I take a look at some Cape Town websites. Of all my homework, the talk’s the one thing I actually want to do. I just need to find the best angle.

‘Your pa will be skyping just now,’ Mom says, still with her back to me. ‘Don’t get too deep into anything you can’t interrupt.’

She turns the gas off and pours the bobotie mixture into a baking dish. She covers the baking dish with foil, bends down and puts it in the oven.

I stare at the empty living room. It doesn’t feel like home. The dents from the legs of a previous sofa are still in the carpet. Mom and Dad have bought an outdoor table and chairs, but for now they’re inside. Our furniture is still in a big container on a ship somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and it feels as if we’re camping here, or that we moved in when the owners weren’t looking.

I’m sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my room, and Hansie has the blow-up bed we used to take on holidays for him. He only just fits it. He’ll be lying diagonally if our furniture doesn’t turn up soon. It’s way better than the motel we stayed in for the first week, though.

‘First days are never easy, eh?’ Mom says behind me. ‘Everything’s new. It’ll be okay though. It’ll be less new tomorrow. And I bet there are lots of Australian things you haven’t even heard of yet that’ll turn out to be great. Just wait.’ The timer on the oven clicks as she turns it. ‘Forty minutes, and perfectly timed to skype your pa. Let him know we’re here.’

When I check ‘contacts’ in Skype, Dad has just come online.

Mom goes to the kitchen door and calls out, ‘Hansie, come talk to your pa.’

Dad is on the screen by the time Hansie rushes in from his room. He’s making engine noises, a toy plane in each hand. Dad’s still got his mine gear on, and the silver patches on his bright orange shirt flare when he moves.

‘Howzit,’ he says, and waves.

‘Howzit, Dad. Where are you?’

This is our first Skype call to the mine camp. He looks around behind him. I can see the head of a bed with a white pillow on it. Next to the pillow there’s a powerpoint and high up the wall there’s an airconditioning unit. He’s the only one of us with a real bed.

‘This is my little house here,’ Dad says, stepping to one side to show us more. ‘You’ll be surprised what they call it. It’s a donga.’

Back home a donga is a dried up riverbed or a ditch.

He smiles. ‘Pretty lekker donga, eh? A lot nicer than sleeping in one of ours.’ He glances around again and reaches his arms out to the sides. ‘What you can see is almost the whole thing, except the bathroom. There’s four of us in this building, each in one of these.’ He looks back at the camera. ‘But what I really want to know is how your first day went, boys?’

‘Good,’ Hansie says. He’s kneeling on a stool, running his planes along the countertop.

‘So, what was good, Hansie?’

Dad knows it was an automatic response. Mom has already texted, telling him some of the details. Hansie lost it when Mom went to leave the child-care centre, then wailed at the door for the next twenty minutes before being persuaded that there were new toys to play with. About every half hour after that, he’d work out no one he knew was around, and the wailing would start again.

‘I don’t remember.’ Hansie leans forward and touches the screen.

‘Well, have a think about it and I’ll get back to you,’ Dad says. ‘What about you, Herschelle? That Mr Brown seems pretty good.’

‘Browning.’ I need to have the right name in my head. ‘Don’t make me call him Brown.’ Mom’s just behind my shoulder. She’s waiting to hear what I say. ‘I think I made a pretty good start.’ It’s a total lie, but Dad wants good news, I know it. And he’s not getting good news from Hansie, that’s for sure. We’ve come all this way and he just wants us to be happy. ‘Everyone’s doing talks on Australian colonial settlements, so I’m doing Cape Town as a comparison.’

‘Good,’ he says, nodding. ‘That’s a good idea from your teacher. And think about what you can say. Even just about the van der Merwes. Long before anyone in England even thought about Brisbane, we were farming at the Cape. Are you making any friends? Or is it too early to ask that?’

‘Max,’ Mom whispers, as if I need to be fed an answer.

‘Well, I would’ve said it’s early, but Mom obviously wants me to tell you about Max. He was my tour guide, and he’s not a bad guy. We played handball at lunchtime. He’s no good at tunnel ball, but he’s not bad at handball.’

‘You like handball,’ Dad says. He’s looking way too glad about it all.

‘It was just handball. And I already know what I like. And who I like.’ It snaps out of me, but he deserves it. Hansie reels away from me and drops a plane.

They want me to be happy, but I won’t have them telling me I already am. Or that meeting one non-awful person and hitting a ball around means this is all easy and everything’s like home now. It’s not like home. Not at all.

Dad’s just looking at me, not sure what to say next.

‘They’ve got nothing to counter my skidder,’ I tell him, trying to calm down and just talk. ‘Not the guys I played with today.’

‘Always good to have a trick up your sleeve.’ He nods and light flashes from his silver patches. ‘Just wait till you show them what you can do at hockey.’

‘They don’t play hockey.’ I can’t believe he doesn’t know this already.

‘What do you mean? I’ve seen them play us on TV, at the Commonwealth Games.’

‘Well, they don’t have it at One Mile Creek.’

‘We’ll find you a club somewhere.’

A club. More new people, new words, new ways of not getting it right. More work fitting in. Dad seems fine at the mine. He looks like he has no idea how tiring fitting in is.