By the time school had finished, the sickness from the cigarettes had receded, so I smoked another one. I loitered outside the school grounds and kicked the dust and didn’t know where to go. Which home should I go to? I couldn’t bear to see Mother. I couldn’t bear how the fight had gone out of her. I knew she needed sympathy, but I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shake her and then give her a slap whack across her cheekbones. Toughen up, you stupid broad. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I didn’t want to go to Papa either—La Coccinella was the scene of a crime, and now he’d gone off with his stuff in a suitcase, I was the man of the house. He’d stepped down. I was not going running back. And I wouldn’t go to you Ornella because you’d purse your lips about Mother and shake your head, and I couldn’t bear that either. And of course I would not go to Mr Parish. I wanted to kill him.

The cigarette made me sick but it also made me feel tough and self-possessed. Cigarettes made Mother feel elegant. Cigarettes made Mr Parish guilty, Kitten saucy, Rosa cough. Cigarettes ruined Papa’s palate.

Cigarettes made me separate from all of them. I went and sat at the Yarra River, under the bridge where the graffiti and broken bottles were. No one was around. A dog came past. A factory belched something that bubbled into the brown water. The trams rattled overhead. I could just climb up into the undercarriage of the bridge, I could just hold on for a bit, and look down at the water and let myself go …

The light got lower. I was looking west. The sky was getting orange. The sky was getting darker and darker orange. No one knew where I was. I wasn’t going to climb into the undercarriage of the bridge. But if I’d had a blanket, I could’ve just rolled up in my blanket and gone to sleep …

I didn’t have a blanket. I shivered. I zipped up my jacket and put my satchel on my back, and I walked along the ragged river pathway to Pridmore Park, where the loneliest trees in the world lived. Once, the river flooded and all the trees in Pridmore Park were up to their middles in brown muddy water. The whole park became a dirty big lake. Right up to the fence-lines. Right up to where the concrete began. It was spooky.

I would go home to Mother and she would see what a good son I was.