‘I’m so sorry.’

He stood and walked through to the bathroom, hitching up his pyjamas at the back where the elastic had gone.

‘Steve, don’t go. Come back and talk about it.’

‘Might as well make an early start.’ He switched the bathroom light on. ‘Get it over with.’

‘It’s the middle of the night. Don’t be daft.’

He pulled the bathroom door shut behind him. Mandy looked in the drawer for cigarettes and found the pack was empty. She stood by the open back door and looked out at the dark yard. Her dad came into her mind. The best man she ever knew. Proud, solid and decent, broken by the woman he loved.

19

Sydney, 1997

Isla stirs in the night and reaches out for Dom, certain of his weight in the bed beside her, the heat and the smell of him. She feels his mouth against hers. He is drowsy at first and then insistent. She lets him touch her, keeping still so he works harder. He’s good at it. Responsive and generous, never needy. She pulls his shorts down to his knees. He rolls her onto her back and she resists him. Not yet. She doesn’t say it, she can’t seem to open her mouth. He speaks into her ear but his voice is thick with sleep and she can’t hear him. His mouth is wet, dripping. He tastes of blood.

She opens her eyes. He stares down at her, eyes dark and bruised, mouth formless, bubbling red as he speaks. ‘Not again,’ he says.

Isla sits up. The room is black and he is not there. She is drenched in sweat. She pulls the covers back, reaches around in the single bed. It wasn’t real, of course. A phantom, made from fear and shame.

She switches the bedside lamp on. It glows a soft pink, the thin cotton shade patterned with roses. Her childhood furniture sits alongside boxes of coat hangers, boxes of shoes, boxes with smaller boxes inside. An industrial-sized carton of laundry detergent is now stored on top of the desk she once sat at to do her homework. She feels outsized in this room. A disappointment to the younger, hopeful self who lived here.

She lies back down, shuts her eyes, but Dom is still there, clean-cut and smiling, the way he was when she first met him, when her boss introduced him to the team. He’d blushed at the sight of her and it had taken all her strength not to stride across the office and kiss him hard on the mouth.

For the first few months she didn’t drink in front of him. She drank orange juice in the pub after work and filled the fridge at home with cans of full-strength lager. It got harder when he moved in. At some point he’d rumbled her, caught her drinking vodka neat from the bottle when she’d thought he was asleep. She’d played it down, promised to change. He’d believed her. He’d talked about marriage as she’d thought about the bottle he hadn’t found in the pannier of her bike. And later, years down the line, he’d become the enemy, the person she hid from, the person who forced her to look at herself. The one she took it out on when she hated what she saw.