'I told you he was a pervert,' the girl in the tree elaborated, picking up the binoculars again from where they hung around her neck. Her voice was matter of fact.

'What's he doing?' Jenna squirmed with frustration. She felt an ant crawling on her leg and squashed it absently with her thumb.

'He's pulling it out of his jeans ... he's pulling back the skin bit on the end.'

'You're making it up! ' Jenna's voice was squeaky - hot colour stamped her cheeks. Half of her wanted to be up there: the other half wanted to run away.

Louise just smiled. The purpling on her leg was visible as she wriggled to find a more comfortable position. She told Jenna it had happened when she was wrestling with her stepfather. The imprint of his fingers were still there in the bruise - if you looked carefully.

'You're jealous because I can see him and you can't,' Louise said correctly. 'If you weren't so chickenshit, you could have climbed up.'

'I'm scared of being high,' Jenna's voice regressed miserably to a seven year old whine. It was useless at this point pretending she didn't care. They both knew Louise held all the power. She would filter selective information down through the plum tree leaves. Jenna, as usual, would have to wait.

The younger girl thought about how Louise had once made her puff on a cigarette; not caring that Jenna's eyes were streaming, that she was coughing until she couldn't breathe. She thought about Louise laughing and showing her the proper way to drag and exhale, making impressive shapes in the air as she moved her lips beneath the whiteness.

She thought about Louise teaching her the touching game - down near the creek...Jenna trembling with the pleasure of her stroking fingers; Louise watching her with a mild amusement.

Even when they were not together, Jenna felt an invisible string between her and Louise. Sometimes at night when she tossed and turned in bed, she thought it was Louise tugging her end of the string from the house next door, that made Jenna's limbs so restless.

Apart from the string, and the times they spent together, their lives were nothing alike.

Louise's mother wore mini skirts and leather chokers around her neck. She had a tattoo of a frog on her left shoulder and worked nights as a barmaid. She bought frozen dinners that came in a foil container and you could heat them in the oven and have the peas and carrots in separate compartments.

Jenna's mother didn't go out to work and wore dresses below her knees and always had a bra on. Jenna's mother made pickles in winter, the smell of warm onions and mustard filling the kitchen, and plum jam in summer; huge blue blowflies circling like small planets orbiting around the larger planet of the saucepan. She covered the lids of the bottles with bright circles of material and a rubber band.

Louise's stepfather bought fish and chips or pizza most nights, and he and Louise watched 'mature audience only' videos together.

Jenna's father rarely bought fish and chips and then made a big deal about it, as if it was a treat on par with going to Disneyland. He supervised the programs Jenna watched on television and fell asleep in his armchair at seven thirty every night after the news.

Jenna often catalogued these differences between the two families, but did not try to draw a conclusion from them. They were lists that comforted her, as if she had recorded these details, and therefore had control of them.

The boy Louise was watching from the tree was 'Dumb Leroy' from number 26. He was eighteen and intellectually handicapped. Jenna's mother said they should feel sorry for him.

He was muscular and grown up looking until you got close and saw the silly grin on his face. He wore check shirts and jeans held up so tightly by his braces that they separated his balls.

Most days he walked down their road with no particular destination in mind, rolling a cotton wool bud around inside his nose and pulling it out every few houses along the way to inspect the snot.

He also liked to wank in a clearing in the bush, Louise told henna three days ago. She had heard her stepfather tell her mother he had seen Leroy doing it as he went past in the timber truck he drove for a living.

Jenna wasn't sure what wanking was - but she was sure she wouldn't take Louise's stepfather's word for anything. She didn't like him, having been woken many nights by the sounds of fighting coming from their house - a man yelling the 'f' word and worse things - and the screech of a woman's voice; then sounds of slapping, like pieces of wood tossed on a wood pile. Most days Louise came to school with dark circles under her eyes.

When Jenna mentioned the fights at dinnertime, her mother's lips closed and puckered as if someone had suddenly sewn them up with a needle and thread. Then she said they were those sort of people and when was Jenna going to get some other friends because Louise was far too old for her years.

Jenna had seen that expression before - the Sunday afternoon her father leaned over the side fence, looking years younger than himself - talking and laughing with Louise's mother, who was wearing a bikini and washing her car in the driveway. Jenna and her mother had been in the kitchen that day, her mother at the window with that mouth - her hands in pink rubber gloves in washing up water; scrubbing at a saucepan as if she was trying to rub the bottom out of it.

Now, as if to verify her stepfather's story; Louise had been up the tree on the lookout for Leroy...and it seemed she had found him.

'It's getting bigger,' she spoke under the binoculars; 'he's pulling it.' Her voice was matter of fact. Louise never got excited, or lost her cool. Jenna had never seen her cry. Sometimes she thought the other girl didn't live in her own life at all but watched it like video she wasn't much interested in.

'Now stuffs squirting out the end' there was a sort of snorting-bubbling sound in the back of Louise's throat that sounded like a frog drowning in honey...'what a retard.' Louise turned her head away dismissively. She began climbing down the tree.

Jenna knew the next part and how she must play it. She slipped into step beside Louise as they walked back up the bush track. There would be no discussion about what had happened unless Louise wanted to talk about it. Jenna felt questions imploding in her chest like stars in far off galaxies no one would ever acknowledge.

The salmon gums laced over the track, shedding bark like pieces of sunburnt skin.

Cicadas gathered their maddening clicks into a net over the heat. Jenna watched nervously for snakes. Louise's thongs slapped as she walked.

'I've held a man's dick,' Louise said. 'It's not as slippery as you think.'

Jenna, who hadn't thought about it at all, knew the comment still wasn't permission to speak - the tone wasn't quite right.

Louise picked up a rock and threw it into the undergrowth. The sound seemed to echo after the first impact - collapsing the bark beneath; snap, crack.

Jenna squinted into the distance where the dirt track came out onto their road. It was one o'clock by her watch. Her mother would have lunch waiting; a ham and chutney sandwich, cut on the diagonal into neat quarters and covered with clingwrap to keep it fresh. Her mother would tell her to eat her crusts and then ask did she want an apple or a pear afterwards, never oranges, since there was an article in the Woman's Weekly about the acid from oranges contributing to tooth decay.

'Wanna go down the creek after lunch and get tadpoles?' Louise had asked it like a question - this was Jenna's cue. She took a few more seconds to rehearse the words she would say; the casual tone, the indifferent pause showing she didn't care one way or the other.

'... yeah ... cool,' she said.