He ought to open a window but if that baby was still crying he didn’t want to hear it. Might be better to get out of the house. Go and buy some coffee and more headache pills. Maybe he’d go as far as Bridge Street and get himself a couple of new shirts. If he could stay off the grog tonight he’d go into work tomorrow.

The phone rang again as he was lacing his shoes. He didn’t bother kidding himself it was Louisa this time. It would be Stan calling from work, wanting to know where the hell he was. He’d told him he had a bug. First excuse to come into his head. If he’d thought harder he might have invented something that would last a few weeks. He couldn’t face the office, the stack of papers on his desk, the meetings about meetings, the internal politics. It had been bad enough before his wife left him.

The little girl across the street cycled past. The Walker kid, what was her name? Isla had been so jealous of her on that bike. He’d planned to get her a bike of her own, once the pay rise came through. But he’d put the money in the savings account instead, and Louisa had taken every last cent of it to fly back to England.

He stood and leaned in against the wall, felt his arm draw back and his fist slam against the plaster, once, twice, three times. It was broken already, he was sure of it. The agony made his legs weak. He swallowed the bile in his mouth.

The phone stopped ringing. He sat down on the couch and kicked off his shoes.

28

Sydney, 1997

Isla stands in the hallway and dials the London number. Her parents’ framed photographs look up at her from the hall table. Her younger self holding a gymnastics trophy, posing for the local press in a leotard, surly with embarrassment. (‘Couldn’t you have smiled?’ her mother had said.) School photos, graduation photos. Her parents outside the house when it was newly built, the sun in their eyes, holding each other at the waist. A happy family, trimmed of its backstory. Isla stares them down.

The phone rings distantly in London.

‘Hello? It’s Isla Green, regarding the first-floor apartment on Sinclair Road.’

A British accent replies, saying he’s glad she called. The vendors of the apartment have had to raise the price. The chain will fall through, he tells her, if she doesn’t up her offer. Isla calmly agrees to another £20,000. The property will appreciate in value, he tells her, in clipped vowels. She can’t lose.

‘One more thing,’ she says. ‘I’m going to stay in Sydney a bit longer than expected. Something came up.’

The estate agent takes her parents’ number. She walks from room to room, picking up her dad’s overflowing ashtrays and taking them into the kitchen to empty them. Her mother doesn’t allow him to smoke anywhere but the kitchen, at the back door, and he is breaking this rule angrily; pointlessly, since Louisa is not there to notice. She has been gone three days and her absentminded mess has been swallowed up.