We were not, of course, forgotten on the Armidale station platform. We were picked up in an FJ Holden ute by Mother’s father, who was my grandfather. He got out of the car with big, heavy old-man’s steps, said, ‘Hello, love’ and hoisted our luggage into the boot. His stomach was round and hard like a very large beachball. I was to call him ‘Gramp’. In the car, through the passenger window, which Gramp wound down to halfway, I could smell water and dust in the air. It was a soft smell like wet soil and it made me realise I was far away from Papa, who had lifted me up that morning at Spencer Street station and called me ‘my big beautiful boy’ and told me to look after my mother. Afterwards my little summer jacket had been hooked up strangely under my armpits and Mother got cross. Gramp took one hand off the steering wheel and, without taking his eyes from the road, passed me and Mother a very dead packet of Lifesavers with crumbly silver foil. Mother recovered one for me and one for herself and passed them back. ‘Same old you!’ she said to her father, and I saw him turn his face to smile at her.

Mother’s whole body changed when she saw the house. She sat up. She poked me in the ribs and said: ‘Look Owen, look where Mother grew up!’ She was almost pressing her face against the window. It was a big, dry wooden house. The roof was red like a storybook roof and from a distance, it looked like a squashed red hat. There were two more squashed hats, to the right of the house—bigger than the house, and flatter, grey in colour. Mother pointed to the distance. ‘These are the Tablelands,’ Mother said to me in a happy hushed voice, reaching for my hand, and I imagined the Tablelands as a series of great big dining tables with yellow tablecloths, covered in flat men’s hats.

Mother’s parents, my grandparents, were a pair. They fitted together. Gramp was grey-black and burnt like a gypsy; Grandmother was pink and white. They were salt and pepper shakers in a cruet set. Not like Mother and Papa, who came from entirely different crockery drawers.

On the verandah, Grandmother hugged me in a hot floral hug. She hugged Mother too, but with a little after-sigh that made Mother go immediately stiff. Mother’s sister Jane came behind Grandmother. She hugged me too. Cousin Marigold and her husband hugged me. Auntie Tilde and Uncle Frank hugged me. Hannah, Aunt Tilde’s freckly little daughter, did not hug me. She was thirteen and skinny as a piece of string. Skinny like a giraffe. She paid me no attention at all and I immediately, desperately, wanted her attention.