I saw Les Champness walking down his drive in his pyjamas and slippers. He leaned over, picked up his paper and headed back. I wondered if Mr Fantastic might fix him. Stretch out of his window, take him by the singlet and say, You watch yourself, mister.

No, Mr Fantastic wouldn’t fit into the drabness of Lanark Avenue, 30 January 1984. It was too hot for him already. The colours bleached from his costume, in the same way we’d all been bleached, into a light blue school shirt, grey pants and white socks. Lennon, too, still on the wall, still praying for peace.

Les went in. Assuming the machine kept working, you could fix people’s pipes, or make seat covers, and then they’d give you an asbestos box on stilts. You could carpet it, put an aspidistra in the lounge room, and make more people to feed into the machine.

I heard Pop say, ‘The mafia runs the church … never been a Pope to stand up to them.’

In a way, it didn’t matter what he said, as long as kept talking, as long as the machine kept working. Even if he forgot bits, or made some up. The sound of his voice; that’s all that mattered. Honey-flavoured, beer-smelling. As long as he kept talking. Imagine that? Pop silent, sitting in a corner, looking at us like we were strangers. So, every little bit of it, every whisper, every scratched nostril and clunked falsie, every rustle of the paper and race call, every fart—excellent! All of it, excellent. Enough to make you happy, even if you were looking down the barrel of another year at school.

Curtis jumped the fence from 29. Same school bag, I noticed. Old shirt and pants, shoes with a bita polish, perhaps. He approached the window. ‘Can I geta lift?’

‘Come in.’

He was gone, around the garden, across the path that led nowhere, towards our front door. I went out to greet him, and Pop was on his feet, holding his head in his hands. ‘He had a horse called Skeffington,’ he said.

‘That’s it, Skeffington,’ Jen said, trying to calm him.

He turned on her. ‘But you wouldn’t know. It wasn’t Skeffington, was it?’

‘It was.’

‘It wasn’t!’

She was scared. She clung to her handbag, full of product.

‘Yes, it was, Dad,’ Mum said. ‘Skeffington. Bill Brown had him, remember?’

Curtis knocked, and entered. ‘G’day, Mrs Whelan, Doug.’ Smiling. ‘Jen.’

Pop said to him, ‘What do you want?’

‘I was gonna get a lift to school, if that’s okay?’

‘Skeffington?’

Curtis took it in his stride. ‘That’s it, Doug. He was a good horse, wasn’t he?’

Pop was unsure. ‘Over long distances. You know him, Skeffington?’

‘Yeah … you were talking about him the other day.’

‘I was?’