Val had to steel herself to drive to the house on Penkivil Street, just fifteen minutes’ walk from Bondi Beach. It was Edwardian-style, with pillared balconies on the upper floor, stained-glass windows on the lower, and a grand archway at the main entrance. Once it had been smart, but now it reeked of neglect, with peeling paint and a garden wall that was close to collapse. She parked in the drive, walked across the overgrown yard, and turned the key in the door to be met with a smell that made her recoil. It clearly hadn’t been cleaned in ages, and the air was stale and sour, with an underlying odor as if some creature had died and was in the advanced stages of decomposition. Holding her breath, she ran from room to room on the ground floor, throwing windows wide and turning on fans.

She quickly saw that nothing had changed in seventeen years. There were the same beige cabinets in the kitchen, sticky to the touch from years of built-up cooking grease; the pantry was buzzing with flies, and a rubbish bin contained something noxious that she quickly threw out the back door. The worn brown sofa and chairs in the living room had suspicious stains on the upholstery. Still there was no TV. As a teenager Val had begged her dad to get one, but he refused, and the only entertainment came from an old phonograph and a pile of sentimental Russian records. The dining room had a burnt-orange patterned carpet and a dusty twelve-seater table that to Val’s knowledge had never been used.

Upstairs, she hesitated in the doorway of her old bedroom, which was just as she’d left it. She surveyed the pictures she’d stuck on the walls: a poster for The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, her favorite film at the time; a close-up shot of Bill Haley & His Comets on stage somewhere; an advertisement for Lustre-Creme shampoo, with the caption “Never Dries—it Beautifies.” The dusky rose-pink bedspread her mother had bought was still spread on the single bed, coordinating with the curtains and the frill around her dressing table. There was nothing she wanted to keep, no part of that teenage girl she felt nostalgia for.

She popped her head into her father’s bedroom but drew back at the intimate smell of his body, still as strong as if he were around the corner in the bathroom, about to emerge in his camel dressing gown, newspaper in hand. She moved on quickly, past the spare room that was never used. There were some faded photographs of her in a niche in the hall, but no trace of her mother anywhere: no clothes, no makeup, no pictures. As far as Val could remember, they had only moved to this house after her mother disappeared.