I tried to steer him away from the past and focus on the future. We discussed the $15,000 recognition payment he would be receiving as the dependent victim of a homicide. He wanted to buy a car; I urged him to think about using the money to fund some kind of tertiary education. ‘There’s no guarantee the McCalls will be able to help you launch yourself,’ I said.

‘Nah, they’ll do what’s right. They want to. They told me.’ He leaned back in his chair and burped, the wreckage of a family-sized meal spread out before him. ‘Blaine’s got a motorbike. It’s gunna be great in Otford.’

But it wasn’t great in Otford. Almost as soon as Aaron arrived there, he began to complain. I’d given him my email address, with the promise that if he ever needed help or advice, I owed him. I didn’t think he would actually want my help, since I was a middle-aged drifter who’d failed him once before. I figured he would find someone else to lean on: an uncle, perhaps. A teacher. A social worker.

Instead I started to receive long, rambling messages about empty fridges, police harassment, school bullies, false accusations, weekend binges, pub fights and Angela’s junkie boyfriend. None of it sounded good. I asked him what he liked doing, and he said he enjoyed tinkering with all the broken equipment strewn around Angela’s house. After emailing back and forth for a while, we decided he might consider getting a Certificate III in air-conditioning and refrigeration. There was a course available at Bathurst TAFE.

But Angela’s house wasn’t conducive to hard work. Blaine had bought a dog that was shitting everywhere, and no one cleaned up the mess. The electricity had been cut off for a couple of days. Aaron was turfed out of his room at one point because a friend had moved in. His school results had been woeful; his TAFE results weren’t likely to be much better. Not if he stayed in that house.

‘Can’t I come and live with you?’ Aaron begged me. ‘I can do the same course at Newcastle TAFE and it won’t be such a hassle to get there.’ The bus trips to Bathurst were a drag, he wrote. No one in town wanted to hire him as an apprentice because everyone hated the McCalls. He could use some of his leftover money to pay me a modest rent.

If he had to stay in Otford he would end up a dropkick ‘just like the rest of them’.

I realised it was time I talked to Warren.