Nell was eleven years old and she slept eleven hours on Saturday. Her eyes shut after the dishes and she came back in the orange light of the room. The clock said twenty past four in the afternoon. Her mother said she had missed the whole day. Nell thought she had wasted it.

Her father Tom milked two hundred and thirty cows outside Wairoa. The cows came in at half past five, because the tanker came in the morning, and Tom had a knee that had not been right since he was nineteen. Nell was awake at twenty past five. She put on her boots, she let the dogs out of the shed, and she counted the cows in while Tom carried the cans.

She liked that part. One of the dogs was called Shower and did not like the hose. The milk went into the cans with a noise like a boat.

At ten to six she had her boots off and her bag on the step for the bus. Her mother Rae drove forty minutes to the school office, so Nell went on the bus with the children of six farms. In June she sat at the back of the maths class and did not hear the answer about the goat shed.

On Thursday her mother wrote on the calendar that Nell was to be up at twenty past five on Friday. That sentence put her body out of bed in the dark, and it lay there counting the sounds in the house. On Friday the clock went and she could not get her legs down. She was up at seven. Tom milked on the bad knee by himself, and it took him an hour longer. The tanker did not wait.

The school health nurse came on Wednesday and set up in the sick room with a stack of white cards and one blue pencil. Her name was Kate. She wrote on Nell's card what time her eyes shut and what time they opened. Then she wrote underneath: nine to twelve hours. Nell put one finger on the eleven she had slept on Saturday. “So that was right,” she said. “That was right,” said Kate. “What did you sleep on Monday?”

Nell did the sum on the card with Kate's pencil. Six hours and twenty minutes. Kate said a body does not keep its own accounts. It keeps them, and then it reads them.

Then Kate asked Nell what time she went to bed. Half past eight. Nell said it like it was obvious. Kate wrote it on the card and put an arrow beside it. Half past eight to five o'clock is eight and a half hours in a bed. Half past eight to twenty past five is eight hours and fifty minutes. “So the bus cost you an hour and a half,” Kate said.

Nell did the sum again on her arm with the tip of a pencil, in case it was something she could rub off. It was not. There was no card in the world that turns eight hours and fifty-five minutes into nine.

Kate told her that sleep does not come flat. She said it comes in shapes of about ninety minutes, and that a body comes up out of one every ninety minutes. Six hours and twenty minutes is four shapes and a piece. Eleven hours is seven shapes and a piece, she said, and seven is what a body that has been short wants. Nell said nothing to that. She was looking at the twenty minutes. They did a fortnight of cards by the bed. Nell wrote the time she shut her eyes. Her mother wrote the time she opened them, because Nell could not see a clock with her eyes shut.

Tom and his brother Hemi split the early round. From the first of July, Nell milked at three o'clock after school on school days, and at half past five on the days she was not in a classroom. The best night on the cards was nine hours and twenty minutes. Three nights were under nine. On the third night she wrote 10:20 instead of 8:30, on purpose, to see what Kate would say. Kate said the number was not the point, and to put the pen down. She said the cards were not homework. They were for catching a person lying to themselves, and Nell had done that on the first night.

Nell slept eleven hours on Saturday again. Her mother said nothing about it this time. She put the tea on when Nell came down. The last night on the card says eight hours and fifty-five minutes. Kate said the low end of what she needed was nine hours. Nell wrote the five minutes in the margin of the card, and she did not cross it out.