The newsreader comes back on, but it’s impossible to know what she’s saying. Maybe she’s saying this is definitely the guy we’re looking for. Maybe someone will call the police tonight and say they recognise him. Maybe that will lead them to a house in a far-out suburb, and we’ll wake up tomorrow and find out that it’s over; they’ve found the creep and rescued Yin. Maybe then I can stop checking doors and windows and running through my dwindling list of reasons to stay at Balmoral.

‘I talked to Dad today,’ says Sam, out of nowhere.

‘Good for you.’ I push my plate away. A layer of congealed skin has formed over the lemon sauce. ‘Are you done?’

Sam skids in his slippery shoes all the way to the bargain games shop. I give him twenty minutes and twenty dollars of my own money. That kid has no idea how much I do for him.

The shopping centre is swarming: teenagers cruising each other, security cameras, security guards. Peace descends for the first time this week. I’m a bee in a swarm, a particle, part of a larger pattern. I have no separate thoughts or significant problems. I wander the corridors with Mum’s camera held in front of me, looking around for colours and patterns.

The tubs of jelly cups and coconut water at the Asian grocer become abstract and psychedelic if you get close enough, the reflections in the window of the brow bar fragment the customers inside, the aisles of the discount chemist warehouse are stark and artificial. I take photos of hair-netted women speed-folding dumplings in a restaurant window and old men gathered in the Greek coffee shop with their walking sticks hooked onto the table.

I swing past to check on Sam, and see him sitting on the shop floor with rows of games fanned in front of him. I snap a photo of him through the window and he doesn’t even look up. If I turn it black and white, if I tweak it to make it look pixellated and gritty, it would look exactly like a surveillance photo.

At the camera store I look at digital SLRs I’ll never be able to afford, not even if I take off a hypothetical $500 won hypothetically in the non-hypothetical art prize and then add all the pocket money I can save this year. Mum’s old camera is a dinosaur compared to these muscly black models. I wish I’d thought to sign out one of the school’s fancy cameras for the weekend, so I could have practised with it. Brooke and Audrey take all their photos on film and use the darkroom to develop and print them, but we didn’t have a darkroom at Morrison, and I don’t have time to learn how to do it well enough for my project.