The new girl

It was just like any other day for Andie Tanner when an invitation to end a schoolyard rift set in chain a run of events which would change her entire universe.

- TONI JORDAN

When I was 12 and we lived in Morningside on the top of the hill, there were three of us upstairs - my father, my mother and me- and four quiet souls living downstairs, underneath the house.

My parents' cars no longer fit down there, what with the four kennels and the raised bench for treatments, the second-hand ultrasound with its clicking dials, and all the tins and barrels and buckets, some empty and others filled with different kibbles and powders next to the perfectly good desk that my father had found at Tingalpa tip on which he mixed the dogs' special meals.

There were two sets of smaller scales for the food and big scales for the dogs, the double-walking machine with the broken belt on one side that my father hadn't got around to fixing, and filing cabinets where he kept the certificates, breeding sheets, application forms and ledgers with times and distances for all the dogs we'd ever had and many more he took an interest in.

There were always hessian sugar bags, some soaking in buckets of bleach and others piled in a corner, washed and dried but still blotchy with dark, creepy stains deep in the fibres and a bristled texture that made them awful to touch. On the wall were hooks for leads and muzzles and collars, and a rack for coats, and between everything were murky crevices and cobwebs and, if you looked carefully enough, the twitching antenna that gave away a lurking cockroach. And most of all, that warm, clean smell of dog, and the menthol of liniment.

It was cool and dark under there, even in subtropical humidity. That's what most people remark upon when they find out I grew up in Brisbane in the 1970s. "I couldn't take it," they say.

They imagine sweating and flushing and their hair frizzing, and days spent under the aircon, dreaming of ice.