I guess Dad could tell after I’d finished my lunch that I was really relaxed, that I was calm. He asked, ‘Do you know why we’re here?’

I thought it was pretty obvious. ‘Because you wanted me to get better. You wanted me to get on top of Mum’s stuff, too.’

Caitlin took his hand and he said, ‘Not only you, us, as a family. You know, we need to work things out, Phoebe. It’s no good how we’ve been going.’

I knew that being back home was good for me, but I didn’t know how it could miraculously solve all of my problems with Mum and stop Dad from getting upset and yelling at me, yelling at Caitlin, and all the stuff that’d been going on.

Dad said, ‘When I was a kid, there was a lot of alcohol around. Sometimes it’d be fun, you know, having a party and seeing the Uncles and Aunties drink. They’d get drunk and crack jokes and they’d dance around and sing, and sometimes they’d give us money. But sometimes a bit of drink would get into people, stir up old wounds, and that’s when the arguments would break out, and sometimes there’d be fighting. And it’s not nice to see people you love fighting, Phoebe.’

‘Nanna and Poppa don’t drink, though,’ I said.

‘Nah they don’t, probably because they’ve seen so much pain from it. Pop doesn’t drink because he hates all of the stereotypes about Aboriginal people being drunks.’

‘Well, that’s not true,’ Caitlin said.

‘Of course not,’ Dad answered. ‘Statistically, our mob drink a lot less than whitefellas, it’s just that some people have got a bit more pain to kill and it’s a bit harder to hide the drink when you’re poor.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Some of our people like to drink outdoors, in a park or something, or they drink outside because they’ve got nowhere else to go. And if you had X-ray vision and looked around the city, you’d see hundreds of whitefellas drinking in pubs, hotel rooms, their homes, everywhere.’

‘I guess,’ I said, imagining Mum as one of the people among all of those drinkers, sitting up at the bar in some cheap hotel.