They walked through a car rental lot about 10 am, and Emily was touched by the suggestive desolation of the space, which made her think of other people’s completed holidays, and the return to normal lives, the photographs and toys these strangers might have brought home. Her stepfather, Rick, took his time and chose a van: a yellow Toyota with a maroon stripe down the centre of the roof. His smile composed and constant, he packed their suitcases into the van and, on the road, explained the route out of Sydney with an enthusiasm that Emily had never seen and which she later realised was his way of working through a spell of nervousness, his increasing dread.

At a set of traffic lights, Emily’s mother, Heidi, tuned the radio and after a choppy rasp of static the voice of a radio presenter came through: ‘Grab your hat, it’s gonna be a scorcher!’

‘My favourite station growing up,’ said Emily’s mother.

The announcer’s overexcited voice filled the car like soap bubbles pumped through the window.

Rick deadpanned: ‘Grab your hat, it’s gonna be a scorcher.’

The family set themselves two aims for the holiday: to visit Emily’s grandparents, and to ‘get away from things’, as Heidi put it. ‘Things’ being Ian Asquith’s suicide the previous year. Emily was having trouble sleeping; every other night she wet the bed; often she didn’t remember what had happened earlier in the day, couldn’t remember the day of the week, seemed to be excluded from normal temporality.

They drove westwards out of Sydney, Emily yawning, her mother telling stories, her stepfather eating apples with only one hand on the wheel, the van cutting into the hazy distance. By midday, Emily’s eyes had adjusted to the bush, and she no longer saw repetition and monotony but a sequence of giant components. The dirt slightly reddened. The land flattened. The immensity of the country, the giant sky, passed into her mind. The vinyl seats burned her legs when she stretched out. Her mother leaned forwards and stared out the windscreen, looking for kangaroos. ‘There’s one!’ she’d say, and her stepfather slowed down and pressed the horn. Whenever the car went over a cattle grid, Rick said: ‘Grab your hat, it’s gonna be a scorcher!’

Emily took the view that her parents’ improvised jokes (which were unfunny) also implicitly excluded her. Perhaps her Australian grandparents might be different (she’d never met them), they might extend themselves, might offer what other children seemed to receive from their grandparents—a kind of conspiratorial relationship, free from the burden of parenting. She wanted to know that delight, whatever it was, and naturally she hoped to be spoiled. Rick’s parents were dead. Her paternal grandparents may as well have died with her father.