I thought to myself, ‘He must be joking. What does he mean, when she might be better?’ There wasn’t a chance in the world that my mother was going to be getting up off that sick bed, but Dad either couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. I said, ‘You need to send her to one of those palliative care places, or else she’s going to die here and you’re going to be left to deal with the corpse.’

He looked at me like I’d said the worst thing in the world. But honestly, Jack, death and bodies, they aren’t anything to me. I’ve seen hundreds of them: people dying over weeks and months, suffering no matter how much morphine you put into them. I’ve gone on to wards at Caloola and found corpses of people who had died in the night – I even found Mark’s own mum, dead as a doornail in the bed that day.

Dad shook his head and said, ‘No, no, the minute you go into one of those homes you start dying.’ So I gave it up and said, ‘Alright, you do what you want,’ and flew back to Sydney, where Mark was waiting for me.

He said, ‘So, how did it go?’ And I said, ‘Well, she’s going to cark it,’ because what else was I supposed to say? It wasn’t like Mum and me had been close.

And oh, here’s a funny thing, Jack: I remember I’d been back about a day when I noticed that old Mrs Bannerman was gone. I don’t mean that she was dead but she wasn’t out in the bungalow and she wasn’t out doing calisthenics under the passionfruit vine, she wasn’t anywhere. I asked Mark about it and he told me that a woman had been knocking on the door, claiming to be Aunt Beth’s niece, and that Beth hadn’t wanted to see her, but then she’d changed her mind and gone to visit her.

I said, ‘I didn’t know that Beth had a niece.’

Mark said, ‘I didn’t either, but that’s what this woman told me, that she was Beth’s niece, and when I told Beth that she’d been here, she said, no, I’m not interested in that, but then a couple of days later she put on her hat and told me she was going to visit her.’

I thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit dodgy, can she even catch a train or is she too demented?’ I said, ‘How long has she been gone?’ But that’s not the kind of thing that Mark will always notice, especially if he’s on the choof or on the punt, so he basically said he didn’t know. I thought, ‘If Mark’s not worried about Beth – and she’s his sort of aunt – then why should I worry? She’s not my aunt.’

As to what else I found when I got back to Bondi – no, it wasn’t another woman sitting on my couch this time, thank God! – it was actually something nice. Mark had been out in the back yard, shifting all the junk that had got stuck in the big crater behind the back door. He’d dragged it all out, and he was finally putting up the deck I wanted.