It was a good job most of the time, I should say that. It was fine. I liked the team, the research was interesting, and it was certainly more satisfying than the supermarket where I’d previously worked, managing internal comms, and where prices were always down down down! And yet, exhausted as I was, it was sometimes hard to know if anything I was doing was real. I was itchy with fatigue, and often fell asleep at my desk and dreamt tiny, alarming dreams. That afternoon, I dreamt of a house surrounded by a black forest. I dreamt I found my guard dog mauled almost to death by wolves. Her guts had spilt out onto the wet grass. I was forced to slit her throat with a razor blade. When I woke up, I was still holding my coffee above the keyboard. Bec was staring at me with that look of hers: pity mingled with fear. I smiled at her and decided to call Abbie again. Then, remembering his advice, I decided not to. Speak to Denis, he’d told me. So I did. I found Denis’s number online, and, eventually, I called him instead.

6.

6.

Denis was a speech pathologist, it turned out. All these years I’d thought my father had said palaeontologist, so I was confused for a while. I’d even done some research and been side-tracked by the stories of a palaeontologist called Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, his time in China, his journeys in India and Egypt, and his obsession, paradoxical as it seemed, with the future of the universe. It didn’t matter. None of this was related to Denis.

His secretary answered and put me through.

He had a gruff, deadpan manner. ‘Are you working?’ he asked. ‘A wife? Kids?’

A few weeks later, I took the day off work — without telling Sarah — and drove out to visit him.

The speech-services building was opposite a big shopping centre in Ascot Vale, which was a suburb I’d never had much to do with. The roads were quiet that afternoon, and, coming down Dawson Street, I had time to slow, although I don’t know why I did, to glimpse the racecourse as I passed, which seemed luminous there in its patience, with its empty grandstands and its incongruous, manicured hedges in flower. The air was warm — it was almost spring, although in my own life it seemed as if everything was coming to an end. Afterwards, on the way back home, a mist of grey rain came down over the suburbs, and the light above the racetrack turned glassy. I pulled over and got out near the ambulance gate to walk the perimeter. In one spot, the chain-link fence had been ripped away from the ground, and, without thinking, I pulled it aside and snuck into the stadium. Then I made my way down the embankment, jumped a wooden barrier, and walked out onto the fresh, green turf.