He leaned back. Seemed contented, then concerned. ‘Don’t mean to scare you. You alright?’

Pity, again. She can’t even be threatened without being put in cottonwool. She tried a laugh. ‘Get off it.’

‘Never know with you women, eh?’

She wanted to rip his face apart with her bare hands and scream into the nothing left behind.

Instead she said, ‘Yeah.’

‘You understand the seriousness of what I said?’

‘Yeah. I get you. It’ll be fine.’

‘Good,’ Ernie said. He finished his beer, stood up. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let’s go see your man.’

She walked home with Roger, keeping an eye on him as he swerved onto the street, no doubt waking people up with his noise. She was ashamed to be married to him.

‘I’ll have to arrest you at this rate,’ she said.

He swerved back to her from the street, tripping over the gutter as he did so. He wobbled into a fence, had to put his hands out to stop himself falling into rose bushes. Leaning over as if to retch, he started coughing. There was no vomit though; her husband notorious for holding his grog.

‘You won’t arrest me,’ he said, spitting a bit. He was breathing like an old man on an inhaler. His back arched.

She refused to help him home. Let him lurch into traffic, pound his face into the asphalt. Cars flattening him like that book she used to read to Peter. Flat Stanley. Flattened by a painting. Mailed himself to other countries.

No sooner had they reached their gate than a car honked from the driveway opposite. She unlatched the rusted mechanism, her husband toppling as his full weight upon the swinging metal careened him into the concrete. He was face down, laughing. Across the road was Leroy, his old schoolfriend and one of the bloody mongrels he got around with. A number of times he’d been in her jail, locked up drunk. Her husband would have been locked up too, were he not her husband.

Roger got to his feet, smacked her on the back. Threw an arm around her waist and pulled her close. His breath hot and vomitous. He punched into her lips with his own, sucking violently. She shoved him off.

‘You going out again, are you?’

‘My boy’s eighteen,’ he said. ‘Too right I am. My shout too. Not much good you getting all that cash from Cahill if we’re not going to spend it, is there?’

She wanted to throttle him, choke the words back into his throat.

‘We’ll just go to Jared’s,’ he said as he flopped across the street. ‘Don’t wait up.’ The car’s tail-lights came on as he climbed into the passenger seat. Old Leroy was probably as drunk as her husband. The car reversed down the driveway and powered down the street. Her anger and hatred made her feel ashamed. Then came shock and sadness. How desperately she wanted that car to plough full-speed into another.