‘It was an accident,’ he said. And then, modifying quickly, explaining quickly, letting himself off the hook: ‘He had an accident.’

34

My mother told me the history of my family as I had never known it. How my grandfather had tried to murder my uncle, Basil’s teenaged father, long before either of us was even born.

She told me how she had seen it, and how she felt it had ruined her, even in that moment.

And she told me that afterwards things got even worse – not the violence, but the decay. She told me how Hessel hadn’t let Danny come home from the hospital, not for one day. How Danny had to go straight into foster care and Hessel wouldn’t let Leonie or Cathy see him or know where he was. How Cathy had had to lie about what she’d seen. And how, over the following years, while Bette started telling everyone that he had in fact died in the accident or at least shortly after, the brain injury was making Danny too erratic and forgetful and angry to stay in foster care. Pretty soon he’d ended up homeless and on drugs and in and out of juvenile detention and then, eventually, he’d just dropped off the radar completely and at that point Hessel told Leonie that he had died of a drug overdose. As if that was what somehow he was hoping for: for Danny to just disappear and never come back.

Cathy was long gone by then: she had buckled under the weight of the lie she’d had to perform: for the police, for the community, for herself. She had run, escaped – anywhere was good enough, anywhere with enough people that she could get lost. She disappeared into her new life in Sydney. Only Leonie had her number.

Leonie hadn’t believed Hessel’s story about the drug overdose. She’d searched for Danny and found him alive, if not actually well, in a hostel in St Kilda. She brought Cathy back to see him, leaving a two-year-old me in Sydney, and when they went there together, it was clear to them that Danny didn’t remember what had happened, had no idea what Hessel had done. Somehow he’d been told the accident story and he’d believed it – needed to believe it. He’d clung to the story like a life raft. He was as fragile and innocent and trusting as the little boy they’d both loved. So from then on neither Cathy or Leonie could bear to tell him the painful truth either.

Leonie and Danny tried to be together when he first came out of the hostel. They tried to salvage what they had lost. They had Basil, something they were both so happy about. But with Danny’s issues it just got more and more difficult, and then it wasn’t quite safe. Cathy came back and she and Leonie found Danny the best place they could in supported accommodation nearby, and tried to make him as happy as possible. And from then on Leonie managed everything while Cathy paid all the bills from Sydney.