‘G’day Abbie, it’s Joe, how’s it going?’

A pause.

‘Ahh, Brat.’

Brat was the name he’d called me as a teenager. Never Joe.

‘I was just ringing because. Did you get my message? I was wondering if you felt like having a chat about Dad sometime.’

‘Yeah, right,’ he said.

It was a voice I knew so well. I thought of the night he’d come back to Melbourne, prodigal somehow, dragging behind him that hint of scandal. That would have been 1993, a good year as far as I was concerned. The year Jurassic Park was released. The year Essendon won the Premiership, from nowhere. I was fifteen years old. We were eating dinner. Without knocking, Abbie simply strolled into the house, sat down at the table, and began helping himself. My mother burst into tears. ‘You shit,’ she said, getting up to hug him. My father laughed nervously, but soon enough he was leaning back in his chair, telling jokes, as if something in him had been released.