Papa looked at Mother with disgust. He looked at her as though she were an alien. Papa loved My Favourite Martian, but he didn’t like his wife being a Martian. ‘I can’t trust you, Veda,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re not a wife if you don’t tell your husband you’re going to do a thing like this.’ He put clothes in a case he had open on the floor. He folded a shirt and then dropped it in so it landed unfolded, which was stupid, I thought.

And didn’t he care that I was there: watching, hearing him? They didn’t even pretend to spare me anymore.

‘I’ve got to defend you to people,’ Papa said. He put a rubber band around a stack of bills from under the 8 oz weight and dropped it on top of the shirt. ‘I don’t know if I can.’

Then he left Mother on the couch with her fat dog. His tie was sticking out of the case where the hinges closed. He didn’t say a word to me, like I was invisible, like I was not even part of the story. He didn’t ask me what I wanted to do. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go with him. Mother cried and banged her head against the back of the couch a few times and asked me if I would stay home from school to keep her company the next day.

‘Of course,’ I said, patting her on the shoulder, and looking at the floor, wanting to run as far away from her as I possibly could.

It was Thursday night. Mother and I slept with blankets on the couch with the telly on in the background. On the third of September, Hamish McMannish, her Scots editor, wrote a blistering repudiation of Mother that was published in the Australian. I was on newspaper duty. I got it first thing from the milk bar, but I kept it folded all the way home. I had hoped there would be nothing in the paper, I hoped that Veda Gray had been blown over by other, more important things. Couldn’t there have been another aeroplane hijacking? But there it was, a headline that said: ‘End of Line for Disgraced Lady Poet’.

Mother tried to call John Honey in Sydney, where he was ‘advocating on her behalf’. Nowadays they would call it ‘damage control.’ But she couldn’t get through and at 2 pm his telegram arrived: ‘Book being pulped stop so sorry veda stop will telephone.’

I imagined all those Veda Grays, all those identical reflections of Mother’s mind, going through an enormous industrial-scale shredder, coming out the other end like grated cheese or the stuffing from packing crates when they’re filled with china. Excelsior, it’s called. It’s what burns up Leroy in The Bad Seed. Mother’s books: turned into murderous old excelsior. Totally unreadable. Lines with all the tops cut off. Or like when you write appleappleapple over something you don’t want anyone else ever to decipher.