I sat on the chair opposite Hessel, discreetly using my feet to move aside a drift of papers underneath the table. The kitchen was freezing. Bette had the window above the kitchen sink wide open. But despite the cold, the fresh air was very welcome.

Hessel looked at me over the top of his newspaper. ‘Do you coffee, or do you tea, Anna?’ he asked. ‘What is your poison?’

‘Would you like an egg, Cathy?’ asked Bette. ‘I’m doing one for Hessel.’

‘I’m Anna, Grandma.’

‘Yes?’

‘You said Cathy?’

Bette looked confused. ‘Did I? Did I really?’

In the little alcove off the kitchen, next to two great closed double doors, two armchairs sat side by side in front of a television with a radiation heater on the floor facing them. Crowded. Everything was crowded.

‘Um, I guess an egg would be nice, thank you, Grandma. And I prefer tea first thing.’ Coffee was off the menu. My little interloper, the strange little entity, had made its dislike known. How can you be related to Nassim if you don’t like coffee, I’d thought, and then, just as quickly, caught myself. ‘Tea would be lovely, thank you.’

Hessel clicked his tongue. ‘Ach, Australians,’ he said dismissively as Bette turned to the table, delivering a breakfast of poached eggs to Hessel. ‘Elizabeth, get our Australian girl a tea.’

Stacked up behind the kitchen chairs, in a small hill, were yellowing, curling paperbacks, and behind them a dusty broken bookshelf and triple towers of what looked like stacked records rising up in a corner, and boxes stacked further on top of them, just waiting to fall on someone and crush them to death. And was that . . .? Was that a dead mouse on the floor? Breathe, Anna.

Hessel folded his newspaper and laid it to rest neatly beside his plate. He picked up a knife and fork, held them at the ready and considered his breakfast for a moment.

‘Look at that,’ he said grandly. ‘Is there anything better?’

I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. ‘Yes. It looks like a very nice breakfast.’ Hessel nodded approvingly and began to attack it enthusiastically with his utensils.

‘Anna dear, I am so sorry to have called you Cathy –’

‘Oh Grandma, please, I don’t mind being confused with Mum.’ And then, very glad of a common topic of conversation, I rushed on. ‘Apparently we look similar. Everyone tells us all the time. What do you think, Grandpa?’

Hessel looked up at me quickly with something that wasn’t exactly a smile, while Bette leaned over my shoulder and poured steaming tea into my delicate cup.

‘The spitting image,’ Bette said enthusiastically.

‘Perhaps,’ said Hessel, and raised his fork again.

‘Thanks for the tea, Grandma.’ I surreptitiously sniffed the milk before pouring it in and then sipped carefully from the cup. It seemed fine. Good even. Bette was watching me so closely it was disconcerting, so I waved my hand towards the open kitchen window. ‘What are those? Out there? Those rock piles, boulder-hill thingies in every paddock? I’ve never seen them before.’