‘Hope you’re thirsty,’ he says.

She looks down at the trestle table. ‘Don’t want to run out.’

‘I don’t know if anyone’s going to turn up, love. I’m not flavour of the month round here.’ He stands beside her and nods at the pastel-coloured bunting she’s strung around the back of the house. ‘It’s enough just to have you home. I don’t need all this fuss.’

She winces. ‘Is it too much?’

‘Tell me you haven’t got a brass band tuning up in the lounge room.’

‘No band,’ she says.

He lights a cigarette. ‘Thanks,’ he says, and his smile takes a decade off him. ‘This is great. Who cares if it’s just us?’

Isla moves the ice bucket into the shade, beneath the table. She squats there a while and fixes a length of bunting which is coming loose from the underside. Her dad paces nervously on the grass in front of her. He’ll enjoy the party once it’s upon him. She knows this because she is absolutely his daughter. This is also how she knows he’s had a drink already today; something to take the edge off, to get him in the mood. Maybe more than one.

‘I met up with Scott yesterday,’ she says, standing.

‘Did you?’

‘We had coffee across the road from his office. He didn’t have long.’

‘That sounds like Scott.’

‘He said he’ll come along later.’

Joe coughs into his fist, turning from her until the spasm passes. He’s perspiring when he faces her again. ‘I haven’t seen your brother in a while,’ he says. ‘Must be six months at least. You wouldn’t know he lived in the same city.’

‘He promised me he’d come.’

‘Did he?’ He coughs again, beating his chest.

‘Are you all right, Dad?’

He finds an ashtray over by the barbecue and crushes his cigarette out. ‘Never better.’

A breeze blows in from the ocean, lifting the bunting. Isla catches the scent of eucalyptus from the tree next door and she sees Mandy in a rich slice of memory, folding laundry into a basket. A blonde woman, on the plump side of curvy, with a conspiratorial smile. Fine, fair hair that she holds back from her face with a scarf. So different to her mother that to love her had felt like betrayal.

‘Does your mum know Scott’s coming today?’ Her dad stands at the trestle table, toying with the wine glasses. He picks up a champagne flute and returns it.

Isla is still in Mandy’s backyard with a handful of clothes pegs and grass beneath her bare feet. She had been safe with Mandy. She had breathed easily in her company. She is flooded with loss, inexplicably, for this woman she barely remembers.

‘Does she know?’ her dad repeats.

‘Yes.’ She smiles at him. ‘Yes, Mum’s excited to see Scott.’

He turns from her. They hear laughter and voices in the kitchen. Someone squeals in excitement. ‘Looks like we’ll have to share the grog, after all,’ he says.