‘And Mum made a great show of saying, “No, no, it’s not like that any more, Rocco, that was when I was a girl. Australia is all grown up now – it’s like London. Nothing will happen to Granny so don’t you worry.” And now of course she’s disappeared in Australia, and I have no idea what to tell him.’

Chapter Five

Dear Jack,

I realise it’s not polite to write to somebody before they’ve had a chance to write back to you, but that last letter I sent, it got me thinking about other things that happened to me when I was a kid that I’m still pretty upset about. The first being that every time somebody decides to get divorced it’s ‘Oh, we want it to be civil, we’re going to try to get along for the sake of the kids,’ and then it straightaway goes pear-shaped.

So, pretty much from the minute Dad was out of the house, Mum was saying she wouldn’t be able to send me to the local Catholic College for high school like she’d always wanted because Dad wouldn’t pay the bills. She said that was going to be my bad luck because the local high school was rubbish.

Like I said before, Dad used to say, ‘But why do we have to send Snow to the Catholic College, we’re not even Catholic?’ And, ‘What’s wrong with the State system anyway?’ He would have gone along with it while he was still living at home but once he was out he was saying, ‘Why should I pay for that? Why not get your new boyfriend to pay?’

Mum would say, ‘We don’t want Snow to run off the rails,’ and, ‘We don’t want Snow mixing with the wrong type,’ by which she meant the New Australians, which was hilarious because many of the New Australians, especially the Italians, were Catholic so they would have been at the Catholic school.

Dad kept saying that my mother was living in his house with another bloke and if he wanted to live there he could ‘cover the bloody bills’ and things like that, and I had to listen to all this for months, and I couldn’t tell anyone at Deer Park Primary where I was going for high school because I didn’t even know.

Anyway, my dad eventually went up to the Catholic school and paid the fees himself.

I was supposed to be rapt to have such an ‘opportunity’, whatever that meant, but I hated that school. It was strict and it was still using the strap on girls, and the first week I was there a teacher broke a ruler over the back of a girl’s hand because the hem of her skirt didn’t touch her knees.

Lucky for me I was a pretty good student and I never got the strap, but I did give the teachers some headaches, and Mum too, especially when I got my first boyfriend.

He wasn’t at the Catholic school. Actually, he wasn’t at any school when I met him because he was much older than me, and that freaked everyone out the way it always does.