On the side of the Gully where Shelby's friend Hayley lived, all the houses were grand Tudor-style homes complete with ivy, or architect-designed buildings of glass and stainless steel, or massive kit homes with wings and six-car garages and a pair of concrete lions by the front gate.
Most of the houses were on two to five acres. They all had lavish pool areas and manicured gardens – some with elaborate bronze statues or ornate water features. Those that were not entirely dedicated to landscaping had horse paddocks, dotted with brightly coloured jump wings, flash show ponies, or striking eventers swathed in rugs – the horses being as ornamental as the bronze statues.
Lydia did not live on Hayley's side of the Gully. Lydia didn't even live on Shelby's side of the Gully.
Lydia lived on the side that used to be farmland – the sort of properties scattered with broken-down tractors and buses without wheels, fenced in rusty barbed-wire with ripped plastic bags caught in it, and the land itself sprinkled in grey patches of blackberry, choked with willow and the browned skeletons of old scotch thistles.
Many of those properties had now given way to industrial blocks – clusters of car mechanic workshops, metal fabricators and self-storage complexes, discount ceramic pot distributors, security-door manufacturers or lumberyards.
It was the sort of place you might find stolen cars burned out, skid-marks and discarded bottles from midnight street races, because no one is around at night, except for the residents living in the handful of little fibro houses that remained.
Lydia lived in one of those.
Shelby knew the area because she had often accompanied her father, an Alfa Romeo enthusiast, to the European car specialist in one of the workshops at the other end of the same street.
'How much further?' Erin asked. She gripped Bandit's reins tightly as another carload of louts shouted out their windows and tooted their horn as they drove past the two horses walking along the grassy verge.
'Why do they do that?' Shelby muttered again. Blue plodded on oblivious to the noise, but Bandit was getting skittish – probably responding to Erin's nervousness.
'We're running out of light. There'll be no time to ride anywhere. We need to be home before dark.'
Bandit spooked at a piece of truck tyre half-buried in the grass and Erin jerked on the reins.
Shelby knew Erin needed distracting. 'So how long have you loved Ethan Agnew?'
Erin put her hand up to her mouth. 'Omigod! How do you know that? Nobody knows that! It is my deepest, darkest secret!'
'You just told me,' Shelby said, laughing. 'If you didn't love him you would have said, "Who? What are you talking about?"'
'You know what, though?' Erin said. 'I can't decide if I love him, or if I actually hate him. He is like my Gilbert Blythe, except Gilbert Blythe was smart and handsome even from the beginning, and Ethan is not smart. He's not good-looking exactly. And Anne and Gilbert talked – well, argued. Ethan and I have never spoken.' She paused. 'That's not true. Two weeks ago he said, "Ta", when I let him go through a doorway before me. But later I was thinking he really should have let me go through first, because I am the girl, but then he could have been respecting my equality. Or maybe he didn't notice that I was a girl, so I thought I should do something more girlie with my hair, like put a ribbon in it, or run a brush through it every now and then. I should start wearing mascara. Most of the girls in our year wear mascara, but I tried it and I always forget, and then rub my eyes, and then it's all over my face. Do you think I should?'
Shelby laughed again. 'Why are you asking me?'
Erin raised her voice to be heard over a truck that drove past. 'I don't even know what it is. I just think about him all the time, and I can't stop even when I want to, and sometimes I just say his name by accident. Like, yesterday I said, "Pass the Ethan", when I meant tomato sauce, because it's an obsession. And sometimes I'm not really even thinking about him, like, I have been thinking about the hair thing for ages. Don't you think that's weird?'
'Lots of things are weird about you,' Shelby said.
'It's such a relief to finally tell someone. It's been boiling away inside my head, but whenever I tried to say it I just couldn't.' Erin sighed.
The two girls steered their horses off the main road and into a side street. Erin hurried Bandit along so the two girls rode side by side. Since there was no traffic around at this end of the industrial estate the two girls rode down the middle of the road with their horses on a loose rein.
Blue and Bandit watched each other, pulling faces, talking to each other in horse while the girls talked in human above their heads.
Shelby wondered what they might be saying.
Never been here before. What do you think of this surface?
Not bad. I prefer gravel though. Those cars were noisy, eh? I hope there's kikuyu where we're going.
Yeah? I'm a clover man, myself.
'How do you know, anyway?' Erin asked.
'I could tell when you looked at Ethan yesterday in Food Tech. You have a see-through face, Erin. You're like a real-life emoticon. And then last night you were going on about cinnamon. Who would remember that?'
'Do you think he knows? Because I don't want him to know. I am just happy to love him from afar. Not even love. It's just a crush. I know it's dumb. Last year he was just Ethan, and now he's Ethan. The idea of actually speaking to him makes me want to leave the country. Did you have that with Chad?'
Shelby started to speak, but Erin interrupted. 'Shh!' Erin blushed. She fanned her cheek with her hand, as if to cool it. 'See what happens? Let's not talk about it! Tell me something else.'
Towards the end of the street the workshops and warehouses gave way to weed-infested lots surrounded by hurricane fencing, and vacant land strewn with rubble.
'OK, here's something else.' Shelby took a deep breath. 'Yesterday I quit the trick-riding troupe –'
'No way!' Erin said. 'I'm glad. I mean, you were good at it, but it looked dangerous. And you would have missed heaps of school, and then who would I sit next to?'
'And Zeb offered to buy Blue –'
'Pfft!' Erin interrupted. 'In his dreams! As if you are ever going to let Blue out of your sight again!'
'For ten thousand dollars.'
'Is he joking? No offence, Shel. I don't think he was being serious, because really, Blue has many good qualities – maybe a few years ago . . .' She reconsidered. 'No, not even a few years ago, and he's not even young now. Are you sure he didn't say ten hundred, which would be a thousand?'
'Have you ever heard anyone say, "ten hundred"?' Shelby asked.
Erin shrugged. 'They say eleven hundred and twelve hundred. And Zeb is some funny nationality, isn't he?'
'He said ten thousand,' Shelby assured her.
'Wow! Are you going to?' Erin held her hand up like a stop sign. 'I hope you are going to say, "No way, Erin, that would be crazy. After all we have been through together, Blue is the love of my life."'
Shelby nodded. 'I did say that at three thousand, which was his opening offer, and at five thousand, but ten thousand, Erin. That's a big holiday overseas.'
In her head Shelby was all ready to tell Erin about the trip to London, but now that she was on the verge of it she felt as though her throat was closing up and she was worried that she might start crying. She didn't want to do that and look like a big drama queen, especially since she wasn't going overseas. There had to be another way.
'That's a deposit on a house,' she said instead.
Erin blinked. 'A house in Wambangalang.'
'Where's Wambangalang?' Shelby asked.
'This is my point. You might be able to buy that, though,' Erin said, nodding ahead.
At the end of the cul-de-sac was Lydia's little fibro house. The two girls were not yet able to see into the back garden due to a tall corrugated iron fence, and a ute and trailer parked in the driveway. The trailer was sign-written in a sloping script, 'Greener Pastures', and then in smaller print, 'Meeting your commercial landscaping needs naturally'.
Shelby bit her lip. She liked to think of herself as open-minded, but after talking to Lydia and learning where she lived, she had already made a judgement about what she expected to see behind that fence. What worried her was whether she was going to be able to do anything about it.