Five years earlier Milli had leaned out of the window of the train at Sydney Terminal Station in their mother’s old coat, clutching a carpet bag and sporting a gay red hat with a feather in the crown, about to depart on the overnight to Melbourne. Milli leaving, this time for good, to join Seamus. She had been so happy, or so it had seemed to the fourteen-year-old Alice, standing on the platform, the smoke and steam swirling about her. Alice, sad already, and desperate to be leaving too, only dimly aware of the loneliness that was to come, waving goodbye to the only family she had left in the world. Wishing she had a white handkerchief to wave, watching until the train was out of sight.

‘Take me with you.’ The words she had not spoken.

And now five years had passed and Milli was back. Two babies had come and been lost, both before their first birthdays, and Seamus had gone too, to Adelaide, for it turned out he had a wife already. So here was Milli, nine months heavy with a third child and so large her confinement could not be more than a few days away. The old coat that had once belonged to their mother was gone, so too the little red hat with the feather in the crown. And the bag of belongings—where was that? The happiness, the hope of a future, all of it gone. And what had returned from Melbourne was this shadowy collection of rags who dwelled in a cave and snatched at the scraps on the table and pressed a knife to your throat when you came through her door.

Handsome Seamus with his Irish eyes and his Irish laughter and his solid and muscular wharfie arms and that flash of something that was thrilling and frightening all at once. Milli had said, There’s some Abo in him, Alice, somewhere back. Alice had been a little in love with Seamus herself.

‘Take me with you.’

But Milli had not thought to take Alice with her—what would she want with a girl of fourteen in tow? She had left her behind, though their mother’s grave was still fresh in Devonshire Street Cemetery.

The potato had slowed Milli down; it required some tearing, some chewing. You needed a few teeth and Milli, by the look of it, had none.