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  Today, she would be meeting someone she hoped could hook her up to a bigger supplier. Jelly. Jelly owed her. Or at least he thought he did.

  Jelly was a regular on the Fairfield street scene. An easy target, he was rolled regularly for his cigarettes, phone, and any money he had. Jill's best guess was that Jelly was aged around twenty-five, with the IQ of an eight-year-old. She was guessing some sort of hormonal abnormality accounted for his problems: Jelly seemed to be pumping too much oestrogen. Jill knew she could never hope to have breasts as impressive as Jelly's; the skin of his face was smooth and hairless, and when he spoke he sounded a lot more like a girl than most of the chicks he shared the streets with. As far as she could tell, Jelly didn't seem to have sexual proclivities that leaned either way. When left to his own devices, he was more than happy to swap dumb jokes, shoplift lollies – or any other food he could get his hands on – and attempt to skateboard. At six foot, and a hundred and twenty kilos, he looked pretty stupid on a skateboard, but Jelly didn't seem to realise that, no matter how often the kids at the skate park told him.

  Even without the contacts he had, Jill would have kept an eye out for Jelly; he might as well have had a big red target painted on his rounded back. So, when she'd found him curled up in the railway carpark being battered by four youths obviously not from around the area, she'd jumped in. Actually, it had been kind of fun. She hadn't had a chance to practise her kickboxing for real for a long time, and discovering that she had lost none of the power from her roundhouse kick was gratifying. The melee had ended disappointingly quickly. The youths were evidently weekend warriors, fearless only when their prey couldn't fight back.

  But Jill knew that Jelly had another guardian angel. Kasem Nader. The only reason Jelly hadn't long ago been kicked to death for sport was that most people around here knew that Kasem Nader would come find them if they hurt Jelly too badly. Nader had had a long association with Merrylands police, dating back to his primary school years. Since then, he and his brothers had collected an impressive criminal portfolio, from stick-ups and standovers to weapons charges and abduction. Jill had heard that the boys now had an impressive meth lab up and running and were looking to expand their operations.

  She had met Jelly for the first time one morning in Ingrid's kitchen, where he was trying to bake cupcakes. Ingrid told her that although he lived in a neighbouring unit block, he was in her flat more often than his own. Jill had peered into his mixing bowl before he poured the ingredients into some patty cases Ingrid had found for him at the back of a cupboard.

  'Ah, what's in this?' Jill had asked, sniffing carefully.

  Ingrid pushed her way between Jill and Jelly and leaned over the bowl with them. 'Fuck knows,' she said. 'You wouldn't eat any of that shit, anyway, Krystal. I just let him go for it. What'd'ya put in there, Jelly?'

  Jelly showed them. Some of his special ingredients had come from the cupboard under the sink.

  Twenty minutes later, with Jelly's batter grey-green and hissing in the drain, 'Krystal', Jelly and Ingrid had taken a hot batch of buttery cupcakes around to Mrs Dang's, and Jelly had been a loyal fan of Jill's ever since.

  It was Ingrid who told Jill about the Kasem Nader connection. According to her, Jelly and his younger brother, Corey, had been sent to separate foster homes when their mother wouldn't quit whoring from her bedroom while the boys watched cartoons in the next room. Corey had grown up in Merrylands near the Nader brothers while Jelly had moved from home to home and ended up in the Fairfield area. Corey had been fatally stabbed in a brawl with some skinheads from Cronulla. Ingrid told Jill that Corey took a knife through the spleen when he jumped in to prevent Kasem being stomped to death.

  Kasem had made a monthly trip out to Fairfield ever since.

  And today, Jelly was due a visit.

  17

  Friday 5 April, 11 am

  By eleven am Seren knew one thing for sure: she could not do this job for a second day. Not even to stay out of that hellhole in Silverwater. But with these thoughts, images of Marco swam through her tears and the pink-tinged water raining down continuously from the pipes overhead. Marco. Her son. Completely alone without her. What she'd sworn to him when holding his brand new body on her naked chest, she'd already betrayed: I'll never leave you. I will always protect you.

  Seren swallowed the bile in her throat and reached out to grab a screaming chicken from the yellow crate at her side. Its warm body pressed into her palms and she felt its heart hammering wildly. Scrabbling with her gloved hand for one of its feet, she hung it upside down as she'd been shown at six o'clock this morning by her supervisor, and clasped each foot into the metal restraints; belly forwards, facing her. The terrified creature flapped its malformed wings, stunted by being raised in a box so small it had never been able to stretch; it swung its head wildly and its shining eyes met her own.

  They begged.

  I'm sorry, she told the bird, and snapped its neck with the piece of equipment designed by someone, somewhere, just for this job.

  The dying bird's shit joined her vomit in the sink below the carcass. Seren pushed the button, and the conveyor belt took the body away.

  Ten workers today. Fifty thousand chickens to be killed between them. I can't do this, she thought.

  And then she remembered Marco being dragged from her by the DoCS worker, when the officer took her from the courtroom to the cells below.

  She reached for another chicken.

  Seren sat staring at the lunchroom table. Men and women around her laughed, bitched and ate sandwiches provided by their employers.

  Seren didn't think she'd ever eat again.

  'You'll get used to it, love.' The middle-aged man from the conveyor belt next to her offered her a Coke. 'Take it. It'll help settle your stomach.'

  'How can I get out of that section?' she asked him.

  He laughed. 'Not easy. You gotta be here a year at least to get into the packing section.'

  'There has to be something else.' She turned her head to meet his eyes.

  'There is. And it's worse. Believe me. I lasted a couple of weeks and begged 'em to put me back here,' he said. 'You're just lucky they put you on the line in the first place. You could have got sent straight to gutting.'

  Yeah, that's me, Seren thought. Just lucky. Feeling faint, she lowered her head into her hands and tuned out the clamour around her.

  For the first three months she was locked up, Seren had done little but cry. She cried for herself, alone in the world since fifteen, when her mother had died of breast cancer in Liverpool Hospital. She cried for her mother, who'd lost all of her light when Seren's father had been killed, falling though a ceiling on a building site. She cried for her brother, Bradley, removed from their home by authorities; her stepfather charged for the 'greenstick injury' to his leg. Seren had always remembered that term and looked it up when she was twelve: she learned that children's bones are so new, so supple, that they do not snap like an adult's. Instead they bend when twisted, as a young tree branch might do. A greenstick injury. Seren had not seen Bradley since – fostered out for life, to give him the best chance.

  Seren cried mostly for the little boy she'd had at fifteen. Marco, born two weeks after the state buried her mother. Alone. Out there, without her.

  After three months crying, Seren had had enough. Enough of authority. They'd been involved in her life for as long as she could remember and where had it got her? Here. They owned her. She spent a month or so in and out of segregation, isolated from the other women for swearing at officers, being late for muster, refusing to complete the assigned tasks. All it took was cancellation of her visitor's rights for a month, though, and she had abandoned her rebellion instantly.

  The fight left her, but not the rage. It boiled behind her eyes and seared a red-tinged image onto her retina.

  The image of the love of her life.

  The man she would make pay.

  In the slaughterhouse lunchroom, holding her head in her hands, Seren Te
mpleton worked through her strategy; honed her plans. She sent her thoughts out into the street, hunting him. The man she would make pay.

  Christian Worthington.

  At least the job finished in time to allow her to be there when Marco arrived home from school. At ten past three that afternoon she ducked her head out of the bus shelter and searched the road for sign of his bus approaching. The rain hung over the street ahead and she could see nothing but the cars immediately in front of her.

  God, I wish we had a car, she thought. Safe inside a vehicle, there were fewer opportunities to be harassed. One day we'll have a car, Marco, she promised him silently.

  Second day in his new school. She hoped it was better than the first.

  The bus steamed to a stop in front of her.

  'Hi baby. How'd it go?' she asked as he alighted, his secondhand school shorts bagging around his waist.

  'Don't call me baby.'

  'Oops, sorry,' she said. 'You're still my baby, though,' she whispered, bending to help him with his backpack. Two or three drops of rain spattered onto the lenses of his glasses.

  Seren tried to hold the umbrella over Marco as they made their way back to the unit block, but he was always a step out of reach. The rain had decreased to a cheerless drizzle, so she folded up the umbrella and hurried a little to catch him up.

  'Bad day?' she asked.

  'Not really,' he said.

  She kept her eyes on him, hardly heeding where she walked. She was hungry for the sight of him; she had missed him so much today. She watched his knobbly knees as he strode through muddy puddles. They cut through an ill-tended carpark, its concrete being reclaimed by the earth, fascinated by his dark hair slicked to his face like a helmet, his upturned nose.

  'I think I made a friend,' he said to the ground.

  Warmth filled her chest. Love and pain. Did they always go together?

  'Yeah?' she said. 'What's his name?'

  'Jake.'

  'What's he like?'

  'I dunno. A kid?' he said.

  'He sounds fascinating,' she said. She thought she saw a smile.

  They reached the group of buildings of their unit block and Seren tugged open the door that led to their stairwell and lifts. She waited for Marco to press the cracked button of the elevator. He always loved to press the buttons.

  The lift smelled like piss and one wall proclaimed that Jonno gave good head.

  'Get any homework?' she asked.

  'Maths. I did it in class. I did all the stuff they're up to last year.'

  'That's good. You'll know it twice as well. I'll have a look when we get upstairs,' she said.

  When the lift bumped open at the sixth floor they got out and walked the short distance to their unit. As Seren unlocked the door she heard a shout.

  'HEY, SARAH! Over here!'

  Great. Tready. Shirtless, standing in his doorway down the hall, waving at them, beer in hand.

  'Come over and have a drink!'

  One of the neighbours did not appreciate Tready's yelling, asked him to keep it down: 'Shut up, you fucken drunk cunt!'

  Seren bustled Marco through the doorway. 'So, you want a snack before dinner?' she asked him.

  'That'd be great, Sarah,' Marco said, grinning up at her.

  18

  Friday 5 April, 11 am

  At eleven am Cassie Jackson uncurled and stretched languidly in her king-sized bed.

  That's the problem with having this mattress, she complained to herself. You just sleep too damn well on it. Shopping for a new bed for this larger apartment last year, she had remembered her mum's advice – don't pay a fortune for the bed frame, spend as much as you can afford on the mattress. When the salesgirl at David Jones had told her that this was the mattress she would buy if she won Lotto, Cassie had been interested. She always liked to have the best.

  And then she'd seen the price tag.

  'Eleven thousand dollars!' she'd exclaimed. 'Just for the mattress?'

  'Try it,' the salesgirl recommended.

  The new bed was delivered that same week, along with a couple of sets of one-thousand thread-count sheets, new latex pillows and the most deluxe doona the store could find her.

  Now, nestled naked in the parchment-coloured fabric, Cassie bemoaned another broken pledge to get up at seven, eat a healthy breakfast and take a walk down to the beach.

  She finally rose and shrugged into a slinky jersey dressing gown. She walked past the cigarettes on her dressing table – your body is your temple, she told herself – and stepped out onto her balcony.

  From the nineteenth floor, even a drizzly Bondi Junction was delicious. She loved her view – a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree panorama between the Harbour Bridge and the lighthouse at Watson's Bay. After dark, Cassie's favourite time, the spectacle could bring a halt to any conversation.

  She moved back inside and made her way to the kitchen, where two avocados on her benchtop accused her of being wasteful. Her mum had bought them for her, already ripe, three days ago now, telling her to eat them immediately. She had just been released from the hospital and had been determined to do as her mum suggested.

  They sat there.

  'You're fattening,' she told them. Her mum had told her repeatedly that avocados contained 'healthy fats'. No such thing in Cassie's book.

  She opened the fridge. A package of prawns, purchased yesterday. Pure protein, no fat: her favourite lunch. But she felt like breakfast. An egg-white omelette? Revolting. She grimaced.

  If she popped down to a café she could order something 'organic and healthy': read – low calorie. But this would be just the time that she would run into Tasha and the gang, and they'd want to know what she was doing tonight. This was the first weekend since the horror of the hospital and she was determined to make it through without drugs.

  Cassie opened the freezer and found a package of frozen mixed berries. 'Yum, thank you, Sara Lee,' she said to her empty kitchen.

  She rained the berries into her blender, whizzed them with some milk – skim – and yoghurt – fat free. Carrying her liquid breakfast in a tall glass, she gathered up a soft, toffee-coloured throw rug and went back out to the balcony, feeling positively virtuous. Curled up in the cushions on her day-lounge, feeling part of the heavens, she took a sip of her drink. Not bad, she thought. Although a splash of vodka instead of the yoghurt could have improved things.

  Bad girl, she thought, grinning into her glass.

  When she'd finished her breakfast, she considered the day before her. Next stop, the gym. Cassie knew that she really was one of those bitches who didn't have to work out. While she did use food deprivation to control her dress-size, a few really well placed curves remained without her having to do anything at all.

  Nevertheless, her mate Bryce and his boyfriend, Nahid, former big-time party boys, had told her that they'd quit drugs using yoga and the gym. God knew, if they could do it, she could too. Bryce had been an absolute coke pig.

  She slipped into footless leggings and a vintage Rolling Stones tee-shirt, threw gym shoes into her tote bag, and stepped into luscious heels – she hadn't worn sneakers out in the street since she was fourteen. She grabbed her leather jacket from the chair and her keys from the table in the entrance hall. Then stopped.