Rain May and Captain Daniel by Catherine Bateson

want to go doing too much,’ I said. ‘Not like I was when we lived in the city.’
    I enjoyed Scouts, though. Okay, the uniform was daggy and I wasn’t too keen on the flag-raising stuff, but the activities were great and there were four other girls — three of whom I didn’t know and Becky.
    â€˜You should come along,’ I said to Daniel, ‘you really should. Some of the stuff we do, you’d love. Honest.’
    â€˜I don’t want to,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m not into those really physical things.’
    â€˜It’s not like that. I mean, there’s some stuff that is, but you wouldn’t have to do it if you didn’t want to, I’m sure. Are you all right? You don’t want to do anything these days.’
    That wasn’t quite true. Daniel and I had gone with Maggie to choose a puppy. Mum’s yoga friend’s bitch had pups and we saw them when they were only one week old. We’d chosen a little sandy-coloured girl with a white star on her chest. We weren’t going to get her until she was eight weeks old. Daniel had been impressed with the pups and had started an active dog campaign on the Counsellor who showed some vague signs of weakening.
    But the best thing Daniel and I did together was go platypus sighting. We went every afternoon for a week before we saw one. We never would have seen one if it hadn’t been for Daniel’s dad who got word from a patient that a platypus burrow had been found on his land, down near the river. Old Mr Beatty gave Daniel and his dad special permission to trespass on his land. Daniel was a favourite with his father’s patients, particularly the ones who played chess. It beats me why kids who are liked by adults are always the ones not liked at school. Anyway, Daniel, his dad and I went down to the river, all wrapped up in woolly jackets, hats and scarves because even though the weather was getting warmer the evenings were still cold. We sat on the bank of the river, near where the burrow was, and waited. Daniel’s dad had bought a thermos of hot chocolate and we shared that really quietly. You couldn’t talk, of course — or only in the quietest of whispers — and we tried not to even wriggle. Daniel was really good at being quiet. I kept finding bits of me that itched — my nose would start, and I’d have to scratch it. Then an old mosquito bite would start irritating my knee or my toes would get itchy and I’d long to take off my boots and wriggle them.
    We didn’t see anything except water rats. I liked the water rats. They swam really well and didn’t look rat-like at all, more like little otters from the zoo. They had white tips on their tails and that’s what you looked for to make sure that they weren’t platypuses, that and their little ears, close to the head but ears nonetheless, whereas you can’t see a platypus’s ears. Once you saw them on a bank or a log you could easily tell they were rats by the way they loped along, just like otters.
    While they were in the water, though, they swam around just like a platypus. You’d be sitting, me trying not to scratch, and suddenly you’d see a moving arrow of water, mostly quite near the bank. You’d hold your breath, waiting, and then the tail would appear with that little white tip and we’d all breathe out at once and pass the thermos around again.
    Then, on the fifth afternoon, when I think even Daniel’s dad was getting a little impatient, we definitely saw a platypus. It came right under where we were. We’d changed where we sat, gone downstream a bit to a kind of fishing platform that old Mr Beatty had built on the river bank. And there was the arrow of water from where we had been sitting and it moved along the river bank while we held our breaths. The platform we were standing on was right near some bullrushes and we watched the ripples and bubbles and then it came