‘Jesus, Dad,’ Charlie says. ‘Harsh.’

‘And wrong,’ I say. ‘It’s not showing off. It’s studying, to pursue a profession. Not grounds for personal insult. I’m not going back to uni to further the cause of women, though it’d be fine if I was. I want to be a lawyer because I care that people who are vulnerable, poor, wrongly accused, have an advocate, Dad. You might not have noticed, but I’m good at helping people. I’ve had a lot of practice.’ I look at Charlie. ‘I meant –’

‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I get it.’

‘So you’ll turn your back on Mark and your kids? Leave them to fend for themselves so you can help some strangers, puff yourself up?’

‘That is not what I’m doing.’ Breathe in, out. ‘Why does this annoy you so much anyway? Mark’s proud of me. Why can’t you be?’

He pauses. ‘Mark’s a good man. You did well there. I was impressed with the piece he did on the National Hotel commission. Very thorough. He’d make a good lawyer.’

Charlie offers me an expression that combines sympathy with the unspoken advice to drop the topic.

‘Some people want to be mothers, you know,’ Dad says, sitting back in his seat with a thump. ‘They get a bit crazy if they can’t.’

I wonder if Charlie hears this the same way I do. Is Dad telling us something about Skye?

‘June had a baby but it died,’ he says. ‘She never got to see it, doesn’t know if it was a boy or girl.’

‘That’s terrible,’ I say. And absolutely not where I thought this was going. ‘What happened?’

‘Things were different then,’ he says. ‘None of this giving birth in a bathtub. When she came to on the hospital bed she wasn’t pregnant anymore and they’d taken the baby away. Doctor told her it had been born dead and it would upset her to see it.’ He pauses. ‘She mentioned it over the years, wished she at least knew where they’d buried it. She worried about whether they’d baptised it . . . And then Hal running off on her.’ He becomes brisk and admonishing without warning. ‘You two should have shown her a little more understanding.’

‘How could we have been sympathetic about something we didn’t know?’ I ask.

He huffs. ‘When did you become so argumentative?’

We sit in silence after that. Charlie never does put on another tape; he and Dad fall asleep instead. I drive the long bleached bitumen road, wide open land spreading out on either side of it, passing wheat-coloured fields speckled with eucalypts, granite boulders, depleted dams and glassy-eyed Hereford cattle, in lots divided by strings of barbed-wire fencing: a landscape low and predictable. Small insects slam against my windscreen. Squashed cane toads spot the road. The road lies like a ribbon on the earth, heat rising from its mirage of an end, making it appear that just up ahead everything solid becomes quivering gas.

There are no houses here, no signs, no overhead cables or telephone poles. This is the land my mother spent her life trying to escape and for which my father pined. From the moment Dad bought the farm he was happy and energetic, as he’d been when Mum was alive.