Not far outside Brisbane’s city limits, bushland gives way to sprawling trucking yards and rubbish tips before it turns to outer suburbia. Here, the land begins to hold more houses, all dropped on sharply defined plots, houses hunched low, neat and apologetic with boundary walls only four bricks high, plants cut back hard and ringed by small rocks so as not to take space they don’t deserve. Then come corner shops, schools and public swimming pools. Then suburbs with hills and valleys where wooden Queenslanders rise up on stilts like flamingos, with air flowing all around them, and lush gardens allowed to unfurl, their arms draped across fences and raised up to the sky. Telegraph poles, light poles and traffic lights stick up from the ground haphazardly, like tree trunks after a bushfire. In the distance, a clump of skyscrapers marks the city centre.

And the heat. Always, everywhere, the relentless garish heat.

I drive alongside the Brisbane River. Near the city it’s brown and indecisive, lumbering out to sea with thin swirling gyres covering its surface, as though the skin is reacting to some twitchy internal doubts. It’s tricky to tell which way the water is flowing. Dredging barges work the river, making it deep for cargo ships and for mining sand and gravel. I pass one bridge after another: the Story Bridge, the Captain Cook Bridge, the William Jolly Bridge. As we approach the Arnott’s factory I roll down the window to breathe in sweet, biscuit-scented air.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Wednesday 11 December 1974

Charlie

Abby and Mark’s house sits in a cul-de-sac in a suburb where the streets twist and bend as though designed by someone who’d dropped a bowl of spaghetti on the floor and thought, ‘Yes, that is how people can best get from A to B.’ Streets have been added on as the council cut lines around weirdly shaped parcels of bushland and sold them to developers; there doesn’t seem to have been much consideration given to how this mess would be navigated by residents. It’s kind of funny.

To drive into her carport, Abby makes a tight left turn off Woondarra Street, then holds left to veer into the cul-de-sac off Jamison and whips the car up a steep driveway, hitting the brakes the instant she’s at the top to avoid slamming into the brick retaining wall. The driveway was Mark’s handiwork, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he’d make a situation that’s already difficult even harder.

‘Another triumph for Evel Knievel,’ I say as Abby pulls to a stop. ‘Fans are on their feet, the cheers are deafening.’

‘How about thanking me for driving for five and a half hours?’

‘I told you I’d drive. Say the word, I said.’

She glares at me. ‘Are you insane?’ Which, sure.

‘Dad then,’ I say.

‘I do quite enough driving,’ he says. I hadn’t realised he was awake.

Dad and I stand in the carport and stretch towards the low ceiling, both of us moaning and cracking as though we’d spent a week in a box. Abby moves straight to the task of unloading. She places bags, cartons, Dad’s suitcase in a line on the concrete floor and calls out, ‘We’re here.’