Free Diamonds in the Mud and Other Stories by Joy Dettman

dobbed on him for feeling up Darlene. She got him in the instep with a stiletto heel before escaping into the bank manager’s hands.
    â€˜You come along to keep an eye on my overdraft, did you, Bert?’
    He gave her a sleazy smile, and passed her along.
    After the first dozen swaps, she tuned out, gauging by her partners’ sweat factor whether they were worth a fatigued-metal grin or not.
    The sandy headed kid from the newsagent’s greeted her with glazed eyes. ‘You scrub up well, Marshall,’ he said. ‘Hardly recognised you.’
    â€˜You look the same as usual. Blind drunk.’
    â€˜You know when you slugged Davo with that bottle of Coke the other night?’
    â€˜It was only plastic, and so what?’
    â€˜It was full, and you cracked a bone in his wrist. He’ll be out for a month. You’re on the coach’s shit-list, Marshall.’
    â€˜Tell him to join the queue.’
    Everyone had it in for her tonight. She could see murder by nagging written in the dragon’s eyes every time she hitched. Marlene had been on the war-path all week. Darlene – she was just a typical sixteen year old blob with blistered feet.
    Danni dodged the football coach to dance with the goon’s father. He came up to her shoulder but the stink of his sweat drifting higher. He passed her to a ham of a hand whose suit smelt of mothballs instead of sweat, but at least his hand was dry. She offered a grudging smile, then realised who she was smiling at and flapped her elbows, made a loud chicken squawk. ‘You chickened out, Priestly.’
    â€˜And you didn’t have any luck with double pneumonia, Marshall.’
    â€˜You can’t win ’em all.’
    She hadn’t won many – maybe not any. Her mother had had enough sense to get out of this town young – if you didn’t get out young, you got stuck. Danni had been raised by her grandmother, but she’d died, so her father had to take her. She’d considered him some sort of grease-scented god until he’d taken up with the dragon and her daughters, then moved them in. He hadn’t married her. Couldn’t. He’d never got a divorce, though he had discussed the possibilities with Danni two nights before he ran under that semi.
    She’d thought the steps would move out when he died, hoped they would. They hadn’t. For twelve months or more the dragon had been calling herself Mrs Marshall; she’d enrolled her daughters at school as Marshall. When you’re on a good thing, stick to it; only weeks after Danni’s father died, the step had hired an out-of-town solicitor to go after the house and business.
    Danni, barely fifteen, had left school – or hadn’t bothered going to school – she’d spent her days in her father’s garage, just smelling the grease, the scent of Dad. Old Joe, mechanic extraordinaire, had suggested she do an apprenticeship instead of sitting around moping, wasting her life. It had been a legitimate excuse to leave school, and it stopped the do-gooders sticking their noses into her life. She hadn’t planned to finish the apprenticeship. Every night she’d decide to pack her bags and get the hell out of this town, then she became hooked on grease and petrol fumes, but mainly on the intricacies of her father’s old Holden – maybe because it had retained the scent of him.
    She ran the business now, her business, as the house was hers. Her father’s will said so, and in time the courts had agreed.
    Fifteen year old kids can’t live alone. She’d shared her house with the steps. It had been that, or fly over to New Zealand to a mother who hadn’t wanted her as a two year old, and wasn’t likely to want her at fifteen, and she knew her father had planned to make his union with the dragon permanent.
    â€˜How did you get the grease off?’ Ben asked, looking at the clean hand while twirling her into the