And so Alice cleaned the gas stove and set the water boiling before Mrs Flynn arrived to start breakfast. She left the kitchen then for it was Mrs Flynn’s domain. She beat the rugs. There was a carpet sweeper with a long handle and a roller that flew over the carpet and left a smart straight line in its wake, but really all it did was pick up threads and fluff and crumbs. All the real dust and dirt was still there and stayed there unless you did what people had always done and picked up the rug and went at it with a carpet beater. And so Alice beat the carpets. The grocer’s boy came on his overloaded bicycle, and the baker’s boy, and finally the butcher’s lad, and she met each one at the kitchen door and made a show of checking the order was right and the butcher’s lad ogled her and made a grab for her breast though he was barely thirteen, but he was already as tall as her and he leered when she took a swipe at him and left with a backward glance that said, In a year I shall be stronger than you.

Alice cleaned all the shoes which, after the days of rain, were thick with mud and almost spoiled. Not spoiled in a Surry Hills way (for in Crown Street these shoes would fetch a pretty penny and go through half a dozen new owners, some of whom would die with them on their feet before they finally disintegrated) but spoiled in an Elizabeth Bay way, which meant they might be worn a handful of times then discarded. And that was something Alice had learned: that things—clothes, objects, people—had different lives in one place compared to another.

She observed that Mr Dunlevy’s newest pair of shoes—soft brown Italian leather—looked as though he had waded through a muddy river in them, though she considered it unlikely he had done so. She put them to one side. The laundry items got parcelled up each week and taken away by a Chinaman and done someplace else. They had been returned the previous day and had not yet been unpacked, aired or folded away, though no one had so far commented on it. And now it was Friday: the windows needed to be cleaned, the silver polished. Alice had begun the dusting, had made some real progress, but had stopped to observe first Mr Dunlevy then Mrs Dunlevy leave the house.

She sat down at Mrs Dunlevy’s writing desk. It was not something she usually did, but Mrs Dunlevy hurrying out like that had unsettled her. It had set her thinking. And so she sat.