She looked at me patiently for a few moments, breathing her smoke in and out, watching me push the concrete back and forth under my feet, as if noticing for the first time how much too big I was for a tricycle.

‘I heard you had a bit of a fit back at the launch. Are you alright now?’

‘Faint,’ I said. ‘Not fit.’

‘Did I say fit? I meant faint. Sorry O-yo …’ She waved her hand with its cigarette and poured more wine. ‘It wasn’t a really good time for you to have a fainting fit.’

‘No,’ I said. I thought hard about what a person who didn’t care might say. ‘Sorry about that.’

She looked at me curiously. Her hair was golden in the light, though streaked with grey, and her face was still pretty, with white teeth and smooth skin. I had always believed her eyes to be grey, a little sickly, not normal, but they were actually quite blue tonight, not grey at all. She sat there, silent, looking straight at me, as though she were sizing me up. I thought something important was only a fraction of a second away. She was going to say something I would remember—on purpose or accidentally, it didn’t matter. She was going to say it. She took a puff of her cigarette and watched me. ‘What do you make of all this, O-yo?’ she said.

She was asking me a grown-up question. I was sitting on a little kids’ tricycle.

‘Come on, O-yo. What do you think about everything that goes on? Do you think all this is normal?’

I didn’t know what she expected of me. Was ‘all this’ a big thing or a little thing? Was she asking me how I felt right this second or in the whole complete history of my life? Did she really care or was she just making conversation with me?

‘I think …’ I said.

She looked at me intently. The blood rushed to my brain, trying to complete the sentence with a phrase of insight or wit—or honesty, even—but I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, not a single word. ‘I think …’ I said again.

And then a sudden chiming started up inside, like a hundred glasses being rapped by a hundred spoons. There were whooping voices. Mother sat instantly upright and put her hand on my arm. Her hand was little and cold. ‘Come on, it’s the speeches,’ she said. ‘Come on, O-yo. Papa’s had his pitcher in the paper; now it’s my turn!’

SABOTAGE

I can’t go on much with my memories of that evening, Ornella. Because of course, Mother did get her picture in the papers.

The Age put Mother on page two. The Australian, somewhat further back, in a smaller column, using a smaller photograph.