I met Kristian on a Monday. I know it was Monday because I was wearing my favourite green skirt, and mum washed colours on Sundays, so Monday was my first chance to wear my skirt again. I would never take it off if it wasn’t for her declaring it filthy after just one day and making me put it into the dirty clothes basket. I would beg her to wash it earlier so I could wear it again, but she always said that Sunday was washing day and that was that. She liked Sundays.

The skirt had been given to me by my grandmother, who was quite given to wearing skirts like it herself. It was made with two layers, a floaty top layer and a heavier bottom layer, so that your underwear wasn’t showing underneath the see-through fabric on the top. It was made from three different tiers with a small frill at each join, which made it good for twirling, although I only did that alone in my room when I first put the skirt on. The waistband at the top was wide and elastic and decorated with flowers and butterflies and sequins.

On Mondays dad worked from home instead of going into his office. So instead of staying at my kindergarten’s afternoon care until 5.30pm when mum picked me up on her way home from work, dad picked me up at 3pm, dressed in his weekend clothes - a faded tshirt and shorts. He never shaved on weekends so by this time his face was bristling with dark hairs. He liked Mondays.

Dad never spoke to the other parents the way mum did. He told me to wait for him just behind the doors of the kindergarten and watch for his car. He always beeped the horn when he pulled up outside, and one of the aides would walk me out to the car. They always seemed a little annoyed by this, as all the other parents came inside and collected their children themselves, but my mother had instructed them that dad was in a hurry to get home and back to work and didn’t have time to come inside.

On this Monday, dad was late, as he was sometimes. I stood by the big glass doors watching the road, feeling more and more anxious as the aide waiting with me got more and more impatient. Other kids came to ask her for help with their paintings or to complain that so-and-so had pushed them over in the sandpit. A tall boy named James, with a mean mouth and meaner eyes, walked over and demanded that she helped him find his favourite and best marble, which he had lost somewhere in the playground and which he must find before his mum came to take him home.

“I’m sorry James,” she said. “But I have to wait here with Audrey until her dad comes. Go and see Miss Anderson.” Of course, Miss Anderson was busy with something else and both James and the aide knew that, and James wrinkled his face at me and stomped off. The aide thought it unfair that I was wasting so much of her time when there were thirty other children to take care of. She would never say so, of course, but I could see it all in the glances at the big wall clock, the tapping of her feet and clicking of her tongue.

“Are you sure you’re not in afternoon care today, Audrey?” she asked as the big hand of the clock stretched towards the 5. I shook my head and hugged my backpack close to my chest, staring out at the road and imagining with all my might the sight of my dad’s car coming around the corner, thinking that if I tried hard enough, it would be real.

He did arrive, at 3.30. I pushed the door open and tripped over my own feet, I was in such a hurry to get to the car. The aide grabbed my arm from behind and stopped my fall, although she too was walking fast and lightly pushing me towards the car.

“There you go Audrey, see you tomorrow then.”

As she opened the door, my dad leaned towards her and apologised for being late. “I had to make a call to Tokyo, it went on a little longer than I expected.” She gave a curt nod and shut the door once I was settled into the seat, and strode back towards the kindergarten and the fights, spilled paint, picture books and bruises-from-falling-off-the-monkey-bars waiting for her inside.

Dad never apologised to me of course. He just took off fast and swore a lot when he got stuck at lights or behind cars that were going too slow, and only when we were on our street did he ask me if I had a nice day. I said “yes,” and didn’t elaborate. He didn’t ask me to.

When we got home dad immediately went into his study and picked up the phone, and I went into the backyard. I had no real reason to do so, but I knew that dad preferred if I wasn’t in the house while he was working. My presence, no matter how quiet I was, distracted him. So I opened the back door and crossed the verandah, feeling the sleekness of the oiled wood caressing the bottom of my feet in a tickly, itchy, but very pleasant kind of way. I navigated the stairs carefully, my mother’s warning to never, ever run down them echoing sternly in the back of my mind. Once on the grass, however, I burst into a sprint, rewarding myself for being good and not giving in to the temptation to skip down the stairs at an exhilaratingly dangerous speed. I came to a stop in front of the jacaranda tree, purple flowers just beginning to colour the tips of the branches high above. My mother liked her roses and dad liked the citrus trees, but out of all the plants in our garden I liked the jacaranda best. In November, or October if it was warm enough, all of the green leaves fell off and were replaced by a violent explosion of millions of purple flowers. For two or three months these flowers grew and fell, making a bright carpet on the ground around the base of the tree, romantically surrounding mum’s antique white iron bench positioned under the shade. The purple especially pleased me on Mondays, when it contrasted starkly against my green skirt. I could sit for hours on the grass beneath the tree, artfully arranging the fallen flowers across my lap and fancying myself to be a nature goddess, or a fairy, though the game of pretending to be fairies was monopolised by the prettier and lither girls at my kindergarten: the girls who took ballet classes and therefore had some experience in being fairies already, with pink tutus and diaphanous wings.

Sometimes I climbed up into the branches of the tree, though my parents told me not to. It was an easy climb with several pockets made out of the branches, where I could comfortably sit and rest my back against the trunk. I’d been caught before and I didn’t like to get into trouble, but I knew that dad wouldn’t look outside this afternoon and my mother wasn’t due home for another two hours, and besides I was still upset at dad for being so late to pick me up. So once I reached the tree I immediately stepped up onto the first foothold created by a knot in the wood near the base, and pulled myself upwards by grabbing onto the branch just above my head. I reached my first seating place and decided I wanted to go higher, so I went up two more branches to the next spot. Here I nestled myself into a wedge created by two intersecting branches, and peered at the grass which now seemed kilometres below me. I felt a dizzying rush and sat back to look out over the fence instead.

The house next door was very similar to ours: a modern, plaster-coated affair in pastel colours, like a well-iced birthday cake. Both houses were double story, though ours had the verandah stretching across the width of our top floor, and the next door house didn’t. Instead, they had a large tiled patio on the ground under beige coloured sailcloths. The backyard was mostly lawn, bordered with a few hedgelike shrubs and bark-covered garden beds. They had no jacaranda trees: no trees at all.
From the time I was born, an elderly couple named Lucas had lived in that house. Mrs Lucas used to share recipes with my mother and prune the bushes in their front yard, but Mr Lucas mostly stayed indoors. He was ill, my parents said, with cancer. It dragged on for years, but Mr Lucas finally died two months ago, and Mrs Lucas sold the house and went to live with one of her children. The house sat empty for that time, and I entertained the idea of my parents buying it and letting me live in it, alone, though I would still want to come over to see the jacaranda, or plant one of my own. But before long the bright red SOLD sticker adorned the front of the Maxx Real Estate Agency’s sign planted in the front yard (Maxx Value, Maxx Expertise, Maxx Real Estate!), and just yesterday a removal truck pulled up the driveway. I opened our front door and watched the yellow-shirted men go back and forth between the truck and the house, grunting as they lifted heavy pieces of furniture, joking and saying ‘mate’ a lot, and occasionally stopping to light a cigarette and lean against the side of the truck. My mother caught me, though, and told me off for being nosy, and then took me to see my grandmother while she went off to do grocery shopping and have her hair cut. By the time she brought me home the truck was gone and the house was silent, though a maroon coloured sedan was now parked in the driveway.

Mr and Mrs Lucas rarely went into their backyard when they lived in the house, so I was surprised to now see the back door of the house open and a figure step out onto the porch. I was even more surprised to see that the figure was a boy, my age or thereabouts, and that he was carrying a ball, and a small white dog was bounding out behind him.

The boy had dark hair and skin like the very milky tea my mother sometimes let me drink. He was wearing a uniform of dark blue shorts which looked too large for him, and a button up shirt, white and pinstriped with the same dark blue of his shorts. I recognised it as the school uniform of Montclair College, where most of the children on the street went, and where I myself would be starting school next year. So he must be older than me, I thought, but not by much. Were we standing side by side, I doubted he would be more than a few centimetres taller than me.

“Arnie,” the boy called as he strode across his lawn, and the little dog happily followed. I was instantly jealous. I had always wanted a pet, but my mother wouldn’t let me, not until I was older, old enough to take on the responsibility by myself. Every birthday I had hoped that this mysterious, unexplained age in my mother’s mind had now arrived, but so far it had not. I was counting on six, my next birthday age, to be the magic number.

I watched the boy for a while, as he threw the ball to the dog, who dribbled and pelted after it with his tiny legs dancing over the grass and his tongue trailing behind along the side of its face. The boy chattered away to the dog, laughing, encouraging him as he raced into gardens and trampled through bushes to find the ball when it fell into the garden. After a while the boy seemed to get tired and started throwing the ball up vertically instead of horizontally across the yard, and the dog waited underneath, watching the ball go up and then down, his tail trembling in anticipation until it finally came close enough for him to leap into the air and catch it in his mouth.

At one point the boy threw the ball high, and in the direction of the fence, and lifted his head quickly to make sure that it wasn’t going to veer out of his yard and into ours. This meant that he looked up, and across, directly into the jacaranda tree and directly at me. His eyes stopped on my face and I was looking directly at him. Immediately, I felt hot all over, terrified at having been seen, at having been caught watching him so intently. He continued to stare, not watching the ball now, which came down on his side but bounced against the fence, ricocheting past the waiting dog who immediately chased after it. Then the boy suddenly broke our eye contact and scurried away under the sailcloth.

My embarrassment and fear were so acute that I felt ill, and I quickly turned around and grabbed the trunk of the tree, preparing to climb down and run inside to hide out in my room. But just as I stepped down onto the branch below me, I heard a thump and a scrape, and couldn’t stop myself from looking over my shoulder. The boy had dragged a chair over to the fence and climbed on top of it so that he was looking over the top of the fence. Once again he was looking directly at me, and me directly at him. He smiled.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

I was frozen, stuck standing on the branch and not wanting to keep moving down while he was watching me, and not knowing what to think, and not knowing what to say because other children never spoke to me, never smiled at me, because the same kids had been there from our days at child care and now at kindergarten, and they’d all given up on me a long time ago.

He was waiting, his eyebrows lifted questioningly, dark brown eyes not moving from my face.

“Audrey,” I said, croakily, my throat tight with anxiety.

“Oh,” he said, and I didn’t know what he meant by that. Was he disappointed somehow? He paused for a second and then went on. “My name’s Kristian. My dog’s name is Arnie, because Terminator is my favourite movie. Do you like that movie?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded anyway.

“Do you go to school?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said “I do. I’m in grade one. I’m six. How old are you? You don’t look as old as me.”

“I’m almost six too,” I said, feeling defensive. Almost, of course, meant ten months away, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Do you want to come and play with Arnie?” he asked.

Oh, I did, so very much. I wanted nothing more in the whole world. But I was still scared. I didn’t really know what to say to Kristian, how to act; I certainly was no good at throwing a ball, and I was even a little frightened of Arnie, despite his size and the fact that I had always wanted a dog of my own.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I’d have to ask my dad, and he’s busy.”

“Go ask,” he urged. “He won’t mind.”

I didn’t bother to question them how he knew this, when he didn’t know my dad at all. Suddenly I was too overcome by a rush of desire, to go and examine that backyard and the birthday-cake house, to see how similar it was to mine, to see exactly where they’d put that furniture I’d watched being carried out from the removal truck (I felt guilty all of a sudden remembering this; I felt like I knew far more about Kristian than he did about me, and it felt like the time I’d accidentally walked in to the bathroom while my dad was in the shower), to play with that little white dog and touch him to see just how soft his fur was, and most of all, to experience what it might be like to have a friend. Without a word I climbed down the rest of the branches, jumped from the last one onto the grass, and ran towards the house and up the stairs (and I was right, it was exhilarating, it felt like flying for a second, though I was out of breath by the time I reached the top and I almost stumbled over the last step) and into the back door.