‘Don’t tell Carlito,’ I said. Ornella pressed my hand and then tucked it inside her elbow, and we strode through the cool air and the grey people, with their hats and their bags and their raincoats. On the corner of your street in Richmond, a plum tree had started sprouting pink blossoms that week; I could see green buds on the trees in Collins Street. What sort of trees were those?

‘They are elms,’ you said to me. (That was when I realised you could read my mind.)

We missed the launch, in the end, you and I, Ornella. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t the end, after all, was it? We’d thought it would be the end—Papa and I thought it would be, anyway. ‘After Mother’s launch …’ had become a catchphrase, a marker of future order and harmony. Everything would become normal after Mother’s launch; years would fold backwards on each other as if they’d never been, and there’d only be ‘Veda Gray, the respected poet, with a sunlit desk and a stack of publications’. Papa would come home and kiss her head and hassle me to do my homework. Mother would be sure and mild, with a long elegant neck and a cashmere twin set like Mrs Parish.

Back at La Coccinella, you and I helped the waitstaff by folding napkins into shapes like birds and placing them on side plates. Yours looked like dying ducks collapsing in a pond, but mine were lithe and young and sat up on the plates like little lapping tongues saying ‘hello’ and inviting the diner to sit down and open them out. The restaurant was filled with the smell of meat. It made me feel sick again.

By dinnertime, though, I’d fully recovered. The heat of the restaurant had acclimatised me to the heat of people, so when they all came through the doors, holding Mother aloft on their praise—I imagined her on a kind of bier, strewing petals, like Cleopatra—I was able to laugh and let myself get pummelled by the men who knew me and kissed by the women. Mother made me sit by her and then changed her mind and went and sat somewhere else. Mrs Knox gave little nervous sighs and picked at the bird I had so cleverly composed for her side plate. Papa went straight to the kitchen, not even stopping to check on me first, like the food in the oven was more important than his son who had fainted in the bookshop. Fainting is for girls, Owen. He would only blame it on vegetarianism.