When I get back to Foreman, lots of pests are there, flapping their vests at the birds. The bees thunder in behind me. ‘I brought all the bees to help, Boz!’ I yell at Foreman.

‘Good thinking!’ he says and orders the bees, ‘Get up the trees with your poles and whack those thieving cockies!’

The bees look stunned. Bees don’t normally help out. Bees like to just do the flowers and nothing else. They think they’re the super-cherries, but they can’t say now they didn’t agree to help. They grab poles and scoot up the trees and beat at the cockies and shout like they’re told to. But they look dirty at me and I hang close at the other side of Foreman for a while.

‘Why aren’t the cockies afraid, Boz?’ I ask.

‘The drought is really bad up north,’ he says. ‘They’re starving.’

It’s sad that we have to fight the cockies for the fruit. But we could starve too if the farm don’t make money. And the farm don’t make money without fruit. If the farm don’t make money we don’t get our oats and beans, our new blankets each winter, from Foreman. If the farm don’t make money we’ll have to leave our shed and move on, and the Urbs won’t come to see us with their hand-me-down clothes and hand-me-down toys. Everything we work for will be lost.

Sad as I am for the cockies, I beat at them with a bee pole until they give up screeching and flying and resettling and whirl up into the sky, an angry ball of cawing, seething white, and move on. That’s the way the world is, I guess. Not enough to go around so you got to protect your own. Except it’s not ours. It’s all bound for the city and the Urbs.

‘Thanks, Peony,’ Foreman says. ‘Could’ve lost a lot of baby fruit without your quick work. How’s your Gramps?’

‘He’s good,’ I say.

‘I got some jobs for him, cleaning up the packing shed,’ Foreman says.

‘I’ll tell him now, Boz!’ I say, and I run to AJ and give him my bee pole as Foreman sends all the bees back about their work. I run back to the shed and tell Gramps.

He smiles and hugs my head to his belly. ‘Foreman likes you, kid. You’re a good worker and you make this family look good.’ He picks my face up in his hands and smacks a big funny kiss on my forehead.

I’m full to busting as I head on back to where me and Mags was in pears yesterday. I pull out my skewer and round up the chooks who are scritching and pecking about under a passionfruit vine where they thought the crazy cockies couldn’t see them. They think any big bird in the sky is an eagle come to eat them. I don’t know that any of these chooks even seen an eagle, but the idea is born into their brains. Chooks is born being chooks and that’s all they’ll ever be. Not like a dog, which could be a sheep dog, or a cow dog, or a guard dog, or a dog that pulls a blind person around. Not like a girl that’s born in a shed and crawls around in the dirt till she learns to be a pest, and then could be a bee or a bagger or picker, or even a foreman one day.