Where in Melbourne would an eighteen-year-old hide? I drove to our old house in Hawthorn, a place Caleb still sometimes called home, even while telling myself no one runs away home. Behind the security gate Stephen had installed, the house looked locked up and empty. Caleb was more likely to be somewhere else entirely, someplace I’d never been, perhaps never heard of. Why didn’t I know him better? I searched Lygon Street in Carlton, where he used to love pizza. I cruised Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, where he used to look at clothes. I paused beachfront in St Kilda, where he used to swim. Of course, all of this was futile. The drive took hours and he was in none of these places.

I returned to Brunton. By then, it was nearly morning. I was helpless, though all I wanted to do was help. I was alone, though I had chosen to have a family. The only email I had was from Marco, attaching more of his article.

Who would you be talking to, if you made an appointment through time and spoke to Nero? Marco asked. Surviving statues suggest answers. Meeting Nero when he was first created Emperor, you’d find a sixteen-year-old with a receding bottom lip. His brushed-forward hair would remind you of the early Beatles. The look didn’t shock Imperial Rome the way it reportedly shocked London. In fact, Nero’s mother Julia Agrippina might have encouraged his moptop because it was a copy of his ancestor Julius’s do. After murdering his mother, Nero changed his hairstyle. He began to have his hair curled into two rows apparently inspired by a wreath. He wanted to look like a grown up. Like Tom Hanks in Big, Nero wanted to be big. He removed Agrippina’s image from coins issued from his mint and ordered the construction of a statue of himself dressed as the sun god Sol. The Colossus of Nero, at thirty metres tall, was very, very Big.

I remembered one hot day on a dig in an ancient cemetery. ‘Doesn’t taking these things ever bother you?’ I’d asked Marco. ‘People buried them on purpose. For their own eternities.’

Marco’s answer had predictably been about knowledge and museums.

‘Future archaeologists will be very confused by our museums,’ I’d commented, thinking of the remains of Rome and Egypt, treasures from the Americas and Asia, now scattered in institutions around the world. Tiger bones in Melbourne, elephant skulls in Sydney. My own coffee table collection. The temptation to begin a personal collection had been strong long before, illicitly, I smuggled my first little pot past Italy’s antiquities police. The provenance of that pot had bothered me when I got it home. Not knowing who had owned and cared for that pot robbed it of meaning. Now I knew the story of every item I treasured.