Achilles said: ‘On Pitt Street there’s a cafe called the California. I saw a picture in one of those magazines. The word California is spelled in tiles on the cafe floor. Big letters, you know, C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A. Those bastards have American everything, sundaes and soda fountains and the full milk bar experience. But they don’t have a real American. Do you understand what a theme is?’

‘Yes,’ said Lucky. ‘I understand.’

‘You are our real American.’

Valia wanted to know: ‘Where is this going?’

Achilles: ‘I want our customers to have a genuine Australian-American-Greek milk bar-cafe education. Lemon and pineapple drinks, that’s the next favourite thing. A soda fountain, sundaes, shakes of milk. People will eat it up. Maybe a US sign for display, big like CALIFORNIA. We want an American theme. Name some other states in America.’

‘Illinois? That’s where I was born.’

‘I can’t see it in my mind. Name me some more.’

6.

After a busy lunch service, Penny informed her father she was more than friends with Walter (she used his real name, Waltraud). She said they had no plans yet to become what she described as ‘matrimonially established’ (this term she took from Great Expectations). She sought to be honest with her father. The news she presented to Achilles had been written down, memorised, and had rested patiently in her pocket for a whole week, the speech practised many times in private. Penny hoped she could tell her father the things she might have told her mother. Walter, a builder, had expressed a wish to eventually study science, and this pleased her, Penny told her father, because next year she hoped to attend the University of Sydney. She was waiting for a letter from the faculty.

The scene was played out in Penny’s room. Achilles stood and she sat at her desk, surplus classroom furniture, with four books before her: uppermost in the pile was A Girl of the Limberlost, which Penny had read twice. After she finished speaking, Achilles asked his daughter to stretch out her arms in front. This she did. He’d said nothing about Walter. She imagined her father was looking for marks or bruises, worried that Walter might have hurt her. She blithely said, ‘Here,’ and turned over her forearms, hardly thicker than her wrists. Her palms faced upwards, both hands rested on the books, and she waited for her father to acknowledge that there were no marks on her body. Achilles Asproyerakas left the room then returned with his olive-wood club and he brought the cudgel down across her arms, breaking bone and fracturing the wooden desktop with a splintery shattering crack. The moment he heard Penny’s cries—the worst sound Achilles ever heard—he was no longer angry with his daughter.