‘I promise, babe, I’ll be better this time,’ he sang. ‘Everything is gonna be fi-i-ine!’

She considered calling him, but a door was banging repetitively behind her in the wind. Turning, she caught sight of her own reflection in the window, and was briefly annoyed at her hair, and then at herself for caring about it. She decided not to call. She dropped offline, felt the sad offline tune play through her. That plunging feeling, like a kind of grief. It mingled with the nausea in a way that seemed about right. She’d been chewing apple-flavoured gum, but apple flavour no longer did the trick. Ginger was what she needed, but she was all out of ginger. Also, she had a painful ulcer in her mouth. Also, she was pregnant. The reality lurched through her again. No one she knew had ever been pregnant. She was thirty-one years old, and she didn’t want a baby. Obviously. She and Harlow had agreed about that a long time ago, though neither of them had got round to having the op. The op was insanely expensive. As would be what she’d have to do now. She wasn’t sure how they were going to afford it, which was, of course, the idea. But it was cruel to bring a child into the world. Cruel and selfish. That was still Harlow’s position. ‘Our position,’ he had clarified, and she had hated him for that, though he had meant, or had meant to mean — and she knew this — not simply his and her position, but rather The Group’s position, the whole reason they lived where they lived, the precondition for their apparent semi-happiness. If that was indeed what it was. It was a communal set-up across seven houses in suburban Sydney. They had goats and bees and grew a lot of their own food, though Sylvie wasn’t particularly interested in that aspect of the arrangement. She liked the parties, the big dinners, the easy way you could come and go in a crowd. She liked standing on the roof at dusk, high on whatever, in music, watching the bats come over. There were twenty-five adults and no kids. That was the position.

‘Our position?’ she’d replied, seeing herself outraged as if from afar, but not quite believing it.

Harlow had come towards her. ‘What I meant,’ he’d said. ‘Babe, come on. You know what I mean. Don’t be like that.’