Tenderfoot

by Toni Jordan

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Marriage & Divorce

Synopsis

By the bestselling, award-winning author of Addition, an exhilarating novel about coming of age in 1970s Australia

Wait for the boxes to open, wait for the race to begin. Wait, and your greyhound will cease to be the dog you know and become an entirely different kind of animal.

Brisbane, 1975: Andie Tanner's world is small but whole. Her mum is complicated, but she adores her dad and the kennel of racing greyhounds that live under their house. Andie is a serious girl with plans: finish school with her friends, then apprentice to her father until she can become a greyhound trainer, with dogs of her very own.

But real life rarely goes to plan, and the world is bigger and more complex than Andie could imagine. When she loses everything she cares about - her family, her friends, the dogs - it's up to Andie to reclaim her future. She will need all her wits to survive this new reality of secrets and half-truths, addictions and crime.

With luminous, aching prose, Tenderfoot will move you like no other story this year.

Praise for the novels of Toni Jordan including Nine Days and Addition, now a major film:

'Jordan is one of this country's most exceptional writers' Better Reading

'Jordan combines pace and humour with a razor intelligence' Sydney Morning Herald

'Funny, warm, delightful!' LIANE MORIARTY

'Taps into the humour and pathos of ordinary life in a way that has you nodding with recognition' PIP WILLIAMS

'Brilliantly observed and highly entertaining' JOANNA NELL

'Funny and smart' Weekend Australian

Release date: August 27, 2025

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 352

Sample

When I was twelve 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.

But in my memories it is always cold. I remember the electric blanket on my bed and my flannelette pyjamas folded in front of the three-bar heater in the lounge room and Campbell’s Tomato Soup in a mug burning my tongue. I remember shivering through swimming classes and afterwards sitting in my mother’s car in my clammy togs, wrapped in a damp towel, skin puckered into goosebumps. Wishing the car would go faster because at home, a hot bath was waiting. I have never again felt the relief of inching into that steaming tub, watching the waterline creep up my legs as I lowered them, the submerged flesh turning first white then crimson, the delicious almost-frozen heat of it.

In my memory, that Tuesday afternoon in late August was cold, or what we thought of as cold when I was a child. It was the day two things happened, one after the other. It was bad luck. I can’t help but think that things might have turned out differently if a few weeks or even days had separated them. In my more clear-sighted times, though, I know that these thoughts are me preparing a defence for a judgement that’s yet to come. There is no escaping it – I was the one responsible for the way things unfolded over the months ahead. I was the cause of it all.

Still, it’s my story. I can tell it however I choose.

The first thing happened like this: towards the end of big lunch, Trudy and Rowena and I were squatting on our haunches playing knuckles in the patch of dirt between the cyclone fence of the tennis court and the row of houses that backed onto the school.

Then Nitsy, who was lookout, yelled, ‘Tammy’s coming.’

I squinted. Sure enough, the blurry shape crossing the grassy slope beyond the bike racks at the bottom of the playground began resolving into Tammy. She was heading straight for us. There was no other destination possible – everyone knew this narrow dug-out space was our spot. After school the boys came here to smoke but not even Darryl Gould dared to sit in Mrs Murphy’s class reeking, so it was ours at little lunch and big lunch. We’d brushed it clear of twigs and edged it with pebbles, but it was ringed by high grass dotted with cigarette butts and scrunched-up paper bags that once held cream buns, and in one corner were two split SunnyBoy cartons, still vaguely pyramidal and sticky with Orange Explosion, teeming with ants. Here, we were hidden from prying eyes. Not even the groundsman came this far.

As Tammy neared, Nitsy joined us and we huddled in a circle with our arms around each other’s shoulders, our breath hot and close and our hair falling down like curtains between our faces.

‘Maybe they want a truce,’ said Trudy.

They did not want a truce, of that I was sure. Every big lunch, they sat in the corner underneath our old Grade 5 classroom. Larissa bagsed it by bolting down the stairs from her desk nearest to the door as soon as Mrs Murphy let us out. It had a solid brick wall at one end which the boys sometimes used for handball, but other than that the advantages were clear: it had a bench on either side so they could sit closer together, and the ground was cement, ideal for elastics and all kinds of games. That’s how we ended up here, so far away, squished between the houses and the tennis court, surrounded by litter.

When Tammy reached the edge of the grass, she stopped and called out to us.

Why our primary school had a tennis court, no one knew. The gravel parade ground at the top of the school was where we girls played netball but only on Friday afternoons, when the teachers handed out balls and bibs and walked from game to game in pairs, chatting and smoking, blowing the whistle at seemingly random moments. The boys had sport on Fridays too, but if I ever knew what they played, I can’t recall it now. If it rained, we stayed undercover and practised the Nutbush. No one played tennis, that was clear. We had no racquets, no balls, no net. Few of us wore school uniforms. Most of the boys didn’t wear shoes.

Tammy’s shoes were shiny black patent with a strap across the top. She wore white ankle socks with a lace trim, and a pink corduroy pinafore with a collared shirt underneath. Tammy was the New Girl. We had never had a New Girl before. Mrs Murphy had told us where Tammy was from on her first day a few months ago, but it meant nothing to us. Was it … England? Was it … Sydney? Somewhere far away, we were sure of that. And it wasn’t only Tammy’s shiny shoes that everyone noticed. Sometimes her mother picked her up from school, in their car. This was unusual enough – we walked or rode our bikes – but sometimes her father was the one waiting for her in the turning circle near Mr Swan’s office. Her father was a policeman, Tammy told us, which we thought funny because Tammy was the best shoplifter of us all, expert at slipping lip glosses and earrings into her pockets at Kmart, her skill and daring the secret to her seemingly instant popularity. The first time Tammy’s father picked her up, the rest of us stood gaping, hoping to see a gun, and if he looked like Detective Sergeant Frank Banner from Division 4. He didn’t.

I told my father when I got home. ‘A copper, hey?’ he said. He was sitting at the dining room table, reading the form guide with a pen in his hand. There was beer in a glass in front of him. He didn’t look at me as he spoke but made a doodle in the margin of the newspaper: a stick figure with his hands in the air, surrendering. ‘Always remember, Andie. Cops and crooks are two sides of the same coin. Steer clear of them both.’

I knew this already. My parents sometimes talked about the cops bashing people and the unfair convictions of unlucky acquaintances, the brute power of cops to do anything they wanted. Other things I knew: The country’s going to the dogs now that Whitlam the commo’s in charge and National Service’d fix these useless teenagers on the news, complaining about everything, quick smart.

Tammy’s gang and ours had not always been at war. We were the girls of Grade 7, after all, and for years before Tammy came along, our loyalties were fluid, groups forming and splitting, undying friendship one day and sworn hostility the next. I cannot recall what this particular fight was about. All I remember is the fury I felt, the disproportionate size of it in my mind. There had never been anything so important.

When Tammy called out, I looked at Rowena, who looked at Trudy, who looked at Nitsy.

‘I’m going to see what she wants,’ I said.

‘Be careful,’ whispered Rowena.

I crossed from where my gang waited, fingers hooked through the tennis court fence, towards Tammy, scanning for any sudden movements in the distance, because Rowena was right; this could be a trap. Larissa and Deb could be hiding at the back of the toilet block with water balloons or slingshots. And as for Simone: she didn’t wear shoes, like the boys, and could swoop in from anywhere. She was the fastest runner in the whole school, and the best at tee-ball, and at Land, which was a complicated game that involved dividing the ground by the number of players, then throwing sticks at each other for the right to take over chunks of someone else’s territory. Simone wasn’t as good at our other favourite game, Songs, a kind of race where the questioner faced in one direction and called out the name of a song, the race only beginning when one of the challengers, facing towards her, called out the correct artist. She continually mixed up AC/DC and ABBA, and The Sweet and Status Quo. I’ve never heard of either of these games since. They belonged only to us. We, or one of our forebears at the school, must have invented them.

‘Andie,’ said Tammy, when I stood before her. One hand shielded her eyes because the smallest glance at the sky left ghosts in your vision when you blinked.

In the middle distance, the bell rang. I hated being late to class, but walking away now was a sign of weakness. Just as I was beginning to waver, Tammy spoke.

‘D’ya wanna walk home with me and Larissa this afternoon?’ Her voice was airy, as though it meant nothing to her either way.

At first I didn’t know what to think. Yes, wars had resolved quickly before, over the past seven years of shifting allegiances between whichever groups we were in at the time. But this time there had been no trigger: no party invitation to secure, no chess tournament underway. And, yes, sometimes a lone defector, motivated by boredom or desire for greener grass, changed sides, only to be loathed and spat at by their former friends for days. After all, we all worked to demonstrate our group’s superiority by laughing conspiratorially at nothing and whispering nonsense sounds lightheartedly, while checking for an audience out of the corners of our eyes.

This was not just Tammy alone, asking to walk home with me. She was also offering Larissa. Larissa, who until this latest fight had been my best friend almost constantly since we first sat together in Grade 1.

Larissa and I were sometimes mistaken for each other by Mr Swan, the headmaster, because we were both small and thin with shining blonde hair. Since hostilities had broken out, I no longer went to her house after school. It had been weeks since we’d spoken.

‘Yes,’ I said to Tammy. And in case I’d been too quick to reply, I added, ‘If you want.’

‘What did she say?’ Nitsy asked, when I went back to pick up my lunchbox and knuckles.

I mumbled, ‘I’ll tell you later,’ and we hurried up the hill, crossed under the classrooms then up the stairs to put our things in our ports, each one smelling of overripe bananas, in the racks outside the classrooms.

The reason I didn’t report Tammy’s offer was this: I wasn’t sure if it included all of us. Perhaps it was only me being sounded out to change sides. I imagined for a moment me and Larissa, together again, waging glorious battle against Nitsy and Rowena and Trudy. Best to say nothing for now, until the situation clarified itself.

The Grade 7 classroom was fibro with banks of glass louvres on opposite walls. It was the best room – upstairs and at the end of one wing to catch what little breeze was available – due to our seniority. This year there was only one Grade 7 class, with almost thirty of us. That hadn’t always been the case. A lack of kids or teachers sometimes forced two grades together; Mrs Murphy had taken a composite 6/7 last year. I liked composite classes. I liked sitting near the aisle with one ear on what the older kids were learning, or imagining myself the teacher of the younger kids when we did activities together. Both these things made the day go faster.

That afternoon crawled by. We sprawled across our desks, watching the clock on the wall next to the portrait of the young queen. From my seat in the front row, I watched Mrs Murphy writing something on the blackboard in her small, neat hand. The chalk squeaked as she finished.

‘Can anyone answer that?’ She turned around to face us and tapped the board with her chalk.

No one made a sound.

‘Come on. Someone must know. Where does the legislation go after it’s passed through the senate?’

I put up my hand.

‘Anyone?’ Mrs Murphy said.

I waved my hand from side to side in an arc.

‘Anyone else? Other than Andie.’

Mrs Murphy, the eternal optimist, was a rangy middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt and a white cotton blouse who pulsed with restless energy and was a better teacher than any of us deserved. I didn’t need to turn around to know that behind me Darryl Gould would be asleep, and Ross Larkin would be ripping small pieces from his exercise book and chewing them to add to the collection of smelly beige stalactites hanging under his desk. Simone likely teetered on the back legs of her chair, searching for the sweet spot where she could balance with only the smallest shifts in weight, a feat she was determined to master.

The school year was half over and then, after the glorious, endless summer holidays, next year, we would leave all this behind and become Grade 8s at Balmoral High. After big lunch on days like these, only a handful of us girls and Alan paid the smallest attention to anything, and no one cared about the passage of legislation, not ever, but especially not now.

I didn’t care myself. I didn’t care about geometry either, or the route of Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson or conjugating verbs, not specifically. But I did like to know things, no matter what they were. Knowing things seemed a way of expanding my world theoretically, since the idea of expanding it geographically was beyond my imagining. Besides, things tended to stick in my head even if I’d only heard them once, or seen them on the ABC news, or read them in the morning’s Courier-Mail or the evening’s Telegraph or in a library book. Nothing I learned in school would be useful in my life once I left, which was now only three short years away. I knew that. I had my own plan for my future and school played no part in it.

‘Anyone at all?’ Mrs Murphy said. ‘Just take a guess, absolutely free.’

After another silent moment, she resigned herself.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Go ahead, Andie.’

I dropped my hand. ‘Back to the house of representatives.’

‘The legislation goes back to the house of representatives.’ Mrs Murphy walked to the board and underlined something in chalk. ‘And where does it go then?’

I put up my hand again. Mrs Murphy sighed, theatrically.

And so the afternoon progressed. After the bell, I was the last to leave because I liked to order my pencils and felt pens in the same direction in my pencil case, which was powder blue with ANDIE in cut-out letters in individual plastic sleeves, and arrange my books in the yellow tub underneath the desk. As I reached the door, Mrs Murphy called out behind me. ‘Will your father be at parent–teacher night, Andie?’ she said.

Apart from my birthday and Christmas and Easter, parent– teacher night was my favourite time of the year. It was held in the empty classroom used as a library with the stacks of books pushed to the side and replaced with stations of desks and chairs, one per teacher. Mine was always the only father in a room of mothers. My father would start these meetings chatty and charming. He was the most handsome father I knew, and everyone liked him, but the more complimentary the teachers were about me and my grades, the graver he looked. I tried my best also not to smile. I wasn’t sure why but smiling when someone says something nice about you was wrong. At the end, my father would ruffle my hair and say, grimly, ‘I don’t know where she gets it from.’ He may well have given the same response to a doctor had I been diagnosed with some disease. It was only the way he touched my head that revealed he was pleased.

On parent–teacher nights, I was allowed to stay up and wait for my mother to finish her shift. She would bring a bottle of asti spumante from the Colmslie, the pub where she worked, and pop the cork like champagne in a movie, and I was allowed to pour it into her glass and then she toasted me, and I would have a sip. The bottle was greenish glass, cold and heavy. The bubbles floated to the surface like tiny crystal pearls. It should be delicious. Certainly my mother thought it was delicious. For me though, every sip, every year, was like a test to see if I was grown-up yet, one I always failed. It was sour and vinegary, a bit like vomit and nothing like lemonade. My mother laughed when I screwed up my face. Perhaps this year, my last at primary school, I would finally love asti spumante as much as she did.

Drinking champagne and hearing my mother laugh were wondrous to me, but that wasn’t the reason my report card was important. For as long as I could remember, everything I did was to make my father proud. The feel of his hand on my forehead, the tousling of my hair … It’s hard to explain how much it meant.

‘He will definitely be here,’ I told Mrs Murphy.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to him about.’

The decades that have passed since that day have taught me differently, but back then I had no sense of foreboding, much less dread. I assumed it would be something good, something I’d be proud for my father to hear. Some conclusion about my character or intelligence can probably be drawn from that. Overconfidence, perhaps, or a lack of imagination that would have seen a more perceptive child on guard.

But the reality was this: so far, the world had been kind to me, and predictable and small. My world was the walk from home to school, from school to home. Add in Gran’s house, Larissa’s house, the pub and, on school holidays, the dog tracks at Capalaba on Fridays, at Lawnton on Tuesdays, at Beenleigh on Mondays and at the Gabba on Thursdays, and you have the universe. Nothing ever happened that hadn’t happened before.

Tammy and Larissa were waiting for me near the port racks. Nitsy and Rowena and Trudy were also waiting for me further up the path, expecting nothing extraordinary.

A decision needed to be made.

Larissa nodded at me and drew a figure eight with the Chupa Chup stick in her mouth. I see now that she was an odd child with an iron will who could spend all day with a lolly in her pocket and not eat it until the walk home. She could resist Fantales and snakes in a white paper bag, even once a Curly Wurly, half-melted and folded into thirds. And for weeks, Larissa had doggedly ignored me. This nod was a thrilling step. I nodded back, and then I fell into step with them.

As we walked off, cutting across the grass to avoid Nitsy and Rowena and Trudy, I could imagine them staring at my back, mouths open at my betrayal. It was a terrible thing to do, I see that now, but I told myself that this was not a desertion. We should be one gang, that was obvious. I was acting as emissary. I planned to argue with Tammy and Larissa for the inclusion of the others. We should be united and focused on our natural enemy: the boys.

Whether I would have done that, I will never know.

We poured out of the gate like a creek of kids, dishevelled and stained, ports in our hands. Our school had almost no truancy. Even those kids who failed every test, even the boys who were sent to Mr Swan’s office for the cuts showed up every day. What else would you do? Go to the Plaza by yourself? All your friends were here, and most kids lived for little lunch and big lunch, when we played in the dirt and made mud and threw things at each other and constructed complex, multi-day games involving sticks and rocks and hiding. Sitting in class snoozing was a small price to pay for such adventures.

It was Tammy who noticed something was different about my house as we reached the top of the hill.

‘There’s a strange car in your driveway,’ she said, squinting. ‘A blue car.’

Our school was on the top of one hill and our house was on the top of the next. Every house in our street was fibro with matching grey besser-block foundations and a low front fence except for ours, which was proper timber and proper brick. I didn’t need to see the banana patch or the mulberry tree or the mango tree that me and Larissa climbed, or the chook run with a dozen bantams and two cranky ducks. Even Tammy couldn’t see the cement path that led to the incinerator, but she could see the top of the Hills hoist and the white back wall of the house, the one with my window in it. She couldn’t see inside my room, the green-blue carpet, my Barbies on the floor. She couldn’t see the gravel of the driveway but she could see a strange car that was parked there.

My parents had friends, of course: other trainers and punters at the dog tracks and the other barmaids at the Colmslie. But at home, we never had visitors.

I didn’t have time to wonder whose car it was. The road leading down the hill had houses on either side but was a dead end, finishing at the creek in a narrow valley with a wooden walking bridge leading to the other side, the next hill, with our house on the top. There was rarely traffic so we always walked down the middle of the road. The three of us continued a little further to the flat part near the Howells’ driveway. Tammy and Larissa stopped and turned to face me. . . .