the badge in the sunlight, so the colours were more vivid. ‘World War One. I wonder what happened to this cadet.’

Harper felt so muddled—she hadn’t imagined throwing it in the river, had she? But at least now she could ask Lolly questions about it.

‘Where do you think it came from? What’s a cadet?’

‘They were boy soldiers. They started at twelve, trained at school, then went off to war when they were old enough.’ Lolly frowned at something behind Harper’s shoulder. ‘Off there, ratter!’

Hector was on top of the table looking for breakfast scraps. Lolly scooped him up with one hand.

‘Can’t he have my crusts? I don’t mind,’ said Harper.

‘All right, just this once. Lucky ratter.’ The dog took a corner of toast from Lolly’s fingers and wolfed it down.

‘Why did you call him ratter?’

‘That’s how Jack Russells were known in World War One. The trenches were full of rats and these little dogs had the perfect build and temperament to catch them.’ She cuddled Hector close and scratched behind his ears. ‘Soldiers used Jack Russells as hot-water bottles when they were cold, too.’ Lolly let Hector lick her nose a few times, scrunching her face.

‘Hector is my hot-water bottle,’ Harper said.

‘Good boy,’ Lolly said. She put him down, and reached over to pin the badge to Harper’s T-shirt.

‘Oh, no I don’t want it, it’s…too old.’

‘Old things are nothing to be scared of,’ chuckled Lolly, and Harper felt like she couldn’t stop her. The pin stuck into her skin and Harper flinched and yelped.

‘I’m so sorry!’ said Lolly. ‘I don’t know how that happened, pet. I was being so careful.’

Harper pressed the sore point and said she was really fine, though the pain pulsed like a bee sting.

After Harper reassured Lolly a dozen more times that it didn’t hurt, Lolly left for work with Annie and Murph. Hector stayed behind these days because Lolly said he was always getting under her feet, but Harper thought it might also be so that she’d have company. She wasn’t the only year six who was home alone most days. Ro was too, only he had his little brother with him. Harper loved her little trench dog.

In the bathroom, she inspected the place where the pin had gone in. It had bled a little into the T-shirt and bloomed into a shape like a tiny red war poppy. She looked at herself in the mirror: the glasses, the badge, and the poppy-shaped blood.

Either something was happening inside her mind, or something was happening outside of it. Whichever it was, she didn’t want the badge too near her. She put it on Lolly’s shelf with everything else.