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“Steven,” I say.

“How about Richard Steven?”

“Richard Steven Fuller,” I agree.

But Dad looks worried, almost cross. “Shhh.” He frowns at the manager’s wife.

She takes us out of the room. She looks worried and cross, too. It isn’t the look most people have when a new baby has just been born. She says, “Would you girls like some Milo?”

“No, thanks.”

But she makes us wait in the long, dark corridor (in which there are photos of her and her son and her husband standing next to various shiny, fat cows and woolly sheep).

“You wait here.”

Her dogs—a German shepherd and a Chihuahua—follow her into the kitchen. Vanessa and I don’t look at each other, we look at the photos of the ranch managers and all their prize animals. The door to the dining room is shut. I can’t hear Dad’s voice. I try putting my ear to the door.

Vanessa says, “Don’t.”

“I want to hear.”

“Look at these photos.” She points to a photo of the wife standing next to a ram.

“They don’t take very good care of their sheep now,” I say. The ranch sheep live in a pen near our house and they’re always dying of starvation and malnutrition when they’re not crippled with foot-rot. Dad won’t let me rescue them. He says, “It’s not your problem.”

“Look at those balls,” says Vanessa, pointing to the swinging hammock of the ram’s testicles.

Which makes me snort.

“Shhh.”

The wife brings us two cups of cold milk in which floats a crunchy layer of undissolved chocolate granules. She shows us the sitting room and points to the sofa. “You sit there.” She has enormous bosoms, which seem to have a life independent of her own. They are like two great, pointy globes sailing across the room at us, armored in a tight 1950s cotton farm dress. She sits opposite us in an armchair, watching us, her strong rancher’ s-wife hands on her knees. The ranch manager is sipping a brandy and Coke. He doesn’t say anything, either. I hate both these people. I think, Leopard killers.

When Dad comes out of the dining room he looks tired, as if he’s been up all night, and his face is red. If I thought my dad cried I would have said he had been crying.

The manager says, “Brandy?” But the drink is offered medicinally, not in the form of celebration.

The Milo is making me feel sick.

Dad says, “Okay. Thanks.”

The manager goes to the drinks trolley and pours Dad a brandy.

“If you need help with the girls . . .” says the wife. “I mean, while you . . .”

Dad shakes his head. “We’ve got a hitchhiker staying. An Australian girl.”

“Oh, I wondered who that was. . . .”

“She can keep an eye on the girls.”

“Oh, that’ll be nice. Won’t that be nice?” asks the wife, turning her bosom and beaming it onto Vanessa and me. We nod miserably.

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” says the manager’s wife, her voice laced with irritation. “We must all make do and be brave, mustn’t we?”

I scowled at her and thought, What do you have to be brave about?

Dad

RICHARD

We walk home in the dark behind Dad, without a torch, following the silvery gleam of the sandy road in the moonlight. I follow the red cherry of Dad’s cigarette. I want to hold his hand, but he’s too bunched and quiet and angry.

The next morning, when we wake up, Dad has left. Charlie Chilvers says he has gone to Mutare General Hospital to see Mum.

“And bring the baby home?”

“Right,” says Charlie.

“Do you have a brother?” I ask her.

“Yes.”

“Any sisters?”

“One.”

“Like us. Hey, you’re like us?”

Charlie says, “Eat up your porridge.”

“But I’m not hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“Is everything okay with the baby?” says Vanessa.

“Hm,” says Charlie vaguely.

“There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

“Why don’t you eat up?” says Charlie.

Vanessa sighs and pushes her plate away. “It’s too hot to eat,” she says.

Vanessa and I spend two days making up a baby’s room out of the storeroom at the end of the corridor. We assemble the crib and mattress, and when we shake out the blankets they smell of Olivia. Baby smells. We take the tins of vegetables and floor polish and bottles of oil and shampoo and rolls of spare toilet paper off