Maybe people will say, ‘Oh, please, you just want us to take pity on him,’ but he didn’t want pity.

I sat next to him with his mum not breathing in the bed beside us and I said, ‘It wasn’t much of a life she had, anyway,’ and he agreed with me and a couple of days later he was back to collect his mum’s things, not that there were very many of those, and he said, ‘I wonder if a girl like you would go out with a loser like me?’

It was a bit of a shock to hear him say that because his mother had just died and I did think to myself, ‘Be careful, Snow, this isn’t something you want to get involved in, because he’s just missing his mum,’ but the look on his face was like a big kid and I thought, ‘Well, how bad would it be to go out on a date with him just now when his mum has died? Maybe a bit creepy but not too creepy.’ So I said, ‘Yes, okay.’ I was glad I did because it cheered him up straightaway. And then, even after just seeing him a couple of times, I knew that he was Mr Right.

What did I see in him? Who can say what anyone sees in someone? You either like somebody or you don’t. I hadn’t had that many boyfriends – not after what happened with Vincent – so it felt pretty good when Mark came with a bunch of red roses for my birthday and did other nice things. We went to St Kilda to look at the beach and we talked about how we’d both got duds for mothers, and after a while I was just thinking about him all the time.

The problem we had was that he was living in Bondi and he’d only been coming down to Melbourne to visit his mum. If we wanted to talk on the phone when he went home we had to make STD phone calls from phone boxes and we were always running out of twenty-cent pieces. One of us would have to move and I thought it might as well be me because what did I have in Melbourne except Mum, who was still going around with Mr Cooper, and Dad, who was working in the shop?

Mark came down to help me pack up my things and we got the bus to Sydney and I remember the driver stopped at the border at Albury so we could stand with one foot in Victoria and one foot in New South Wales, and I got all excited to see cars with New South Wales plates, and street signs in a different colour, that’s how innocent I was.

The bus dropped us at Central station – a really nice old stone station, not like Spencer Street – and Mark was great: he got my suitcase from under the bus, and hauled it down to the next corner so we could get the bus to Bondi, and then he carried it all the way up to Mrs Bannerman’s house.