Mr Parish had a new collection out that the reviewers said ‘eclipsed all his previous work’. One reviewer said it put him in place ‘as Australia’s preeminent poet’. The poems were in very small print on yellowish paper and they contained phrases like ‘this morganatic marriage’ and ‘in the pocked shade’. It seemed like gobbledegook to me and I didn’t know how he got away with it. There was not a single line that made sense. There were hardly even any rhymes. But grown men in suits came to discuss it with him at lunchtime so it had to be important. I heard them, trying to get to the bottom of ‘morganatic marriage’, and Mr Parish genially laughing in his accommodating laughing voice that meant he didn’t want to answer. Mrs Parish said her favourite poem in the collection was ‘The Cumquat Rose’, which was not a real rose but she wished it was because she could imagine it, right down to its smell and its colour.

But as far as I was concerned, Mrs Parish was doing something much more exciting than Mr Parish’s poetry collection, even if he did get his picture in the paper. Mrs Parish was planning a trip to Japan. She had booked an aeroplane flight to Tokyo. The only problem was Mrs Parish was terrified of flying. She could barely bring the subject up. ‘Oh Owen,’ she said, ‘That enormous plane, and all of us passengers in it, I just can’t see how the physics works!’ Every time she talked about the plane, she put her hand on her chest and went a little white. I offered to go with her—I was desperate to go on a real live plane and I could hold her hand if it got bumpy—and she said, ‘Oh Owen! I would love to take you with me’ and squeezed my shoulder and shook her head. Then she tried to hold my hand, but I felt funny about it. So I took mine away and then felt even more funny.