Mum would be in the lounge room setting up the vinyl card table – it was one of those that had metal corners and legs that folded up, and I loved to help fold it up – or she’d be putting out one of those trays with Planters Nuts and cabana, and the ashtrays would be out, with cigarettes to offer the guests. Dad would rub his hands and say, ‘Now, who’s for a drink?’ And he’d have sherry for Mrs Cooper and Mum would have gin.

I was supposed to have had my bath and brushed my teeth and be ready for bed, but I was allowed to come down the hall in my dressing gown to get a Ritz cracker with a square of cheese, or else a piece of cabana on a toothpick, and I was supposed to give a kiss to all the grown-ups, including Mr Cooper, who was creepy to me.

The big game was seeing how many times I could sneak back into the room after I’d been sent to bed before Mum threatened to get the wooden spoon out. So I’d come down the hall and I’d say, ‘I need the loo’ or ‘I need a glass of water’ or ‘I had a nightmare’, but really what I wanted was to see what kind of adult thing was going on in the smoky bridge room. I remember Mum in there with her cigarette in one hand and she’d be keeping score on a tiny little pad of paper with a tiny little pencil, saying things to Dad like, ‘Shut up, Jim, nobody’s interested’ when he wanted to talk about politics, which was all Gough Whitlam and the Dismissal in those days.

It was like that every pay day for as long as I could remember, until bang, one day there was no knock at the door, not that week and not for two more weeks, and not much was said about it, or not to me, anyway, but I noticed that things were a bit strange. And then, maybe it was a week or so later, I can’t remember, I got up one morning to get ready for school and instead of finding my place set at the kitchen table with a bowl for Weet-Bix and a glass of orange juice, I saw my mother in the kitchen and she wasn’t dressed. She had her dressing gown on, the quilted one that went down to the floor and had little satin buttons up to the neck. And I have to tell you, Jack, my mother wasn’t the type to go wandering around the house in her dressing gown. She was the type to dress in a trendy way, maybe because she was older than all the other mothers and didn’t like to be reminded of it, so when I was growing up she liked her flared jeans with the embroidery down the side, and she liked her platform shoes made of cork, and she wore her hair big, and had macramé vests and other things that I wanted to wear except I wasn’t allowed.