The only other thing Mark had was a milk crate for a bedside table, and maybe he could tell that I was looking a bit worried about it because he said, ‘You can make it nice if you want.’ So later that week I went to Kmart and bought a new doona, sheets, pillows, pillowcases, towels, a lamp, pots, pans, plates and cutlery for the kitchen. I had money saved from when I’d been working at Caloola, which was just as well because Mark had no money, though it wasn’t his fault because as I was soon to find out Mark had a gambling problem. That’s an addiction, like a sickness, and it was hard for him to work because he had this obsession with needing to be at the pokies. He was always thinking, ‘If I’m not there at the machine when the numbers come up, how can I ever win?’ And yes, he would take my money and put it in the pokies, but that’s because he was always thinking of money as an investment in the jackpot he was going to win one day.

It was because Mark didn’t work that I had to find a new job pretty much as soon as I got to Sydney. Mark didn’t see the point, saying, ‘Why don’t you just go on the dole?’ because he’d been on the dole for years, but I don’t think people should get money for doing nothing. I mean, Mark’s situation was obviously different to mine: he had his addictions, not just gambling but the choof as well, and that was because he’d had a lot of pain in his life. Thinking about it now, he probably shouldn’t have been on the dole, he should have been on the disability pension, but he wasn’t. He was registered with the CES – Centrelink, they call it now – for the dole plus he could get money out of Mrs Bannerman’s bank account on pension days so he could handle all the bills for her house.

Anyway, I made some enquiries and found out that there was a home for geriatrics up on O’Brien Street in Bondi, and since geriatrics was where I did some of my training they hired me straightaway. Mark couldn’t get his head around that kind of work, saying, ‘That old person’s smell is disgusting.’ And maybe it is, but we needed the money. I realise that maybe I’m making it sound like I was working my guts out and Mark was at home on the bong and on the TAB account, but that isn’t the way it was. He was pretty good about fixing up some things in the house that needed fixing. Like, when I complained about the state of the front garden, he walked down to the old hardware store on Hall Street – it’s gone now, turned into a café – and bought a pair of shears and got stuck into the trees, and started clipping them to look like animals. I mean, he started by just clipping them and then he stood back and said, ‘Look at that, Snow, it looks just like a lollipop.’ And then he decided the lollipop should be an emu, and before long we had two emus in the front, and another tree shaped like a kangaroo.