No sooner has Ma wedged me into my too-tight clothes and a pair of stupid hard black shoes that don’t let my feet bend or breathe, and tied my hair up so that there are no bits hanging over my face to protect it from the sun, than Ivy yells for us to ‘get upstairs and clear away her ladyship’s lunch things while she’s having her piano lessons’.

I’m stomping into my shoes so hard as Ma drags me from the kitchen that I get a fright to find I’m stomping on wood so polished and shiny I can see up my own trouser legs. When I lift my head, I’m in a room as big as a packing shed. But this ain’t no packing shed. It’s got floor rugs with crazy patterns I’ve never seen before, and huge furniture, so huge I reckon I could sleep on one of the chairs really well, but my feet wouldn’t even touch the floor if I sat on them. There’s benches made of shiny wood with curly feet and carved decorations, and on top of them are big glasses with flowers sticking out and silver framed pictures of a family. Either side of the window hang curtains, but not just curtains for covering the window. These curtains hang from the ceiling to the floor and look as heavy as wet blankets, heavy as the waterfall when Foreman opens the sluice to water the trees.

Ma jerks me along over the rug to the bottom of the stairs. I dance my clumsy shoe feet so I don’t step on the winding bits of pattern that look like flowers. The railing on the stair is made of wood and curves away at the bottom like a gnarly tree caught in the wind for a thousand years, but polished and shiny. ‘Come on, Peony!’ Ma grumbles and pulls me so my hand doesn’t get to follow the winding of the railing. I stumble up the stairs after her.

At the top of the stairs is a hallway so wide a fruit truck could drive down it. It’s got more of the patterned rugs and I want to just stand still and check out the patterns for a while, and the patterns on the ceilings and the fancy lights, but Ma drags me to a table on one side of the hall and picks up a tray there and shoves it into my hands. Somewhere up the hallway, music plays and stops and plays again.

‘All the people who live in this building must be super-cherries,’ I say.

‘Ha. All,’ Ma mutters. ‘Just one family.’

I look down at all the doors in the hallway. They must have a lot of children and cousins and aunties and grans and gramps living in this family. And maybe babies like Mangojoy. I like MJ. If they have babies, I know how to make them laugh. I’ll take care of the babies and the family will like me and I’ll tell them about Mangojoy and how AJ and I look after him heaps, coz his mum’s not well, and then maybe they’ll take me home, coz they’ll understand how important it is to everyone that I stay and work on the farm.

Ma points to a huge shiny wood door in front of me. ‘Go in that room. Go to the table in there and collect all the plates, whether they’re dirty, clean or still got food on ’em, and put them on the tray and carry the tray back down to Ivy. Do you think you can do that without breaking any?’

‘Cha! I carry packing trays all the time,’ I remind her, and somehow I’ve agreed to work with her without even saying so. But I guess I gotta play along till I can get home to Gramps.

She nods and pushes the handle on the door so it glides open and then she heads off up the hall leaving me to it.

I push the door open a little more and peer in. It’s a huge room. A whole family must live in here coz there’s a bed and a couch and a table set up under the window. There’s also a TV and some kind of games, lying on the floor. I tiptoe around the games to the table and put the tray down on the chair. I can’t believe that there’s a biscuit with a bit of jam left on the table with just one bite out of it and also half a glass of some yellowish water. I sniff it. Apples! It’s apple juice! I look back at the door, pick up the glass and drink it all. So sweet. So fruity. I wish I could tell Applejoy about this. About me actually tasting apple juice like a super-cherry Urb! I shove the biscuit into my mouth too. Apricot jam, just like Gramps’s apricot slices but sweeter, and more bitter too, coz apricot is our special treat, and here, even when it’s been made into sweet jam, someone just bites an apricot biscuit and dumps it like it’s not a special thing at all. I empty all the plates off the table onto the tray, heft it up and carry it carefully back across the room, chewing my apricot jam as long as I can, so I can keep the taste of home on my tongue.

I get back out the door to the top of the stairs and move the tray out of the way so I can see my clumsy shoes on the steps. If I had bare feet, I’d be able to feel the edge of the steps. This is stupid. If I can run along branches in bare feet and not fall, then I can get this tray down the stairs in bare feet a lot safer. I kick my shoes off, leave them lying at the top of the stairs, and carry the tray to the bottom, feeling the way in my new white socks, with blood already leaked into the fabric from my stubbed toes.

At the bottom of the stairs I put the tray on the floor and run back up to grab my shoes. But when I get four steps from the top, a girl about my age is standing over them with her hands on her hips.