Tilly sat in the front passenger seat of the 1986 Holden Commodore beside her mother, Arlene, staring wide-eyed with fear out through the windscreen as the car rocketed along the thin, gravel road.   Ducking down in her seat as grit and dust flew up at the windscreen, Tilly looked across at the speedometer and saw that it registered one hundred and ten.

“One hundred and ten Kays isn’t so bad!” she thought, knowing in her heart though that it was too fast for an unpaved dirt track.

Ducking even lower on the seat, planting her feet firmly on the floor, Tilly clutched the chrome buckle of her seat belt in both hands, wishing that it did up.   Her parents had been arguing for months about the need to have new seat belts installed.   Her father would insist that the car was too old to justify the expense, so her mother would retort, “Then trade the bloody heap in on a new car.   One with seat belts that work!”   “We can’t afford it!” Richard Dragwylla would reply, pointing out that the new house had put them into hock for the next three decades at least.

Tilly sighed deeply and looked up at the tall brunette sitting beside her.   The arguments over seat belts had been swamped by all the other arguments that her mother and father had had over the last fifteen months.   They had argued long and loud about giving up their home in West Footscray to move to the new housing estate in Green Meadows, more than ninety minutes drive from Melbourne.   “More like fifty minutes the way mum drives!” Tilly thought, crouching even lower in her seat.   They had argued about the effect that it would have on Tilly’s education, uprooting her from school a few months before the end of year exams last year; and on her private life, moving her away from all her friends.   But most importantly, they had argued about Lloyd Butterworth.

That had been why they had gone to Gran’s midway through the January term break, after her parents had had another hellish row over Butterworth.   Lloyd Butterworth had been their next-door neighbour for three years in West Footscray, and his name had come up repeatedly in the arguments that Arlene and Richard Dragwylla had had almost nonstop for nine months prior to moving to the Green Meadows estate.