And something happened to Bette on those two Secret Cake Days. It was like some great fun-mum instinct kicked in. Both years she had become bountiful, spending everything she could on the four of them. But the second year especially, when the man at the bar poured her out a third sherry on the house (no-one ever ordered the sherry, he said; he was trying to get rid of it) and Danny had been able to lure her into playing pool with them, she had become silly and gregarious, loudly discussing her shots with various punters at the bar, giggling too much when she completely missed the cue-ball with the cue. It was amazing. She was like a mother they had never known. In the car on the way home, Bette had repeated with a gleeful edge, ‘What Hessel doesn’t know can’t hurt him.’ And back at home, once the lies had again been successfully told to Hessel and Danny had gone off whistling happily into his bedroom, Cathy and Bette exchanged complicit smirking glances, an unspoken congratulations on a job well done. And suddenly Cathy had a sense of something precious. Something she hadn’t even known she was missing, a feeling that she could access now. It felt like she had a family.

‘So you’re going to go with Dad this weekend?’ Cathy asked Danny, flipping the Elastica record cover over to read the back.

Danny was leaning towards his tinny amp, trying to match the chords of ‘Annie’ as the song filled the air around them.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I liked your idea better though.’

‘Of course you did. Because my idea was shit hot.’

For Danny’s official birthday that weekend Cathy had been going to hire a PlayStation and a projector and turn a room in Bromley Cairn into a games and junk food centre. But Hessel had suddenly wanted to be more involved. In fact, he’d taken over. ‘Daniël is becoming a man now,’ he’d said to Cathy. ‘Your parties are for little kids.’ He’d cancelled Cathy’s plans and decreed that instead, he would drive Danny and one friend down to the city to see a Dutch film at one of the bohemian arthouse cinemas and then he would take them both out to drink a Hollandia beer.

Danny laid his guitar down on the bed. He couldn’t keep up with Elastica the way he could with Pavement – or perhaps it just mattered more if he got it wrong. ‘I’m not going to take anyone with me though,’ he said. ‘I don’t really want to make any of my friends do that.’

‘That might piss Dad off,’ Cathy said.

Danny just shrugged. ‘Everything I do pisses him off.’

Sometimes it made Cathy feel a bit wild, Danny’s meek acceptance of their dad. His strange passive resistance. But maybe she was missing something. Cathy thought about the two of them alone together, driving all the way to Melbourne, sitting in a darkened cinema, drinking a beer. She tried, but she just couldn’t see it working. But maybe that’s what she wasn’t getting. Maybe this was actually an opportunity. Perhaps them going out together, just the two of them, would be the moment their dad found something to like about Danny, the moment he might actually have a conversation with him and figure out how great he was in his own very Danny way, instead of being constantly disappointed in him for not being more like Hessel.