‘Henry believed the world owed him things. Plenty of people are like that, but with him it was an extreme trait. It’s true we fed that problem in some ways.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We didn’t give him every little thing he wanted—of course, you don’t do that with a child. But when it became apparent that he had mental health problems it was easier to give in. In secondary school his health got bad. One day he skipped class and called me at work. He said he knew what was wrong with him. He said he had been flying out of his body over the streets, singing the song of everyone’s lives, and he wanted to know if it had been on TV. Sometimes we didn’t know what to do. You could say we never found the right thing to do. I wrote his year twelve essays. He wanted to pass. We made sure of that. I told myself that he’d missed so much school on account of his difficulties that he deserved some kind of assistance. As soon as he got his driver’s licence he crashed into a parked car, a minor thing, and my husband went to the police station and took responsibility. When he got lost driving around Sydney—and this happened all the time—he’d find a phone booth and call us in a rage, demanding directions. As if it was our fault he got lost. Every problem he encountered was someone else’s fault. He wanted money. He wanted me to write his job applications and put them in the post. We did that for him. He had this thing inside him, this narcissism or whatever it was.’

‘Did he get help?’

‘We tried to get him help from when he was fourteen until he was well into his twenties. Psychologists. Psychiatrists. At the age of twenty-one he was committed for the first time. There’s a stigma around mentally ill men: that they’re all dangerous, that they turn out to be antisocial or criminals. That’s not fair. My husband, Adam, had depression all his life. With Henry, I don’t know how much of the shooting could be attributed to his illness, and how much was this anger underneath everything. I don’t know how to measure all the parts of him. I think every time he wanted something from the world he put himself on a path towards a disappointment that he resolved by lashing out. Always with words. And then he’d reset, and run off again towards a new meltdown. Eventually he found a job, he moved out. He bought a gun.’