I couldn’t really argue with this. Peter had been there since the beginning. Since Mum and Dad had brought me home from hospital, and laid me in my cradle, and Mrs Donnellan had brought her sons in to see the new baby. The stuff I’d been told about. They’d probably congratulated Mum and Dad and asked about a name and said, Clem, that’s a nice old name, and even (probably) heard me crying at night.

‘Been watching you walk past all these years,’ Peter said.

‘Yeah.’ What could you say?

‘And you’ve always been in a rush to get home.’

‘Just glad to get away from school.’

‘Perhaps.’

Maybe, I thought, home was the place to be. Because it would be the same at four as it had been at eight. ‘Got a good art teacher,’ I said. ‘Lets us call him Nick.’

He just worked.

‘Well, keep at it.’

I was in shorts and sandals, of course, with my Clem Whelan satchel, cowlick and stick legs. And he was gardening, and I was telling him about my teachers, and art, and Mr Fantastic, and I felt bad that I’d changed, but he hadn’t. I always felt bad; like these people had ossified so I could grow up.

‘What do you reckon I should do next year?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Keep studying. It teaches you how to think.’

‘I know how to think.’

He smiled. ‘Yeah, guess you do. You used to say you wanted to be a pilot.’

‘Na.’

‘Then a mechanic.’

‘For Pop.’

‘Then once you said, I’m gonna be a writer. A novelist, like Dickens. And you had this book planned. You told me, remember?’

I waited.

‘It sounded a bit like David Copperfield, but I didn’t say anything.’

I thought about it. It made sense. It was like he was saying it for a reason. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘Gleneagles needs a famous writer. You could fit the bill.’

I almost laughed. ‘Any ideas?’

But he didn’t reply. And I didn’t need a reply. I could still hear Nick Andrews telling me to do what I knew. ‘You’re gettin’ sunburnt,’ I said.

But again, he didn’t reply. He’d done a square metre of weeds. That was a good day’s work.

I woke to the smell of freshly mowed lawn. Neat, and Lanark respectable. Ready to be rolled on, ball-thrown on, sat on, with the abridged David Copperfield Peter Donnellan had remembered. Summer nights on Onkaparinga rugs, because the house was too hot. A tranny (on the end of three extensions) playing Sherbet. The last of Don’s lollies. As it got darker, and you couldn’t read, but you kept reading, because what else could you do? As Mum called, Clem, come in, the mozzies’ll eat you.