Oh, but it all felt wrong, from the start. In the first instance, there was the perennial difficulty of how to explain Beatriz, because it was always so hard to find the right tone when introducing her to new people. Michael tended to say, ‘And this is Beatriz, she’s the real boss around here,’ which somehow always seemed to imply the opposite: that if there was a boss, it was probably him, and it certainly wasn’t Beatriz. Ali’s favoured introduction was: ‘This is Beatriz, she lives with us here,’ but this still left unclear the matter of why Beatriz should share their home; was she a lodger? Had she been taken in off the streets? Tonight, the questions hung only briefly in the air between guests and hosts before Beatriz herself made it clear, in a long and convoluted greeting, that she was uniquely useful to this household. When Moira and Greg arrived she’d been heading out to a church social, swathed in purple chiffon, but she stayed on, half in and half outside the house, to offer an expansive explanation of how to make authentic piri-piri chicken and then to give Michael unnecessary instructions for the slow and steady grilling of said chicken, how to apply the sauce to the cooked meat – with a bunch of parsley, never with a brush – and finally to urge and insist that all washing up should be left for her return, this last being the only one of her instructions that would be roundly ignored. There was a brief hiatus after she’d gone, as there might be following a small earth tremor, then Ali said, ‘So, congratulations, you’ve been well and truly Beatriz’d,’ and Moira and Greg laughed a little uncertainly. Then Cass showed up, already slightly merry, waving a clanking bag from the bottle shop, and Tahnee appeared just afterwards, straight from the airport, and so Stella – who hadn’t realised Tahnee was coming – asked if she could join them for dinner, which of course was fine, except that Greg turned out to be in charge of the radiation protection division of the EPA, and Stella had done her Year 12 research project on the continued contamination at the Maralinga nuclear-testing sites, and Tahnee’s grandfather – it transpired, as the conversation blundered on – had been among the scores and scores of indigenous people hounded off their ancestral land in the fifties and sixties by white men in army vehicles, so that the area could be experimentally nuked by the British government.

Michael stood at the barbecue, listening to the steady unravelling of the evening he’d had in mind. He waited for Tahnee to finish what she was saying, then cleared his throat. ‘This chicken’s done,’ he said. ‘Just needs the sauce now. Hope everyone’s hungry.’