At the edge of our town, a new housing estate was built – the first of many – and it brought with it a sense of novelty. There were boys in those cheaply built houses, boys who had to move schools, boys who had hurriedly left cities, and we all lied to each other about our levels of experience. The three-beds faced an area of stubby, patchy grass and the boys called it the green. We always split up according to some hierarchy I couldn’t fathom and I was left with the quietest, the kindest, the one who had spent the least amount of time in a juvenile detention centre. He would pull down my bra-strap, pull it back up, pull it back down as if to say: Nope, I have no idea what’s happening here either.

In the evenings, when my friends and I were alone, we talked about the missing girls. We admitted we thought some of them were plain.

Before the Australian arrived, the missing girls were the main priority. They had been sucked into a blood-red sky, summoned into a gaping, flame-filled ground. The man who took them was Freddy Krueger, his claw-hand stretching out of a silent car, skirting slender upper arms. We dripped ice cream onto our laps, our bare stomachs. The girls said ‘Candyman’ three times into an unforgiving mirror. We sat on walls, we skipped through side alleys. We sauntered around, bare-shouldered, waiting for cars to beep at us, seeking any tiny confirmation that we were alive.

My mother, threatened by the modernity of the new estate, had decided to gut the kitchen. The Australian was recommended to my father by a friend, but it was clear from the start that he didn’t know what he was doing. His talents extended to drawing elaborate sketches of a wood-panelled kitchen, but no further. He pored over these squiggles with a look of wild concentration, but resisted doing anything as serious as actual physical labour. My father liked him in the way that men who don’t say much often do like each other. He was rewarded with a key to the caravan and my father insisted that once he got started on the farm – once he settled in – he would be an excellent worker. The kitchen project was abandoned, as my mother always knew it would be.

He was in his early thirties and if you didn’t know him, you would have presumed him to be stupid. He had one of those unlucky faces that could so easily be described as slack-jawed, and a great braying laugh. He also had a sad, lazy way of confirming people’s low expectations of him. On good days, he was a charming stranger. Other days, he was simply the man who stood squinting in our yard. His clothes were not well cared for – a button missing, a shirt cuff frayed or torn, the material faded in places from the sunlight. He had no passions, nothing he talked about with enthusiasm. It takes a special kind of hard-working mind to fall for someone so helplessly and honestly ordinary.