‘Too right. Never seen no one change so quick. That’s when I asked her in for a cuppa, and she was quite apologetic. Like it was her fault, makin’ me promise to stay quiet all these years.’

‘About time,’ Peter repeated. ‘You can’t make sense of the world if you don’t know where you’re from.’

‘Too right.’

I sat down against my side of the fence and listened. I could tell everything about them from their voices.

‘Poor, Fay,’ Val said.

Bottles. A box, perhaps. Peter saying, ‘We could get money for these.’

‘No, put ’em in the bin.’

‘Could keep them, just in case.’

The home winemaking he’d been promising to start for years.

‘Just chuck them, you’re never gonna do it.’

‘Might.’

Weeds. Fire. Silence.

Val said, ‘Then she ends up havin’ a good cry and sayin’, Yer right, Val, it was mean to keep it from them.’

No reply.

‘You been so good to me, she says. And I say, Anyone would’ve done the same, and she says, No, remember, all them days you’d babysit?’

Me and Jen playing on Val’s rug with Val Doonican drifting in the window from next door, Peter reading Dylan Thomas aloud, hoping (somehow) to inspire us, as Val made cupcakes for our after-school treat.

She said, ‘I told her, It was a privilege, Fay. Then she was crying again, saying sorry. I said, There’s nothin’ we can’t say to each other. I bathed ’em, remember? When you couldn’t get home in time? I put ’em in that rotten bath of mine and scrubbed them and dried them off and put them in David’s and Peter’s old jarmies till you got home. Remember me doin’ that, Peter?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

The fire flared. I imagined more weeds, more shit they’d left in their shed too long.

‘That’s what I told her, Peter. I mighta let it slip, but it was cos I cared, cos I couldn’t help myself.’

‘Look, Mum, we still got this.’

Silence, as they examined whatever it was.

‘Should give it to Fay,’ Val said.

‘Righto.’

I peered through the gap. It was the cast-iron pot we’d cooked the soup in. Five, six years of cats and rats. Keep it, I thought. Then Peter handed her a few lengths of wood and she made her way to the fire, lowered them in, like an offering, and stood watching. ‘Lonely,’ she called.

‘Eh?’

No response, then: ‘Some days … though I dunno if I’m ready to start again.’

‘Once Clem sees it, ready to go, he’ll be motivated.’

Now it was a reliable fire, red flames and clear smoke, rising straight up.

‘Don’t know,’ Val said.

‘It’ll need a tonne of work, but I reckon it’d be just the thing for Doug.’

Doug?

‘Get him interested again. Nothin’ worse than when you lose interest, eh, Mum?’