I know that for sure because it was the same officer who came up to my mother at the state funeral with a hefty slice of cake and said, ‘I’ll show you where I shot him,’ before smearing a finger of cream across her belly and growling, ‘Here’, tracing a lingering sticky spiral on her hip, ‘Here’, and then squashing the rest of the cake in the centre of her chest: ‘and here’.

My mother didn’t flinch, but I remember hearing her let out a long-held breath through her nose, as the cop returned to a circle of his back-slapping friends.

This is one of those tricks writers use, I’m afraid. The state funeral I attended as a child was not my father’s. It was for the man he killed. My mother said we had to go because it was the right thing to do. She said there’d be TV cameras, and they’d talk about us if we went but they’d talk about us more if we didn’t. And that’s when I learned what it was like to be an outcast. I wasn’t me anymore. Not just for the funeral, at school too. And later, when I had to tell a girl I was dating about my childhood. And when I didn’t want to tell a girl about my childhood but she googled me anyway. (Erin, with her own traumas of a violent father, had been one of the first to understand me on this level.) There was that time a detective from Queensland drove the ten hours to Sydney just to accuse a Cunningham of an unsolved assault on his beat. I was sixteen at the time and had never left the state. I imagine it was a long drive back north for that bloke, sitting with the humiliation of not only his prime suspect being a teenager without a driver’s licence but also Marcelo’s telling him to shove his unreliable hair analysis up himself. My point is, our name pops up on a list, even for something as fallible as hair matching (not permitted in courtrooms since the 90s for a reason), and it may as well be highlighted. Like when Detective McMuffin had me holed up in an interview room a couple of decades later and wouldn’t believe anything I was telling him. I wasn’t Ernest Cunningham anymore. I was ‘his kid’. My mother became ‘his widow’. Our family name was an invisible tattoo: we were the family of a cop-killer.