6

All day at school Avis enjoyed the secret that she was keeping. There were plenty of chances to tell one of the other girls about the predator-proof fence, the tunnel house full of lizards and the smuggling operation, but Avis wasn’t even tempted. She enjoyed having the secret all to herself.

That was the point of secrets, she thought, knowing something that no one else did.

She could never understand the way other people seemed so willing to part with their own secrets. It was such a waste, like when people threw a whole apple in the school rubbish bin just because they didn’t feel like eating it right now. Waste annoyed Avis.

At the end of the school day her secret remained just that.

She grabbed her backpack and, walking as fast as she could without actually running, Avis turned out of the playground and towards Malinda’s. She was jittery with excitement about where she was headed. To calm herself she silently chanted the combinations to the tunnel house doors. She was sure she had them right. If Malinda had left with Percy that morning, the place would be empty and therefore all hers. That feeling was almost as delicious as having a secret. While she felt lonely at home each afternoon, the idea of being alone in a new place was exciting, tinged with the idea that she was trespassing but not quite – she had a key.

Avis was bent over, unzipping her school bag to get it when a sharp shove sent her face-forward onto the hard footpath.

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Drake Snelling. ‘I didn’t see you there, Mavis.’

Avis knelt and put her hand to her grazed chin. It wasn’t bleeding but it stung at her touch. Drake started kicking her bag along the grass verge as if it were a football he was dribbling down the field.

‘Give that back,’ she yelled.

The key to Malinda’s gate fell out of the unzipped pocket and Avis scrambled to pick it up and shove it in her shorts’ pocket. Drake passed the bag to his mate William with a lifting kick. William deliberately missed it. It landed heavily. Avis heard her lunchbox crack.

Avis looked at their faces. They were all grinning except for Archie Young. He looked sorry.

‘Oh dear, I think something just broke,’ said Drake, and he unzipped the main bag and started to tip out the contents.

Avis’s books went fluttering into the gutter where the wind ruffled the pages, her sweatshirt was kicked aside and the lunchbox, empty because she always ate all of her lunch, was tipped out along with a few pens, a hairbrush, some hair-ties and a couple of novelty rubbers that had been in the bottom of her bag for months.

The lunchbox, the one she had had since she was six, was cracked right across the lid, splitting Sleeping Beauty’s face in half.

Drake Snelling grinned. ‘Trust Mavis to have a princess lunchbox,’ he said. ‘Never mind. Aaron Miller will buy you a new one.’

He threw it to William, who dropped it again then threw it to another boy, and they carried on passing it and dropping it, making the split in the lid wider each time.

Avis stood on the path hanging her head.

She felt powerless to do anything or say anything to help herself. She knew that later on she would think of a clever thing to say or a brave thing to do, but no ideas came now (except for the thought of crying) and she had the sense to hold the tears back. Sooner or later the boys would stop and go away.

Other kids on their way home from school walked quietly around them, some stepping off the path onto the road to take a wide berth. Then the boys stopped throwing the lunchbox and let it fall. A tall shambling figure was scuffing the path with his sneakers, eating a hot pie from a white paper bag and a carrying a can of fizzy.

‘Bruno,’ Avis called.

Her brother stopped chewing and stared at his sister standing in the middle of the footpath, with the contents of her schoolbag strewn all over the place and a handful of boys strolling casually away in different directions.

‘They broke my lunchbox,’ she sobbed. In her relief at having Bruno come to her rescue Avis forgot to hold back her tears. They streaked down her cheeks and when she wiped them the salt stung the graze on her chin. She whimpered.

‘Pick up your stuff and stop being a baby,’ said Bruno, scuffing his way towards her. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself.’

‘They broke my lunchbox,’ said Avis again, thrusting the pink plastic pieces in his face so he could see how badly she had been treated.

Bruno snarled as he walked right on by her. ‘Time you got rid of that thing. Time you grew up and faced the real world. It’s not all pretty and pink, is it?’

She shoved the broken lunchbox pieces into her backpack and picked up her other belongings. Her breath was catching in her throat but she wasn’t going to cry again. Her grazed chin throbbed. She wiped the back of her hand across her nose, took a deep sniff and unlocked the gate.

Avis dropped her bag by the gate and made sure that the padlock was firmly closed so no one could get to her here. Once that was done she felt as if she could breathe normally again. She tried to forget about Drake and the smashed lunchbox and Bruno.

The walk up the drive seemed longer than it had the day before. Darker too, deliciously so. She walked around the edge of the verandah, opened the pest-free fence and punched in the code at the entrance to the shed leading to the tunnel house, feeling important and grown-up to be doing this all by herself. The door swung shut and self-locked behind her. She carefully put on the paper suit that was too big for her, the paper over-shoes and hat, and with a trembling hand punched in the code for the internal door.

The door opened and she stepped into cool, damp calmness.

A gentle chittering greeted her and a few thin branches shuddered as lizards shifted position. Avis breathed in the smell of damp leaves and semi-tropical flowers. Even though she was allowed to be there (well, sort of) it felt like she was intruding. She walked slowly along the path, stopping every now and then to look for lizards. ‘Hello, gorgeous,’ she said to a shiny copper-skinned skink wiggling under the leaf litter. ‘I won’t hurt you, I promise.’

She spotted a few different lizards this time: one green and goggle-eyed, one that she first mistook for a piece of bark, another that clung to a branch with a rosy bulge under its chin. But behind the screened-off enclosure of the Teju Chokor, nothing. Not a flicker or a movement or a hint of colour, though Avis stared and stared and sat as still as she could. Behind her, cutting through the gentle hum of the air conditioning, she heard a tiny cough. She heard it again, a couple of croaky barks. She turned and found a mottled green lizard watching her, its open jaw emitting the strange noises.

‘Are you sick?’ she said. What if the lizards got sick while she was looking after them? What if the Teju Chokor had hatched and escaped?

Avis really didn’t know how to look after lizards. Especially baby lizards. With that great ball of worry in her stomach, she walked back to the door and let herself out. The joy of the secret and the job and the thrill of being here alone had all vanished.

As she hung up the paper suit, she glanced at the stack of folders on the desk. On top was a notebook with a hand-written label: The Legend of the Teju Chokor. Avis slipped the notebook off the pile and flipped through the pages of hand-drawn maps and notes of Malinda’s journey. It was in cursive writing, which Avis found hard to read.

The sun moved behind the trees and she realised that she’d better hurry if she was going to beat Dad home. Bruno wouldn’t care where she was but if Dad arrived home and she was missing he might start asking questions. She took the notebook with her to read later. She wanted to know as much as she could about the Teju Chokor and would return it tomorrow. Avis assured herself that this was borrowing rather than stealing.

There was no milk again.

Avis complained to her father.

‘Bruno went to the dairy and bought himself a pie and a Coke but didn’t bother getting any milk.’ There was no point saying anything about the Drake Snelling stuff. Her father would tell her to stand up for herself. She’d heard it before.

‘It’s a thoughtless phase,’ her father said. ‘Lay off Bruno a bit, okay, Avie? He’s got a lot going on at the moment.’

Dad didn’t even notice my grazed chin, thought Avis bitterly. It’s not only Bruno going through a thoughtless phase.

She put the pink pieces of her lunchbox into the recycling bin, unsure if it was the recyclable type of plastic. From now on she would have to take her lunch to school in an old bread bag.

A storm came that evening, a real doozy of an early summer storm. The day had been warm and windy, but just before tea big black clouds rolled in. The thunder and lightning were an overture to the main event: the hail that pounded down and blocked the gutters on the roof, causing waterfalls to stream over the windows. Avis’s father raced out in his T-shirt to fling a cover over the car. He came back drenched and stinging from a multitude of small bruises.

‘If you tidied the garage then the car would fit in there again,’ Avis said.

‘Leave it, Avis,’ said her father. ‘I’m working on it.’

Bruno ventured out of his room and scooped up a handful of the icy hailstones from outside the front door. The biggest of them were like marbles.

‘Ah, so you aren’t hibernating after all,’ Dad said.

Bruno responded with a fake laugh, ‘Ha-ha, very funny, Ralphie,’ and went back to his room, leaving the hail melting on the kitchen bench.

‘Can you wipe that up, Avie-bird?’ asked her father.

‘I’m working on it, Ralphie,’ she snapped, and stomped off to her room where she tucked herself under the duvet. Malinda’s notebook was difficult to read with the hastily scrawled handwriting and all of the scientific words she used, but Avis stuck with it. She wanted to learn as much as possible. Maybe tomorrow she would see the Teju Chokor.

Her mind was full of lizards and legends even after she’d fallen asleep.