Me, the teenage Garner, giving up on Lanark Avenue, wandering the back streets of Windsor, the flaky suburb the other side of the main road. It’d started suburban, like us, but ended industrial. Factories built between more cracked-spine fibro homes. Weedy driveways with old washers, stripped bare, piled high along fence lines. Looking in open doorways, down halls, to mums shouting at bare-arsed kids as, outside, dads collected, stripped-down and calibrated. Always twice as many cars as there were people, cos cars could be cannibalised (I’d learned that from Pop, though Mum’d never let him keep wrecks round the yard). A trampoline for the kids, perhaps, but with a hole, and someone had stacked bricks on it. So there was no distinction between living and making a living.

I crossed the road and entered Don’s, bought a Coke and emptied my pockets, hoping there was enough. As he counted, moving uncomfortably in his Marlboro T-shirt, he said, ‘You been behavin’ yerself?’

‘Yes.’ Surprised he’d shown interest after so many years. Perhaps it was boredom, the quiet before the Ford mechanics, after the milk mums, the ciggie kids. ‘We’re right behind your shop.’

‘With the pool ladder?’

‘Yeah. Me and my sister, t’ get over the fence.’

He dropped the money in the till. I wasn’t sure if he’d gypped me. It seemed unlikely I’d had the right amount.

‘You never buy cigarettes?’

‘No.’

‘But you smoke them.’ And he gave me a strange look.

‘Well …’ Then I thought, he would’ve seen me, walking past with Curtis. ‘Everyone smokes these days.’

‘The Post?’

‘Nan used to read it.’

He waited.

‘Nan and Pop. You know Pop? He comes around for tobacco and papers.’

‘I know him.’ He returned to his newspaper, spread out on the freezer.

I walked home around the block that was a songline, each blue metal hill and valley one that I’d made, each fence post one I’d watched peeling, rotting and falling into the soursobs. Past the Donnellans’, but Davo was inside. Then a voice, ‘Clem.’

I turned, looked at the fly-wire.

‘You busy?’

I went to Val’s door, and straight in, since I’d been invited. She welcomed me, smiled and showed me her cake. ‘I guess I should,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Like you said, about Ida.’

It seemed like a good idea. At any rate, it’d shut Ernie up for a while.

Val picked up a bowl of icing and started spreading it on top. ‘I don’t know … after all these years.’

I’d told her how Ernie didn’t care about Ernie, but Mrs Ernie—that was different. How he hated to see her left out, forgotten, when Donnellan and Whelan were together, babysat, front porch Hamlets, rides in wheelbarrows and the rest of it.

‘If it’s such a simple thing,’ she said.

‘I guess.’