Our parents were married against their own parents’ better judgement. Our father’s father was a Methodist minister, as I’ve mentioned. Tara and I only met him a handful of times. He was a large, funny, cruel man who spent the last years of his life alone and drunk in a caravan on the edge of a town called Katamatite, a couple of hours’ drive from Melbourne. The local football team had gained some notoriety many years earlier, when they defeated the neighbouring town of Wattville 78.19 (487) to 1.3 (9), but this seemed to be the place’s single defining feature. Our grandfather had disliked my mother for her Catholicism, and didn’t come to the wedding, a simple, irreverent ceremony in the backyard in Byron Street — there were photos — without shoes and with a lot of marijuana (you could see the giant crops in the background). They were a sweet-looking, nervous couple. Almost happy, it seemed. They had not known each other long, and they appeared to be waiting for the significance of the moment to dawn on them. My father in brown flares and a yellow shirt. My mother pregnant with me. They held hands as they cut the small cake. Our father’s mother was an art teacher and a painter, a distant sort of woman, who liked to believe she was descended from Spanish aristocracy. She was at the wedding, too, looking frail and dainty and uncomfortable on the low bamboo couch, but she died soon afterwards, before I was born.

Tara and I were both born before our parents realised how little they had in common, I think. Or how fundamentally their misconceptions had been betrayed. Or perhaps we helped reveal these misconceptions; perhaps we triggered some bomb that had been lying in wait, and which caused them each to change and move away from each other, to retreat into their own bitterness. They fought, but not often or outrageously. Our mother tended to withdraw, to wait out the storm. Sometimes I would find her sitting in the huge yellow Kingswood that was our car then, reading or crying. She kept a book called Lives of the Saints in the car for such occasions, which she also read at the traffic lights, sometimes, while she was driving. And yet our parents stayed together. They even loved each other. They stayed together, and they kept renovating the house, as if that might fix other things.