I tell Hannah, but I don’t think she really understands: how fast everything moved then. Not fast like people run around now, constantly busy and so self-important that they need to tell the entire world what they ate for breakfast, but fast in the sense that all that had been safe and normal suddenly wasn’t. The world we knew had changed. Death was closer than it had ever been, the Japanese were liable to attack at any moment, and our brothers, cousins and lovers were away, dying in trenches, firing weapons from their freckled, blunt-nailed hands. Hands which they had used to catch fish, milk cows, shoot marbles and fly kites. Hands which had held us as we danced. Hands that played piano and tickled the arch of a foot, hands that unhooked a bra, cupped us and made us cry out.

How was anyone to make sense of it? The world was upside down, flipped and spinning backwards—women working men’s jobs, street and railway station signs taken down or covered in case the Japs landed, coupons needed just to buy butter, tea, sugar or meat. Blackout curtains in our houses and air-raid wardens walking around to make sure no light seeped through. Headlights on cars painted black. Petrol so hard to get that Dad put a charcoal burner on the back of the truck in order to keep deliveries going. The army and navy requisitioning anything they wanted, anything they needed for war. Japanese subs in Sydney Harbour.

When death is close, you have to live.

Roy was being transferred to New Guinea. He knew it before we kissed, but he didn’t tell me until weeks later, when he took me to the cinema. I can’t remember what film we saw, because we didn’t really watch it; we sat in the dark room with the smell of dust burning off the projector bulb and kissed, his hands travelling up from my knee, stopping at that tender midpoint of the thigh, an impossible place to stop. I wanted to cry out. I bit his shoulder instead. Afterwards we ate dinner in a little cafe, Repins, and I could hardly swallow. My mouth felt tender, and I touched it with the tips of my fingers, wondering if I should reapply lipstick.

Roy’s fork was poised in mid-air—he ate with his fork in his right hand and used it like a shovel, the opposite of how I’d been taught—when he said it.

‘I’m going in a coupla months.’

It took a moment for the meaning to sink in.

He wouldn’t see me cry; he wouldn’t see me care. I stood up and left.

Roy must have paused to pay because I was a little way down the street when he ran up beside me. ‘Sarah,’ he said, grabbing my hand, pulling me towards him.

‘Get off it. Leave me alone.’

‘But we were having so much fun.’