I said to him, ‘What’s all this?’

He said, ‘You were good to me when my mother died, and I wanted to do something good for you.’

And that was the kind of person Mark was, the kind of person who’d do something nice like that, without me even asking. He hired a concrete mixer from Ray’s up at Bronte, and he bought decking timber, and decking oil, and big square terracotta pots, and he worked until that area behind the door there was all filled in and covered over. Then he oiled the decking timber, and picked up an old kettle barbecue. And once he was done, we sat out there with a mozzie coil burning, and things were pretty good. But I suppose I’d only been home a week when Dad called and said, ‘Snow, Snow, you’ve got to come,’ because of course Mum wasn’t getting better, she’d taken a turn for the worse. So it was back on the plane and back to Deer Park.

It didn’t take long after I’d got there. Mum dying, I mean. She wasn’t conscious for more than three hours a day, not that it mattered since she didn’t speak to me. I stayed mostly in the kitchen, scrambling eggs for Dad, who refused to go to bed to get a proper night’s sleep, saying, ‘No, no, I want to be here with her, in case something happens,’ and then she died while I was asleep.

I woke up at around 5 a.m., which was pretty early for me, and the sun was hardly even up. I went down the hall and there was Dad with his head resting on her body. He wasn’t saying anything, but like with Mark’s mum, I could tell by looking that she was gone.

We had the funeral at Tobin Brothers in Altona. There were six rows of those horrible plastic seats but hardly any were taken. I’m fairly sure one of the women in the front row came because she was one of those people who read about funerals in the newspaper and come to eat the free sandwiches.

My father gave a long eulogy, full of stories about how he’d come to Australia with Mum and how they’d had me, and how happy they’d been in Deer Park and what a privilege it was to have nursed her. He didn’t make one mention of the fact that she booted him out of the house and kept him dangling on a string for twenty years. And at the end of the service, he gave everyone a little Scratchie because ‘Ros loved the Scratchies. Always thought she’d win the jackpot.’

I scratched mine, and didn’t even get $2.

Of course I asked Dad what he was going to do now that Mum was dead. The house in Deer Park was practically falling down, the carpets hadn’t been replaced in twenty years, it was way too big for him.

I said, ‘Why don’t you move out to one of those retirement villages?’ But he said, ‘Why would I do that, Snow? I want to stay in my own home.’