That night you bathed me and read to me and snuggled next to me in the bed and smacked my fingers when I kept turning the reading light on and off. I lay there, cocooned inside your arm, and you read The Man with the Golden Gun till you fell asleep.

Mother had cooked for Papa, something Mother did less and less these days. Papa had taken a night off. This also was rare. Now that he was working with the Salvation Army, as well as running the restaurant, as well as running his Works on Paper gallery, we rarely saw him. There were homeless men who depended on him for their survival. He said this, astonished, to Mother, when she complained.

‘Yes, only—’ said Mother.

‘But Veda!’

Papa wished he had two or three or perhaps even four carbon copies of himself so he could spread his love properly around and make it fill every necessary corner. I understood this. I knew it when he came late to say goodnight to me. ‘Sorry I’m so late, O-yo,’ he said. ‘Little tacker.’

Men didn’t say ‘I love you’ in those days. They said, ‘little tacker,’ and ‘bruiser’ and ‘muscles’.

Mother had lit candles and set the table with a tablecloth. I don’t recall what she cooked. Mother’s cooking comes to me without precision, like Mother herself. Something baked, perhaps slightly overdone. She probably didn’t eat. She probably smoked cigarettes and drank the wine she’d got from The Whitehorse Inn on the corner of Barton Street and Burwood Road, and watched Papa as he forked her bland offering into his mouth. He would’ve played his part. ‘Darling,’ he would’ve said, ‘this is delicious!’ Then he would’ve pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette too.

Beside me, in the cane bed that I had insisted on accompanying you into, you snored your wet whistling snore, Ornella. But I was awake, and I could hear the buzz of Mother and Papa talking at the table. I heard the voices rise and fall like the voices in the Tablelands. I didn’t trust that rising and falling. Soon a glass would break or a cry would crack the air. There were bronze velveteen curtains draping the arch in the hallway. They were held to the wall by ropes of what I imagined to be braided hair. They were perfect for hiding in.

‘I doubt myself terribly,’ Mother was saying. ‘I feel so completely alone with it all.’ She had one elbow in the other, propping up her cigarette hand. She looked like Lauren Bacall. I had watched The Big Sleep and How To Marry a Millionaire.

‘You’re a genius, darling!’ said Papa. ‘My genius poet.’

‘Will you read them?’

Papa put his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘Darling … What do I know about poetry? I wouldn’t know what to say …’

‘But you don’t have to say anything. You can just read them. You just have to read them.’