‘Do they always have to die or get paralysed, the monkeys?’ I said.

‘No,’ you said, very firmly. ‘Sometimes they get cured and then they get sent home to live with a kind family, or to a zoo. That’s what happens. Cross my heart.’

I didn’t believe you, but I went forward anyway, and got my sweet spoonful and my lifelong immunity and felt guilty for the rest of the night.

I didn’t tell them about the monkeys, but I did tell Barrington and Edith Knox about my ambitions for the Mary Martin Poetry Competition. I told them when Mother was not in the room, because I didn’t want to make her feel like I was copying her. I was highly conscious, from what kids in my grade said, that copying was a very bad thing to do. The girls at school were always accusing each other: Copycat from Ballarat, went to school and got the strap. ‘Mary Martin’s,’ I told the Knoxes, ‘will give me a book-hamper if I win!’

Mr Knox swore mildly. Mrs Knox crinkled her mouth and eyes into what her husband called her ‘persimmon frown’. Mother came back from the toilet and asked what the problem was.

‘Max bloody Harris’s bookshop,’ said Mr Knox. ‘Enticing future loyalty from the young with book hampers!’

Mother raised her eyebrows and didn’t ask. But when she later saw me lying on the bookshop floor, labouring over my poem with a grey-lead, smudging the paper horribly as I crossed out and rubbed out, she became interested enough to ask what I was doing.

‘I’m writing a poem,’ I admitted unhappily. The rhymes weren’t working. The lines kept getting too long and out of time.

‘Oh,’ said Mother. ‘Good lord!’ She raised her eyebrows at Mr and Mrs Knox but said no more. I took this to mean I had her approval. But I didn’t ask her for help, and she didn’t offer it. I was glad her book of poems hadn’t been published yet, because then, if I won, everyone would say Mother had written the poem, not me.

But a funny thing happened while I was writing my poem: I became completely deaf to everything Mother and Mr and Mrs Knox were saying. They might’ve been talking about anything; they might’ve been arguing, or crying, or laughing hysterically: I just didn’t notice. They ceased to exist. I fell deep into the land of my difficult, painful rhyme. And once I started, I couldn’t stop, and that was the really annoying part about it. It was like an itch that you couldn’t stop scratching once you got going. It was like a song playing round and round in your head. It was like a kind of medieval torture.

Monkeys crying, dead and dying,

Why must monkeys pay the cost?

Keep them alive, let them survive

Or their race will soon be lost.