I dated this fascination to the time when a girl from my school – not in my year, she was in year twelve while I was in year eight – suddenly died. Georgia. She hadn’t been ill, hadn’t suffered an accident. She just died one night in her sleep.

‘That happens with young people sometimes,’ I heard one of the teachers, comfortably in her fifties and out of danger, say to another. ‘They just go to sleep and don’t wake up.’

At a number of slumber parties afterwards, other girls and I would try to summon Georgia’s ghost. We held seances, lighting candles, joining hands, closing our eyes, chanting. One girl’s liberal-minded parents even bought her a ouija board for her birthday, and we’d sit there with our fingers on the planchette, asking questions.

We asked Georgia if she was in the room, and the planchette always slid to yes.

We asked Georgia if she’d kissed a boy before she died and she said yes.

We asked Georgia if it hurt to die and she said no.

Everyone was giddy and nervous, but gradually, through a certain quality to their shrieks and shudders, I came to realise I was the only one there harbouring a genuine belief that Georgia’s ghost was real, and truly wanted to speak with us. I always expected to see Georgia, perhaps translucent and in a fluttering nightgown, strands of her hair rising like she was channelling static. I would pray to her, cobbling together parts of other prayers: Dear Georgia, proteggimi, now and in the hour of my death.

We asked, once, which of us would die next.

I held my breath, certain she would spell out my name. Instead the planchette slid to B. Then E. She spelled out Bethany. I looked over at Bethany with a new and abiding disgust.

As an adult, I sometimes still thought of Georgia, still imagined I might call her up; I hoped to see her at the end of my bed, or behind me in the clearing steam in the bathroom mirror.

The house was at the bottom of a cul-de-sac that sloped downwards as if into a dell. There were trees growing on the nature strip: an English oak, a Monterey cypress, several eucalypts. All the houses on that street had names, even the ones that had been built in recent years: Arundel, Jettysprite, Currawong… The fences were like walls, high and smooth, made from stone or concrete slabs. When we’d attended the inspection, the fence outside the murder house had a billboard attached. Its headline read: THIS IS THE ONE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

Everything was so private, so dignified. We could be dignified too, I thought, living in a place like this.