In September, Lucky was declared non-essential to the needs of the United States Army Air Force and discharged from the service through a separation centre in Chicago. He stayed with his parents for a fortnight or so, and Lucky’s strongest memory of that time returned him to an image of his mother drinking sage tea at a stool near the oven, in a shirtwaister from which she’d removed the belt. His father, at the table, rubbed methylated spirits into his arms (a Mallios remedy for sore muscles and joints). Mother spoke about the letters that came from Greece concerning the people she knew as a child in Pontus, the families who fled to Piraeus and stayed there and died in the famine of 1941–1942.

‘Panos went insane watching members of his family die,’ she said. ‘One after the other in the room they all shared in a shack.’

‘No surprise, huh, Pontians the first to die,’ said Lucky’s father.

‘The first to die were the women going without food for their children, like my cousin Maria,’ said Lucky’s mother. ‘And you know what they did with her body?’

‘What?’ said Lucky.

‘Dumped like garbage in the cemetery at night,’ she said. ‘No decent burial. So they could keep her ration card. They took her food even when she was dead!’

Why this particular memory, these ghastly details? He supposed the memory stuck because it made plain that his parents still thought about people far away, people they remembered from childhood and would never see again—and Lucky hoped this would be the way they’d speak about him, with real emotion, once he left town again. John the Terrible, naturally, did not visit the family home that fortnight. He’s busy always, Lucky’s father would say.

Lucky travelled back to Australia with a Dutch-owned shipping company, on a German-made steamer given to the Netherlands as war reparations. The signage everywhere remained in German: damen; herren; rauchen verboten. His dark berth smelled of old shoes and had the green metal atmosphere of an office bin. The tempo on board was domestic; some passengers made friends, swapped stories, played songs and crooned together in the lounge. Lucky did not enter into the ship’s everyday life. He shared a cabin with two chatty Scotsmen and each day couldn’t wait for the hour they left, somewhat reluctantly, to spend time with their families.