I screwed up my nose. Was he crazy? I didn’t want to be Richie Rich. I didn’t want a stupid bow-tie and a dog with dollar-signs on its coat. He swung me down from the fence and I immediately trod my laces loose again.

Mr Parish wanted me to go to private school. I was already rehearsing to say no. I was going to work in a racing car factory: what did I need private school for? I was going to have a wife and some kids and I was going to work in the factory and race cars on the weekend. And when my racing career got going, well, then I’d leave the factory and be in the Grand Prix and when I won they’d shake champagne all over my head. I had a wife already picked out, well two actually: Monica Lloyd who read Trixie Belden books and was good at high jump or Vasoula Costopoulos who had big dimples and curly brown hair and the neatest handwriting in class. That was the future. If I was going to be rich, it would be from winning at the Grand Prix.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ you said, Ornella, but you got some fabric with racing cars on it and made ‘drapes’ for my bedroom—for some reason you wouldn’t let me call them ‘curtains’.

I’ve still got those drapes in a box somewhere. I remember all the early mornings, waking up and watching the racing cars as the sun rose: there were three cars racing across that calico vista—a blue, a yellow, and a red one. One had a snub nose like the Genesis, and the other two were sharp and speedy, like a Sharknose Ferrari. The man driving all of them was the same man with the same black hair. He looked French in a stripy red and white top and black moustache. Sometimes he looked like Papa. Sometimes, depending on the light, the cars looked, not like cars, but like strange coloured fish. Or, if I changed the angle of my vision, they looked like three different clown faces, all mean, all with frightening noses and mean eyes. I could stare at them for ages, shifting my vision, making them other things. Sometimes, if I started really hard for long enough, I could make them jump out into 3D.

Why did you throw out everything when you sold the house in Coburg, Ornella? Was it because you knew all those things didn’t matter in the end, that without memories attached they were just junk shop rubbish? You put Nonna’s things out on the grass for the neighbours to pick through. You didn’t even keep a teapot, or a pair of earrings. You filled your new place with glossy new things with no memories attached. You thought Carlito was sentimental, the way he hung on to his christening bracelet. You rolled your eyes. But what are you now, without all those things? The other ladies here, they have display cases full of shells and trinkets and pictures of younger versions of themselves. Walking past, you can see their lives—not in summary, but at least in bits, in the things behind the glass. What could I put on your shelf? Your electric toothbrush? Your steel cherry-pitter? The nit-comb you dragged through my hair once a week, cursing other children’s parents?