It was the strangest feeling: shock without surprise. As if it were right that she should hear a baby crying from the direction of her house. As if she should have known.

‘The Walkers are expecting,’ she said. ‘Their baby must have come early.’

Doug shook his head. ‘Saw Abigail not ten minutes ago. Still the size of a house.’

Mandy swallowed. Must be thirst, putting strange thoughts in her head.

‘Sounds like a kiddie that’s getting its teeth, Abigail reckons.’ Doug went back to pruning his hedge. ‘Got some lungs on it.’

Andrea Walker shot past on her bicycle, rang her bell as she reached the end of Bay Street and turned out of sight.

Mandy’s limbs were heavy as she climbed the stairs of her verandah. Behind the closed curtains of her living room she could hear the uneasy whine of a baby not quite asleep. She let the shopping fall at her feet and stood for a minute in the shade with the key in her hand.

27

Sydney, 1967

Joe opened his eyes and shut them again. He hadn’t closed the curtains properly last night and now they were letting in the sun. The room was hot and bright and he was a dirty grub, a waste of space, lying in bed half the day, hiding from work when there was nothing wrong with him except the usual blinding hangover and the mess of his life. He turned in the bed and the pain rolled around the base of his skull, darkening. He held onto it, let it fill his head.

No matter how much he drank, he woke up knowing that Louisa had left him and taken his daughter. The hangover curdled it in his head, turned it bad before he had a chance to make any sense of it. It doubled his agony. Of course it did. He knew that, and he drank anyway, because his old man was winning. His dad was always right, in the end.

He forced himself to sit up, to swing his legs over the side of the bed. God, his throat was rough, he must have smoked most of a pack last night. His fingers were yellow, brown in places. He reached into the top drawer of the bedside table for his headache pills and crunched two, dry-mouthed. Nausea passed through him and he closed his eyes against it, let it pass. He thought of Louisa then, with a towel wrapped around her head, holding a plate of toast, asking if he wanted any. He had to watch himself, getting sentimental over her. She hadn’t made him toast in years. She spent the mornings running around after Isla, trying to find something clean to wear for work.

The phone started ringing as he got in the shower. He let it go. If he didn’t answer, he could imagine it was her, calling to apologise. To explain. He could think of her waiting for him to pick up, nervous and hopeful. She could ring as long as she liked; he wasn’t giving in that easy. He lathered up the soap. Let her sweat. The ringing stopped and he washed the soap from his face, holding his breath as water streamed from his nose. That wasn’t her on the phone. It was the middle of the night in England. If she was going to call, she’d wait till it was evening here, morning there. Around nine.