In the kitchen Isla stacks the dirty plates next to the sink, runs the tap and adds soap to the water. Dave Taylor is mowing his lawn next door, pacing up and down, leaving long, green stripes in his wake. A cockatoo lands on the arched trellis of his passionfruit vine. Mandy used to sit under there, Isla thinks. A striped chair, white and green. She pushes the image away. She’s been trying not to think of Mandy these past few days. She doesn’t want to imagine the last time her mother walked out, leaving her dad hurt and angry; hitting the bottle. Mandy just next door.

It’s Steve Mallory she remembers. Not his physical appearance or the things he said. She remembers how it was to be in his home. Days spent in his backyard watering plants, digging for worms, always wondering if he’d pull up out the front in his truck. A current of fear beneath warm colours. She rinses a plate, sets it down on the drying rack and looks out at Dave Taylor and his mower, trimming around the eucalyptus. It’s still there, this shadow of Steve at the edge of her vision, the threat she’d picked up on as a child.

She takes another plate and submerges it. She was so young, back then. She is remembering through the filter of her adult self, knowing all that she knows. The child removals are all over the news. The stolen generation, they’re calling it. Aboriginal people talking about being removed from loving homes, taken to institutions where they were trained to work for white people. Stories of abuse, cruelty, inhumanity. It’s no wonder she can’t think of Steve without this edge of menace.

She leaves the plates in the water and returns to the phone in the hallway. She finds Scott’s office number in the address book. His secretary puts her through.

‘Isla?’ His voice is loud in her ear. ‘Are you ok?’

‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘I need to ask a favour.’

‘Ask away.’

‘Do you have a computer?’

‘I do.’ She hears him sit down, the creak of a chair. ‘What’s this about?’

‘I need you to help me find somebody.’

A pause. She feels his impatience. ‘Isla, the police will have searched for Mandy more thoroughly than you or I could. They’ll have her dental records, medical records, birth certificate. There’s no point me punching her name into AltaVista.’

She stretches the telephone cable into the lounge room, where the fog of cigarette smoke hangs low in the morning sun. Under the armchair, the neck of a bottle of vodka protrudes, instantly familiar. She moves to pick it up, to hide it. She is halfway across the room when she remembers she doesn’t drink these days. She leaves it where it is.

Isla lifts the phone up from the carpet. ‘It’s not Mandy I want to find,’ she says. ‘It’s Steve Mallory. Her husband.’

29

Sydney, 1967

The smell of baby reached Mandy’s nose before she’d shut the door. Formula milk, and the foul, slightly sweet smell of soiled nappies. The heat had intensified the stink. She ran down the hall to the kitchen with her hand clamped over her mouth and nose. There were babies’ bottles in the sink, and she leaned over them, dry heaving, as she ran the tap and let the water splash against her face. She managed to take a few mouthfuls of water and hold them down. Small dots passed before her eyes. She slid onto the lino and sat with her legs apart, her head between her knees. Colour seeped back into the room. The baby’s cries rose and fell.