‘And, later, maybe a year or two …’

She picked up the last jumper. So small. Dog-sized. ‘This was the first. You can see where the silverfish got to it.’ And she showed me.

It was beautifully knit, cable pattern, unlike the shit you bought in Target. ‘Maybe you should keep one,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Six months, he might change his mind.’

‘I don’t reckon.’ She went to put it in, but I held it, tried to take it.

‘I reckon if it were me, and I was living somewhere, I’d wanna know.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Cos you’d think, Maybe she had to … and maybe she felt bad, all this time.’

She let go, and I took it.

‘What d’you reckon, six months?’ she asked.

‘Maybe. Maybe a bit longer.’

Wool burns quickly. So the flames had died, and the smoke had slowed. She reclaimed the jumper, walked over to the tap, and rinsed it under a slow stream. Turned off the water, held the jumper up and said, ‘Hard to imagine anyone being that small.’ She pegged it on the line.

The smoke seemed to have quietened the bees. That’s how it was in nature, especially with bees. They all assumed their home was burning, so they flew back, to see. But now, they started up again. And Les came out to look.

Wilton wasn’t the flashest suburb. The bus ride had been a descent into Curtis’s Latin hell. A couple of kids sucking each other’s face, saying, ‘What’s your fuckin’ problem?’ when I looked around. The bus driver wasn’t about to buy into it. I got off and walked past a row of empty shops, the doors boarded up, VapoRub signs from the fifties when (I guessed) it was still safe to bring your family shopping. The streets were dirty, the footpaths, too—some sort of vomit—claret—urine mixture.

Thomas Street. I studied my mud map, walked past yards full of washer bodies and crates of empties, stumped cars and stuffed water features. You could see down hallways, into dark kitchens blaring finals footy and fuck-the-reffos talkback. Like any moment Virgil would step out from behind a fuse box and say, Come on, I’ll show you the way.

I wanted to turn, retrace my steps, get on a bus and head for the city, but couldn’t. Something was pushing me, saying, You’ve come this far.

Gould Street. Easy, I told myself. He’ll know. And anyway, what’s my choice? I’d looked up the Maritime Workers’ Union, called, and said, ‘My name’s Clem Whelan. My dad used to be a member, I think.’

‘Go on.’

‘I have his membership card, but it’s pretty old.’ I explained how he’d been a builder (probably), then stopped, worked on freighters (or some other type of ship), stopped in Callao and then …?

The woman said, ‘We can’t give information over the phone.’

‘This was a long time ago.’ I told her how I hadn’t seen him since I was a kid, but how I’d found his membership card, and how there didn’t seem any other option. And she said, ‘You checked Births, Deaths and Marriages?’