Clementina took Hal, Jessie and Steven to South Beach on the day I decided we must talk, Magnus and I. A Saturday, it was, and it had to be done before he cycled off to the Oddfellows, his hotel of choice on weekends. There’d be no point once he’d started drinking. I had my words prepared, in order in my mind, and they seemed reasonable when I said them to myself, but then I had to catch my breath because nothing was reasonable about this, nothing made sense. It was beyond imagining that I would ever have need to say such words to Magnus Tulloch.

I sat with him at the kitchen table, hating—hating—that he was fidgeting and anxious to be gone, and that I could not let him, no. I had to be the one to speak, the voice he didn’t want to hear.

Look at him there.

Look at you.

When did you get so thin? What are you hearing when you jerk your head like that? You would talk to me once. I knew about the ringing in your ears that never went away. Is that what you’re hearing now, trying to shake free? Or is it noise I canna imagine, that you never talk about, never have told me? When did you get so pale? Where are we, Magnus Tulloch, where am I in your face now, your face I have loved so long, your face that once held all we were, safe, to shine back at me, assure me that we were the thing that would always be? When did you get so lost? Now it is hollowed out, your young face old, empty like the shape left in bedsheets that speaks of someone who once was there. I was there, in your face, once …

I said what I had prepared myself to say.

He gave me scant hearing. Grunted to let me know he had heard, so I would not say it again. A conversation it was not. And I didn’t want to but had to keep going. Mrs Laskon’s rent … the children … food … it couldn’t be Clementina’s burden alone, now, could it?

Mute, he emptied a trouser pocket onto the kitchen table, a handful of coins, but his wallet remained in the other. It gutted me—in, twist, flick—that look as he left. It told me plain, plain as flour, that if it came right down to it, he would be choosing oblivion over all of us.

One night a few weeks after that, Paulie Garrioch saw him home, leaving the bike chained to the iron railings outside the Beaconsfield. Magnus Tulloch wheezed all the way, Paulie said, coughin’ like his lungs’d bash clean through his ribs. He walked him from the bus on the Mandurah road with a steadying arm.

Needs a doctor, he do, Paulie panted as they struggled through the door and Magnus collapsed on a kitchen chair.