‘God, Mandy. Don’t say that.’

‘He loves that child every bit as much as you do. He’s her bloody father for Christ’s sake.’

Louisa sat in the passenger seat and folded her long legs in front of her. Mandy could see she was crying from the way her body shook. The daisies on her dress shuddered.

‘Louisa.’ She knelt down beside the car and spoke softly. ‘Please don’t do this.’

Isla was staring wide-eyed at Mandy from the back seat. Her chin had puckered but she was managing not to cry.

‘Are we going or not?’ the driver wanted to know. ‘If we’re going we need to move it.’

Louisa reached out and touched Mandy on the arm. ‘Let me go,’ she said. Her face was wet. ‘Will you call me in a few days? Let me know if he’s all right?’

‘You’ll be at your mum’s?’

She nodded, and Mandy nodded back. She couldn’t find any words. Isla was crying now and the driver was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

‘Bye, sweetheart.’ Mandy fixed a smile on her face, touched her fingers to her lips and reached past the hot vinyl seat to press them against Isla’s cheek. ‘You be a good girl for your mum.’ She stood and pushed the car door shut.

The car pulled away sharply from the kerb, and Isla twisted round in the back seat. Her voice carried through the open window, ‘I don’t want to go!’

Mandy ran after them, stumbling and losing a house shoe in the gutter. Isla was a small, blonde dot in the back of the taxi, her hands pressed pale against the rear window. Mandy stood in the road and waved until she was gone.

She hobbled back to the footpath. The sun was scorching the back of her neck, and the bitumen had burned the sole of her one bare foot. David Walker was practising his violin, sending a sequence of flat, trembling notes across the street. The gate outside Louisa’s house stood open. Mandy couldn’t look at it. She found her missing house shoe and slammed her own gate shut behind her.

11

Sydney, 1997

Isla smooths a tablecloth over the trestle table she’s assembled in the yard. She’s been up since dawn, cooking and tidying, rinsing out tumblers and champagne flutes. The lamb has marinated overnight, the salads are prepared and ready to serve; the drinks are perfectly chilled in the ice bucket. She has arranged the glasses on the trestle table so they slope in order of height across its surface. Her sober self is quite the perfectionist, it seems. Her bad self wants her to have a drink, just one, to get away from this edgy, over-prepared, damp-pitted person she has become.

Her dad walks towards her across the grass. She’s still shocked at the sight of him, three days in. He has circles under his eyes and deep, curved lines running from nose to mouth, more pronounced on one side. His hair is a wiry grey, swept back from his face. And there is something else; a change in his demeanour which troubles her. He looks like a man on the back foot, a man who has been caught out.