The Lost Child by Suzanne McCourt

mower from the shed and mows the front lawn even though she mowed the day before. Mrs Winkie yells at her over the click-clack of the blades: ‘You’re going to run yourself into the ground if you keep this up, Nella. You need to get a grip on yourself.’
    Mum keeps on mowing.
    Grannie Meehan has invited us to Bindilla to have Christmas with Uncle Ticker, Uncle Pat and Auntie Peggy and our cousins from the city. Only Dunc is going. Mum says Auntie Rose and Auntie Elphie are the only ones she’s got any time for and they’ve both had a falling out with the Old Girl and they’re not coming down from the city this year, so why bother?
    On Christmas morning, I get a bride doll in a box. She has yellow hair and blue eyes and lashes that flap open with a clack . She has a white net skirt with a petticoat and frilly pants and a veil held on with a white-flowered comb. Dunc has a new cricket bat. He puts his face up close to mine and says my bride doll is an a-bomb-in-a-shun, you don’t know what that means, do you?
    â€˜No one will ever marry you.’ He looks under my bride doll’s dress and pulls her veil over her face. When Uncle Ticker arrives, Dunc drops her on her head on the bed. After they’ve gone to Bindilla, Mum tells me I’ve been invited to have Christmas dinner with the Daley kids. If I want to go.
    Of course I want to go. Why didn’t she tell me before? Did she forget? But if I go, what will Mum do? She is standing at the sink and I cannot see her eyes. Should I go?
    â€˜I don’t mind. I’m going to get stuck into the floor. It’s a day like any other as far as I’m concerned.’
    Not for Mrs Daley. For days we’ve helped her make decorations from strips of coloured paper and now they’re draped around her kitchen and across the lounge room walls. Yesterday, Mr Daley cut a limb from a pine tree out near Five Mile Drain and Mrs Daley got the box of decorations from the wardrobe in her room.
    I wanted to fix the manger, which had lost its sheep in the bottom of the box, but Faye said I could find the star for the top of the tree. I hurried to get this done because I wanted to hook the coloured balls on the tree’s long arms. Faye said she was in charge and I could put the snow on the branches. The snow was cotton wool.
    â€˜Not there,’ said Faye when I’d finished with the snow and was trying to clip a shiny bird onto a branch. ‘It needs to be done properly.’
    â€˜I can do it properly.’
    â€˜It’s not your tree.’
    â€˜That’s enough, Faye,’ said Mrs Daley from the door.
    â€˜It’s not. There are tons more decorations to use up.’
    â€˜You know what I mean.’
    Faye let me do the manger. I found the sheep and pushed them into their sockets and laid the baby Jesus in his cradle bed. I fixed the palm-tree head and found the three wise men. Before I left, Mrs Daley pulled the curtains and switched on the Christmas lights so that I could see how the tree shone in the dark. She didn’t tell me I’d been invited for Christmas dinner. Perhaps she did the inviting after I left, though I can’t think how and when.
    I want to take my bride doll to show Faye. ‘That doll is staying here,’ says Mum when she’s dressed me in my new pink dress and tied a matching ribbon in my hair. ‘I don’t want it getting dirty.’
    â€˜It won’t get dirty. I won’t put it down.’
    â€˜No.’ She lifts the kitchen chairs onto the table and sets them upside down around the edge. I wait by the door hoping she will change her mind but she takes a knife from the dresser drawer and kneels down on the floor. Then her arm sweeps out, out and back, out and back, peeling off the polish with each wide-armed reach, sending shavings in the air, onto her hair, the table and chairs.
    Did she know my father would be having Christmas with the Daleys? When he walks in