He told Mark’s mum he was from Bosnia or maybe Croatia, but with a name like that I’d say he was German and he didn’t want to admit it, because Germans were a bit on the nose after the war, not that it matters what he was other than a drunk who smashed holes in every wall of every house they ever lived in.

People like to bag Mark, call him a thug with a big criminal record, but when you know about him – that he was in and out of boys’ homes when he was a kid and that his mum was a crazy person and his step-dad used to beat him up all the time – what do people expect?

I’m not trying to say he never did anything wrong because the record is there for anyone to see, but he had a bad start in life and that has to count for something. Back when we first started going out, Mark would tell me stories like the time his step-dad told his mother to stop feeding him and he got so hungry he started stealing lunches from the other kids at whatever school he was going to then. The teachers told welfare and the welfare workers went up to the school and asked Mark, ‘Where’s your lunch?’ He had to say, ‘I don’t get any.’

Then the welfare people had to go and talk to his mum and they saw all the other fat Friedgut kids running around, and his mum was shaking and crying and they tried to talk to old Mr Friedgut, saying, ‘You have to feed all of them. You can’t starve one of them.’ And Friedgut said, ‘Why should I put food in his mouth when he isn’t mine?’

But Mark got his revenge because when old Friedgut had his heart attack Mark was the one who saw him go down on the kitchen floor. He saw him lying there on his back with bubbles coming out of his mouth, and he was reaching up to Mark, like ‘help me, help me’, but there was no way Mark was going to help him.

Pretty soon after that, Mark was back in Baltara and then later he was in the Tamworth Boys’ Home. I don’t know what you know about that place but they used to make the new boys put cardboard boxes on their heads when they arrived, so the other boys could kick and punch them. By the time he got out, his mum had gone crazy, but he always went to see her at Caloola. He visited her for twenty years and he was there on the day she died, and I know that because I was there, on the ward, and I walked by and saw he was crying. His mum’s eyes were wide open and she was staring up at the ceiling, and Mark was sitting near her bed. I sprinted across the room, took her by the arm and tried to find a pulse, knowing it was hopeless. I said to him then, ‘What happened? Did she just go?’ And he could hardly talk about it.