‘Hi Dan,’ I said.

He whipped around and hissed.

‘Shh, shh,’ I told him.

‘Don’t shoosh me,’ he said.

‘Oh no. I thought you liked being shooshed.’ Just like I appreciated being hissed at. I got in behind him and gave him my ‘false hug’, another of my privately developed specialities; I had learned to encircle people without ever touching them, with the aim of providing comfort through proximity.

It was like the awful kids’ game where you have to move the wire loop to the finish point without bumping the wire track, otherwise it zaps your hand on contact. Dan kept moving around tensely and I kept adjusting, but then he settled down, as if I’d managed to push some important nerve. But he always outsmarted me – he’d just relaxed his bones so he could gain the space necessary to wiggle out of the circle, elbowing me in the stomach for good measure.

It was too soft to be categorised as true undue aggression, but too hard to be taken for a ‘friendly jab gone wrong’.

Lachlan looked embarrassed for both of us. He said, ‘What could be so wrong?’

And we listened to the story of how Dan had become an hour behind on his always roomy cooking schedule, because he’d needed sherry vinegar but while the Smith Street stores were more various than the ones at Barkly Square, it was less easy to know what they would stock. The fruit shop didn’t have it, and the health store didn’t have it, and the woman at Sonsa Foods seemed to appreciate the question, suggesting deep knowledge of sherry vinegar and its role in Dan’s life, but when this knowledgeable person led him to a secret cache of vinegars, she found that someone earlier must have purchased the last one. This left Dan with the evil Coles or also-evil Woolworths. He tried one of them. ‘Just one of them.’ He would not say which one. There, Dan had assailed a friendly-seeming teenager in mid-vegetable-restock with requests for sherry vinegar. This teenager had asked Dan which aisle he thought would have it, and then he’d gone with Dan to visit Dan’s suggested aisle, as if Dan had been asking for a second set of eyes rather than professional intel. While watching the boy hunt in the aisle where Dan knew the vinegar wasn’t, saying, ‘Hmm, I’m just not sure if we have it or not,’ Dan had said, ‘Not to be rude, but could you find someone who knows?’ – causing no amazing expert to come running.

‘Could you just use other vinegar?’ asked Lachlan.

I widened my eyes. But Dan only shrugged and said, ‘I did. I’m being unreasonable.’

For most of our lives, the interesting moments are dealt with before they are fatal.