I was a big boy, I did understand: everything was arranged to give Mother time and space to work on her poems. But I didn’t get in her way. I knew how to play by myself and watch TV by myself. If I wasn’t there, she’d be alone all day long. She’d go mad. She’d even said it to me: ‘I’d go mad,’ she’d said, ‘if it wasn’t for you, O-yo’. So why was I the problem that had to go away to different houses with different dinnertimes, and no TV, and toys that were so new they weren’t even soft yet? It made me want to kick things I loved: like my meccano and the tin telephones Aunt Tilde sent down from the Tablelands. It made me want to kick the things that would crack and get dented and maybe even hurt my foot. It made me want to bash things.

And whenever I got home from Papa’s or your place or the Parishes, Mother was not working anyway. She was staring into space or drinking wine on the couch with a record on. Once Papa and I got home and we couldn’t even find her for a whole hour, until we searched in the back garden, right down at the neighbour’s fence, and she was asleep on a patch of grass that was still warm from the sun, a teacup next to her with yellow stuff in it.

On Sundays, Papa took me to the restaurant, where he made big stews full of meat and vegetables for the homeless men. He called it minestrone, and at the end he added pasta shells. I wished the pasta-makers made seahorses and starfish as well as shells. Papa gave me pasta dough and I cut out my own shapes, but they ended up looking like cups or bowls, or essentially, shells anyway. He threw them in the broth.

Les Preston came at five o’clock to load the van. Les was an ex-boxer. His muscles were hard, but old, shrunken down like an apple core. He’d left school, like Papa, at thirteen, served in New Guinea, seen atrocities. He was tough. But though he said he looked like a ‘fucking fairy’ buttering bread or ladling soup alongside Papa and me at the Salvos, sometimes his eyes got teary, or he clouted Papa on the back a little too hard, like he really wanted to hug him, or he went over and shared a smoke with one of the men with dirty faces and bad teeth. He made rings for his granddaughters out of ten-cent coins.

I liked being with these two small, hard men as they fed the other hard men: men with tacky eyes and red noses, stinking trousers and crazed voices; conmen and gamblers and shadows of their former selves. They all got fed. Once Papa even cooked them roast pork. He got a deal at the Vic Market. He made gravy and apple sauce and roast potatoes and peas. Major Paulie shoved the roasting trays in the gargantuan ovens at the Salvos kitchen to heat them up and get the skin crunchy. The men chewed on the crackling, and the ones without teeth sucked it.