Penguin Books Australia

it's true, there's something in the world called love.

esma felt it when she moved into the house with the blue stairs and the broken balcony, carlton gardens opposite so she could see all the way to the sky. there was kara beside her, behind the wall, and simon below with his room that looked out to the road, two roads actually so you had a choice as you were leaving or arriving, which way to take,

or not.

but anyway, esma at the beginning saw only one way. she'd arrived via the blue clothes peg kara had spied in her hair the day of the house interview. blue and plastic and chipped at the base, although kara couldn't see the chip because it was lost inside the thinness of esma's hair which she'd dyed black to hide her blondeness.

'i like your hairclip,' kara said, and esma, raising her hand to her back, to kara's voice, laughed. she was on her way out over concrete and past the iron spikes that made the front fence, a garden of branches in her eyes.

'i like your hairclip. you can have the room if you give me your hairclip.' and so it was, esma moved in a week later minus her hairclip. she'd posted it to kara as a kind of bond: a promise or maybe an acknowledgment of what was to come.

it was the blue peg she'd found amongst the debris of her mother's yard. she'd found it on an april day between the plastic wire and the hated geranium bush.

you had to hate that geranium bush, for it attracted all kinds of moths and bees, beasts with wings that pushed through air and landed on a coloured petal to take away all its redness or worse.

'why does it attract all those ugly things?' her mother wanted to know, and esma should have known because esma was always knowing, or thinking. or at least thinking she should be knowing, that was it.

and that was where she came to join kara, in that ambition of knowing. so that even at the beginning, esma saw kara's perfect fingers around a painted tea cup and knew there was something that joined them.

'we clean the kitchens on tuesdays,' kara said. it was the house interview. 'we keep a book for extra expenses and a tally for phone calls made.'

and esma was grateful right then because she knew she'd come to the right place, a place to learn and become.

since she was in need of becoming, and determined too. eighteen years of living had not yet made her wise or full or unscared, or beautiful of all the things she was meant to be beautiful of, and kara offered the key. kara with her dark dark hair and her tiny wrists, her labels for everything that stopped it spilling out everywhere.