Arrangements slid into place over the next week, as if the gods were smiling on Val—for a change, she thought. First she was awarded the job of telephone operator, then the university agreed to give her an advance on her salary to pay the deposit on a flat. She found a tiny apartment in Camperdown, even smaller than the one in Balmain but with an affordable rent. Yet again, she and Nicole would share a bedroom, and the shower was in what amounted to a walk-in closet, but the place had been recently repainted, its floorboards newly stripped and varnished. It was miles more comfortable than her mother’s home in Harbin. What was more, there was a primary school down the road from the university, so Val could drop Nicole there on her way to work. After lessons finished, she could play in the university day care for a couple of hours until Val’s shift was over, then they could spend their evenings together. It was worlds better than the late-night cleaning job. She wished she could phone her mom in Harbin to tell her; instead she wrote a long letter describing their new life. She hoped Ha Suran would be proud.

When Val took Nicole for her first morning at yet another new school and left her in the care of yet another teacher, she felt a pang of guilt at the way her daughter’s life had been disrupted. She was only six, but this was her third school, her third home, in less than a year. Val remembered the intense loneliness she herself had felt when her father made her move at the age of thirteen, and the struggle to make new friends when playground alliances had already been cemented. She hoped Nicole would not have the same trouble, and watched carefully for any signs of anxiety. But after her first day at the new school Nicole asked if someone called Amy could come and play on the weekend, and by the end of the week she was engulfed by a group of girls with white kneesocks and neat hair ribbons as soon as Val led her into the playground.

There wasn’t much storage space in the new flat, so many of their possessions had to be left in cardboard boxes stacked in the corner, to be dug out when needed. It was several weeks after moving in when Val came across the old photographs still tucked in a pocket of the suitcase she was using to store winter clothes. She pulled them out to have another look at the ghostly black-and-white images: the girls in their ethereal white dresses, and the one of her father as a young man. Ivan Skorokhodov; the name suited him better than Irwin Scott. He had been Russian to his fingertips.