A text – Zac: Mission accomplished! I got the goods!

From me: Oh, me too! Now we have loads! Great!

I’d thought it best to hedge our bets, just in case. He’d been given the number of someone who worked and dealt MDMA from a pizza takeaway in Surrey Hills and had gone there by train the night before.

Zac: Had to order a Hawaiian for cover :)

Me: Pro move!

Zac: It was pretty tasty, actually.

* * *

Zac and I were growing closer, despite the nearly twenty-year age gap. I’d been introduced to him at Josh’s birthday party six weeks earlier. Josh was six years my junior, Mel ten years his junior, her friend Zac two years her junior. We were skimming-stones bouncing along the surface of early to mid-adulthood.

I was taken with Zac’s manner, his blend of haughtiness and calm, and the sense I often had that young people were smarter than I was at their age, better at knowing who they were. It was the world they’d grown up in, no doubt. Such condescending thoughts were hard to suppress, as was the impression that Zac – blinking behind designer glasses, slim and attractive – was a reluctant genius. He was less than a fortnight into his new job as a regional manager at Trend, said he’d only ever worked for luxury brands. His accent was difficult to place. He sounded posh, maybe privately educated.

‘I’m actually from Montevideo in Uruguay,’ he said, flicking ash over Josh’s balcony, adjusting his glasses.

‘You don’t sound it.’

‘Me lo tomaré como un cumplido.’

‘Huh?’

‘It means thank you very much. That’s lovely or whatever.’

He’d been in Australia, mostly Perth, since he was thirteen, the son of a world-renowned lyricist who’d come to the country for work and dumped him with his half-brother before leaving.

‘What about your old man?’ I asked.

‘Never met him. He lives in Singapore, apparently.’

‘And your half-brother?’

‘What about him?’

‘Fuck, I don’t know, man. Do you get on?’

‘Not really, no.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘He’s a transvestite or whatever – not that I mind that … But he got lots of abuse at school, which meant I got a lot, too. That, and the fact I was this chubby little South American kid with glasses called Jerónimo.’

‘Your name’s not Zac?’

‘It is now,’ he said. ‘I changed it. I mean, do you blame me?’

* * *

I saw him at Josh’s apartment a fortnight later, on a rare night out for me and Sarah. Her parents, Carly and Chris, had taken the kids camping in Pyalong overnight, in part to celebrate Sophie’s fifth birthday. Carly had hugged me when I dropped them off, always did. Chris too. My relationship with my in-laws … My grief, Sarah’s grief – it had taken a toll. Chris’s nervous breakdown a few years earlier hadn’t helped.