At which point … I’m sorry to just clumsily regurgitate the whole thing like this without any … without any particular style or finesse, but I’m actually re-telling this sorry tale to … to myself if you must know. To try and make some kind of sense out of it. Because – like so many other stories in my life thus far – it doesn’t really add up. Which I suppose is the story of my life – my destiny (if you want to get all deep and meaningful about it) – it simply doesn’t add up. My life is an incorrect sum. A bad piece of algebra. And that is who I am. My story will always have a big, red cross stuck in the margin at the side of it. Mr Huff, you are wrong, it proclaims. Mr Huff, you are simply wrong.

But anyhow … I was just trying to … to backtrack, to apologize to Miss Hahn for my terrible blunder when who should turn up but Mrs Sage Meadows – a Florence Nightingale in heels! – bearing a bloody cake. And Miss Hahn closed down. She shut down. Whatever there was between us – before – was gone. In an instant.

It was difficult. Mrs Meadows – for some reason – seemed confused and irritated that Miss Hahn was … and I was confused and irritated that Mrs Meadows was …

Either way, Mrs Meadows put the cake down on to the kitchen counter and then started making a big fuss about … This was odd. Mrs Meadows was just trying to pass off a difficult social situation as best she could, and then suddenly (that part is a bit of a blur, if I’m honest) she was looking at the coat – at the child’s coat – which Miss Hahn had just hung over the back of a chair before preparing to dash off (she had that look – that look Miss Hahn always gets when she longs to escape. Which is a look I am all too familiar with, alas). Anyway, Mrs Meadows started cooing over it (as Mrs Meadows is wont to do – coo over things) and then out of the blue she started inspecting it with a real intensity … her eyes lit up.

‘How extraordinary!’ she exclaimed, reaching into her handbag, removing a rather large and ungainly pair of heavy, tortoiseshell glasses and applying them to her nose. ‘What exactly is this thing?’

‘It’s Orla’s coat,’ Miss Hahn informed her (moving from foot to foot, eye on the door), ‘Orla’s possum-skin coat. It was a family heirloom, passed down through several generations on the Aboriginal side of the family. The first time Orla saw the Virgin Mary, in a vision, after an attack of heatstroke, Mary was wearing a possum-skin coat just like this one. It’s actually very old.’

Mrs Sage Meadows scratched her head. ‘But how … how odd,’ she said.

‘Odd?’ Miss Hahn echoed.

‘Yes. Odd … Strange.’