There was a seating plan. It went like this, clockwise: Kitten, with her hair in a long braid over one shoulder like a schoolgirl. Then Mr and Mrs Parish. Then you and Carlito. Susan and Gordon Bridie. John Honey and the curious blonde woman who had been at the cashbox. Rosa and Florence Oakey. Me. Mr and Mrs Knox. Mother. Finally, a newspaperman who kept trying to get his arm around Kitten, which she resisted, valiantly and cheerfully. A hundred cigarettes burned in a hundred ashtrays. The Poems of Veda Gray was everywhere. It was, in duplication, a strangely unsettling mirror, a reflection of something that didn’t exist: Mother’s mind, in book form.

There was nothing concrete in the conversations that night though; they were all featherweight. Or lighter, because feathers tend ultimately downwards, towards the ground, and these conversations just went up up up and dissolved into nothing. ‘And I couldn’t believe it when …’ ‘And she really thinks that he …’ ‘And it is a wonder, after all …’ ‘But you never said that, you only insinuated …’ ‘Oh of course it’s too much money …’ ‘I don’t go for it, I’m afraid, and I never will …’

In their wafting gaseous forms, the conversations that night were antithetical to memory, Ornella. They were a chain of present moments, popping like bubbles colliding with other bubbles.

But if the talk was elusive, forgotten in the next minute, the menu was pressed into archival service by ink. It is a fact separate to all others. I still have it in my Safety Cartridges Class IV ammunition box, where I keep the documentation of Life Before, should anyone ever need it.

On heavy cream paper, Papa offered his diners two choices for first course, but only one for second:

I primi

Pappa al pomodori

This was his accommodation of my vegetarianism. I consider it a significant compromise. A soup made of stale bread and milled tomatoes, rich with sage and garlic. No one had ever contemplated vegetarianism on a menu before. He was the first. He said this to me over and over.

o

Risotto agli Scampi

Prawns and fish stock, stewed into arborio rice, that weird tough nutty rice. Papa had been at the South Melbourne market that morning. That’s where you got the good prawns. The diners sucked the smell into their nostrils, but they did not call it a smell, they called it an aroma. I had long ago concluded that seafood was the worst of all meats. You could see their whole creature-hood. You could actually identify their spines, complete and intact. The speckled grey of fish skins. The bones. The feelers and crunchy transparent casing of a prawn. Black eyes. Heads and tails you could rip off with your teeth and spit onto the side of your plate …

I Secondi:

Papa’s special dish to celebrate Mother and alienate me:

Maiolino da latte intero arrostito: