Excerpt: Rascally Flats

Jeanne never knew what it meant to have a difficult life. She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, rings on her fingers, and the scent of Chanel No 5 pervading her pores. Mummy and Daddy were rich miners (or rather, only Daddy was, while Mummy spent her days lounging on her bed, drinking vintage wine and watching soaps on her 50-inch plasma television set) and they all lived happily in a large house in a fairly fancy-pants part of town. Jeanne herself went to school with the children of the rich and famous, where all they learnt in lessons were how to evade the paparazzi and to behave properly when you least expected the need to, lest grainy photos of you picking your nose ended up sprawled over the front page of a trashy magazine somewhere, and ruined your daddy’s chances of winning that next big award.

Yes, life was one smooth-sailing highway, flawlessly constructed and a breeze to traverse, especially when Jeanne did it in her Daddy’s brand new Mercedes C600 sports car at 120 kilometres per hour.