Three is my lucky number.

That's how the police find people these days. If you make a call on your mobile phone, and there are three base stations in the area, then they can triangulate onto your location. Three points. And suddenly they know where you are.

I come from a family of three. Three little pigs huddling in their houses, three bears waiting for their bowls of porridge, three witches gathered around a bubbling cauldron. When I held hands with Prescott on one side and Lark on the other, I felt we were strong.

No matter how much my dad was yelling, or how much my mum was crying, if the three of us together I knew that things would turn out okay. We'd make our parents patch things up and sooner or later, peace would return to our household.

My dad had always been a cold-beer-when-he-got-home sort of drinker. His job was stressful. He needed something to help him unwind. Maybe on the weekends he'd have one too many, but that was something we could laugh off. If he had too much at someone's barbeque, well, the men would just pick him up and put him in the car and we'd let him sleep it off.

Mum would park the car in the driveway and leave him there. She'd herd us into our room and then we'd play at fairytales. Prescott always wanted to be a hunter and Lark always wanted to be a princess, but my favourite games were the ones where we were just ordinary animals. A big one, a middle one and a little one. That's all the fantasy I needed.

At some point, as I grew up, my dad's drinking stopped being something we could laugh off. It became something we just didn't talk about. Then Prescott and Lark stopped playing games with me. We'd grown up. It wasn't right to hold hands any more.

On Saturday morning, when I woke up, something had changed. My head didn't feel groggy. My arms no longer ached from fending off bad dreams. As I stretched out the sleep from my shoulders, I felt ready. I'd been away for three days. It was time to go home.

Zahara was still sleeping soundly so I left a note for her and headed out. I wanted to call my mum, but paranoia prevented me from using the telephone in the house. My dad was a lawyer, after all. It wasn't beyond him to have bugged the phones, or to have hired a private detective. I could imagine a tracer, electrons firing, red dots beeping along cold power lines and suddenly a knock at the door, poor Mrs Kath being surprised in her bedroom slippers, a camera flash catching her startled face for eternity.

As I sat on the express train into the city, I wondered if that was wishful thinking. I hoped dad had hired a private detective. I hoped they were looking for me. Maybe they'd shrugged, told each other, "She'll be back." Maybe dad had just poured himself another drink and forgotten about it. That's what he said he drank for.

I cradled my mobile phone in my hands. I'd kept it switched off for the past few days, just in case. Just in case they were looking for me. I thought, again, about Natasha Ryan. She hid herself away in her boyfriend's home for four years.

Her parents gave up looking for her, thought she was dead. They held a funeral for her. It was all over the news. Natasha must have seen it, maybe she even read her own death notice, and she didn't care. She stayed hidden.

When they found her, the photographs showed her scowling at the cameras. She'd hid in a wardrobe when the police came. They'd pulled her out of there, out of her boyfriend's house and back into the present.

But I kept thinking about her sitting in that wardrobe, like a child looking for Narnia, never wanting to grow up. I wondered what happened to her tombstone. If they took it down, what did they replace it with? How do you bury something that doesn't have a body?

As if to answer me, my thumb pressed the power switch on my mobile. Its introductory music played, and suddenly I was back in my old life. The wallpaper was a photo of Lark and I, mucking around. We were being high society snobs, like the Lindfield girls we were -- pouting with huge fish-lips and tilting our faces so far back you could see up our noses.

I smiled at Lark, batting her eyes at the camera. You couldn't see it in the photo but her arm was around me, holding me tight.

There was only one message on my phone. A terse one, from Prescott. Come back pls. I could visualise his expression so clearly, just from those three words. He had a habit of sucking his lips inside his mouth when he was worried or nervous, so that he looked like Keanu Reeves in that scene from the Matrix where his mouth disappears. I wondered how long he'd waited for a reply.

I stared at the phone, and as if by magic, it started to ring. As a joke I'd set the ringtone to 'Jingle Bells'. Prescott's number showed up. I stared at it in shock. 'Jingle Bells' continued to play, merrily drowning out the rhythmic roll of the wheel treads on the rails. How much fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh. I quickly switched off the phone. Silence.

How had he known to call me at this very moment? Maybe I wasn't paranoid. Were they really watching me?

Jingle bells, jingle bells.

Someone on the train was humming my ringtone. I looked up and there was Prescott standing before me, boxing me in with the height of his body.

- What are you doing here? I asked him.

- What am I doing here? Where have you been?

He was not nervous right now. The cavity of his mouth was wide and gaping at me in anger.

I stood up, so that we were level with each other. I don't know what I expected. Maybe I expected my family to be affectionate and cuddly after my disappearance. But Prescott was livid. His voice began to move up in a crescendo.

- We've all been worried sick. Where the hell have you been?

- Away.

- None of us have been able to sleep for days. I was afraid you'd drowned or something. I'm sitting on this train thinking, shit, I shouldn't have gone out last night, how could I go to a party when my little sister's missing, maybe kidnapped, maybe dead, and what happens? You walk in, right as rain, fucking checking your messages like you're going to school or something. How could you do that to us?

I stared down at the ground.

- You're coming home right now.

He grabbed my arm, instinctively I began to struggle.

- You should be whipped for this. Mum should ground you for life.

I cried out, his fingers were cruelly twisting into my flesh.

- Let me go.

We were grappling with each other now, like we had as children. Prescott was trying to push me back down onto the seat. I tried to pull his arm up towards me to bite it, but we weren't little kids any longer and he was much stronger than me. He was winning.

- Hey -- leave her alone.

A stocky, middle-aged man had walked up from the lower carriage deck. He wanted to help but I could tell he was afraid. He stood in the stairway, a short distance from us. Prescott growled at him.

- Stay out of this, it isn't your problem.

- You shouldn't be handling a young lady like that. Get your hands off her.

The train was slowing down and I realised that we were pulling into Redfern station. Prescott's grip was softening, as he stared down the man. He opened his mouth to say something but then the train jerked to a stop, sending us all sideways.

I pushed against Prescott, sending him across the vestibule onto the other seat. As he tried to stand up I bolted out the doors and ran up the stairs, out of the station.

I didn't bother to check and see if Prescott was following, I just legged it out of there. Outside of the station I ran down the nearest street and hid against the wall of a building. Panting, I peered around the wall to check and see if he'd come after me.

The coast was clear. But as my heart stopped racing and my breath evened itself out, a different fear came over me. The smell of burning wove itself around me. I was inside The Block.

I pulled the sleeves of my cardigan over my hands and wandered out.

- What do you want?

I jumped, searching frantically for the owner of the voice. I half expected Lark to pounce on me from the shadows, but I finally located an old woman, sitting on a crate. Her hands were empty, her mouth was missing several teeth. I stared at her, flustered.

- What?

- Smacko -- you want smacko?

- No. Thank you.

I made my way between rows of tired-looking Victorian terrace houses, trying to remember how I'd gotten here. These terrace houses weren't shiny with new paint like the ones I was used to in Paddington and Balmain. These ones seemed to have the past steeped into their ragged walls and colourful corrugated iron roofs.

The road was quiet and there were green front-yard lawns, which surprised me since we were in the heart of the city. I could have been out in the suburbs, only I was aware of the sensation of eyes watching me from gaps in curtains, from holes in the walls, from still shadows in windows and on balconies.

I followed the smoky tendrils to a clearing at the entrance of the Block. Seeing a place I recognised made me feel better. An Aboriginal flag had been painted onto the wall of a building. Its black, red and gold colours were stamped unapologetically over the bricks. Off in the distance the grey and beige concrete towers of the city dominated the skyline.

A couple of men were tending to the fire. Further along, another cluster of people sat on overturned crates. Everyone stopped talking as I approached. They stared at me, their faces closed and cautious, and I became self-conscious of the fact that I was the only non-Aboriginal person in sight. But for some reason, Reshma's face came into my mind.

I saw her walking through Haymarket, her green scarf a bright swath of colour amongst the crowd. She would have smiled and acted like nothing was out of the ordinary. So that's what I did.

- Nice day we're having.

The people still eyed me strangely, but I could feel them grudgingly accepting my presence. They must have all seen me sprinting past only minutes earlier, and be wondering what was wrong with me. I cringed.

- Don't mind me, I'm just a crazy girl.

Now that I'd started speaking and people were staring at me, it was difficult to leave. I wondered if I should just turn around and run away from them.

- I'm a crazy girl, too.

I glanced down and noticed a girl sitting on the ground beside the fire. She was beautiful. Skinny, almost too skinny with the skin drawn tight across her neck and cheekbones. She was clearly of Aboriginal descent but her hair was blonde, even blonder than my hair went when I put lemon juice on it in the summer.

She gestured to me and I sat beside her. One of her eyes was padded with bruising.

- What?

- Whatcha doing here?

- I dunno. What are you doing here?

- I'm trying to find my mob. I just come in from up north. Things got too hard for me up there. Thought I'd be able to come and find my people.

- What happened to your eye?

- I got hit. What happened there?

She pointed to my arm. Four purple marks flowered on my forearm.

- My brother.

She nodded with understanding.

- He drink?

- No. My dad does.

- It's liquid evil. Once it gets hold of them, they dunno what they're doing anymore.

She took my hand and held it. Her fingers felt rough but warm within my own. We sat together before the fire and it felt as though we were communicating somehow. Through her skin she told me of never knowing her father, of being taken away from her mother and placed into foster care, of drugs and alcohol and disappointment and helplessness.

And through my skin I told her about my dad. I told her about wanting to go home. For those few moments it felt as though all we had were each other.

She stroked my fingernails.

- You've got nice hands.

- Thanks.

- My old fella, he got hands like yours. Nice and soft. Til he fist 'em up and use 'em.

- I'm sorry.

She gestured to the fire in front of us.

- You know what this is?

I shook my head.

- This here is for the Tent Embassy. It's here to remind us of the constant struggle us blackfellas have for recognition in our own land. But you see the smoke? I come here to sit by the smoke, 'cos I think this is the only way you're gonna get through life.

You gotta take all that pain and blow it away, let it disappear into the air. You hold onto that stuff, it'll kill you. There's just too much of it for one person to handle. So you let it go, you let it go and become someone else's burden.

I smiled at her, and squeezed her hand.

- What's your lucky number?

- Me?

She laughed, a crooning, throaty chuckle.

- Seven. Whatcha want to know that for?

- Mine's three.

- You are crazy. Three ain't lucky. Three times I went back to my fella, and look what he gave me in return.

- Why is seven any better?

- Seven days of a week, and you've got a new beginning!

We laughed, and I could feel some of the certainty I'd felt that morning returning to me. Three oranges, three eyes, three golden hairs, three tasks. I would find Prescott and Lark again.

The girl beside me patted my hand.

- I wouldn't mind three wishes though, sometimes.

And we sat together, watching the smoke. Its grey claws curled up into the sky and disappeared.