8.

‘Maybe instead of watching boxing videos on YouTube you could figure out how to put a child to sleep,’ Sarah suggested one day. There were other things she suggested, too. One evening, I heard her laughing in the kitchen. But when I came in from the backyard, she wasn’t laughing. She was standing against the fridge, crying.

I tried to touch her, but she slapped my hand away. ‘We’re not working,’ she said at last. ‘There’s no family if there’s no us, and there’s no us.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, although I guess I did.

‘If this is the price,’ she said — our distance from one another, my practical assistance, which felt empty to her, though I myself felt utterly drained by it, completely exhausted, as if I were treading water at the very limit of myself — ‘If this is the price, then I wish we’d never done it.’

‘What do you want to do?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t you figure something out for once?’ she yelled.

But her rage was incoherent to me. It seemed to come from another world. It was not unlike my father’s, in that regard. She wanted to destroy everything. I felt something icy snap shut: my own contempt, like a steel roller-door, slamming down between us.

We argued until Sylvie woke again, and then Sarah ran to her, and I went out into the darkness and watered the garden, furiously pounding the fragile vegetables into the dirt. Overhead a few dull stars flickered above the suburbs, above the Hills hoist and the neighbour’s cable-television satellite dish.

The next day, I called my dad’s old friend Charlie.

‘You wanna know why your daddy topped himself, is that it?’ Charlie asked.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Nice. Yeah, I guess.’

‘Go,’ Sarah said, with what seemed like a flourish of generosity. ‘I hope it does you some good.’

9.

The thing I thought about when I thought about Charlie was a name — Emerald City — and a story that went with it. I remembered my father telling this story at the dinner table, more than once, throwing his arms out, grinning, holding back the crucial details like good cards, which he then laid down dramatically before us.

Yeah, yeah, I would think, and Tara would roll her eyes. The past was a foreign country, and who cared what they did there.

I rang Tara from the train station in Brisbane.

‘What do you remember about Charlie?’ I asked her.

Tara lived in Adelaide now. She had found her way. She was happy, I think. She had three dogs, a nice husband called Gus, and twins — tiny, freakishly identical girls with wild black hair. Sometimes they shook their heads at the same time and scared the hell out of me.