‘Well, I thought so. Remember that necklace you made me wear for a week, with the purple diamonds on it?’

‘Yes.’ I can still remember the smell of the glue. How we pushed those plastic ‘jewels’ into their metal clasps and folded the tiny claws around them. It was a necklace we would have made for Mum, had she still been around, but we gave it to Dad and he accepted it with laughter and good grace. He even wore it on the school run.

‘Remember how every Christmas, you girls would go to Nonna and Papa’s a few weeks before Christmas and plough through her Grattan catalogue? Write huge long lists of all the things you wanted?’

‘Yes. Angela’s lists were always way longer than mine, though.’

‘She wanted a lot out of life.’

‘Still does.’

We both smile.

‘Great kids,’ adds Dad, shaking his head.

‘Yeah, we both used to be all right,’ I said, and we were back then, when we were young – despite the abandonment, the sadness, the motherlessness … We all used to be a kind of all right.

‘And you’re not now?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t know.’ Well, I do. Angela is both remote and imperious and I am a damaged soul, aren’t I? An ugly adult, no longer able to hide behind whatever cuteness of childhood I could once muster. A flattened survivor of things I hadn’t asked for. A willing and stupid victim of unrequited and unreturned love, with a cupid’s arrow still sticking out of her back. Someone who is guilty of things both big and small.

I’m being dramatic, I know. It’s a gift.

‘You should take up art again,’ says Dad. ‘You were good at it.’

‘Nah, I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Really?’ He pauses. He pauses for quite a long time. Anyone seeing him from a distance would think he was looking out over the water, contemplating life. ‘I’m scared, too,’ he says finally. ‘I’m scared all the time.’ Where has this come from? I never said I was scared. And his words come across as purposely flippant, dismissive even. He doesn’t sound scared. ‘I guess we just have to keep on keeping on,’ he adds. ‘Take it one step at a time.’

‘I guess so.’ I look out across the water. I see the dragonfly again, hovering by the flank of a houseboat. It hesitates, then levitates away.

I should be asking him if he really is scared and why – what I can do to help? I should ask him to talk to me, really talk to me. I don’t believe he is as flippant as he sounds. I don’t believe in his dismissiveness, or mine. But we’re not there yet, are we?