MELBOURNE, 14:25

The sun was high and strident over the Botanic Gardens as Sal paced the dirt track, passed at intervals by mad hot-weather runners, dog-walkers, and sometimes the even more insane people who ran with dogs. Away to the left were the sports stadia, domes and polygons, looking like a series of spaceships that had landed in town. There was the familiar eucalyptus smell, the little birds that hopped onto the path: a cheeping finch, sometimes a black and white ibis, its comical long beak scanning the ground like a blind person’s walking stick.

As usual, the processing space required by all these sensory pleasures took her out of her head, and so did the orderly data of her fitness watch. Two thousand three hundred steps. Heart rate slightly high, but good. One hundred and sixty-two calories. But her phone was intruding, wanting to drag her into it again; she snapped back into the now to find that she’d missed a Facebook notification and that a call was coming in right at this moment. There was no way she could not answer Mum, not at the best of times, let alone now: even though this was the third call in an hour. ‘I mean, for the love of …’ she said out loud, and pressed to reply.

Somehow, Mum took four rings to pick up. What the fuck else could she be doing in these circumstances but waiting for the phone? Planning a barn dance? But the words jarred, because that was something Dad used to say.

‘Mum?’

Sal’s heartbeat felt fast and bit scatty, like someone not very accomplished was playing the drums.

‘I just – I didn’t know what to do, Sally, I don’t know what to do at all, so I … I’m just calling you again, that’s all, in case …’

The plaintive tone, the unvarnished need for help, socked Sal in the heart with immediate remorse. She hadn’t heard her mother like this since Dad died.

‘All right. Mum. Listen. People are … all of us are trying. I’ve been calling James and, and tried a couple of his friends.’ Sal felt like a politician trying to spin an unpopular policy change, even though it was true: she’d sent messages to Karl, to anyone else connected with James who was still on her phone. ‘And I’ve just, literally now, just had a message come in on Facebook.’

‘Facebook,’ Mum repeated, doubtfully. Sal gave a deep, ten-second-long sigh, breathing out into the warmth, the stillness. She and James had spent most of an evening coaching Mum in the art of Facebook; largely James, she supposed, if she was honest. But no, it was still too much hassle, it seemed, just like it was too much hassle for Jean to even get a mobile.