He has a lost future in mind for me. In it, I’m a success, his kind of success. An ophthalmologist, a radiologist. Wickham Terrace, the Wesley, Brisbane’s better private hospitals. I skied for decades without paying for it, the best slopes in the world, the best new powder. I still ski in my dreams, endless double black diamonds.

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ he says. Sweat runs into his eyes. He picks up his towel and presses it against his face.

‘I did Medicine because I got the TE score. Not even that. It’s just where I ended up, where my subjects took me. Subjects and marks. I don’t lie awake at night wishing I was in Brisbane looking at skin rashes.’

‘Yeah, but, still . . .’ Sweat drips from his chin and nose onto the mat. ‘Things got complicated. Which is no excuse, but . . .’

‘It wasn’t for me. It wasn’t that complicated. If you want to make it simple, I might have bombed out anyway. Probably would have. But turning up after the first-semester results saying my father had died? They couldn’t have been nicer. The dean said I could stick with it and they’d try to support me, or they could wipe my results and I could start Med again the next year, or I could do something else. So, it was my escape. It got me out without penalty.’

Outside, Lacy finishes the call, sets her phone down on the wall, stretches like a basking cat and gazes out across the bay. My knee is jammed against the seat’s handgrip, so I push myself up to a standing position and straighten my leg. Simon stands too.

‘Anyway, it was Mum who should have been there for me,’ I tell him. ‘It wasn’t your job. And she was a bit too busy drinking. The nineties wasn’t her best decade.’

‘Yeah.’ He’s holding his training notes in his hands, sweat streaking the plastic. ‘Really? Well, I would like to have handled it differently.’ He glances outside, to Lacy, who is leaning on the wall with both hands, still looking across the water. ‘I want to . . . yeah.’ He checks his notes, runs his finger down the list of exercises. ‘Nearly done.’

I move around to the next station on his machine and set it up for some lat pull-downs.

Our mother’s drinking predated our father’s death, though it accelerated for a few years after. It’s not as simple as putting it down to grief. It was more like someone with a hobby suddenly having more time for hobbies. She travelled to places he had never wanted to go, spent time with people he hadn’t liked, drifted away from some friends I’d thought were mutual. None of the travel, none of the drinking, seemed to give her the joy it was supposed to.