I thought of Basil, standing up here, making fun of me by jumping up and down. I wondered if he knew about Danny. He seemed to know everything else about my family. Imagine if Basil had fallen. Bright and lively Basil, snuffed out, just like that.

And all of a sudden I just couldn’t fathom it. How could Mum never have told me she’d had a little brother who died? A fully formed fourteen-year-old boy, as alive and healthy as Basil was, right there, flesh and blood, and then gone, just gone.

Even if it was painful to speak about, even if she was ashamed of herself for leaving her family in the middle of all that, how could she have simply stopped talking about him, her real-life brother who, according to Bette, she had loved with all her heart?

I put my useless phone back in my pocket then climbed very carefully back down the cairn and trudged back across the paddock in the moonlight. I felt thick-headed and dull. Not even the chill air refreshed me. When I reached the yard I had to stop and lean against the gatepost. A sharp twinge caught my belly, and then a swelling ache with a pointy tail, and suddenly the weight of it all – trying to understand, trying to achieve, trying to escape, trying to be, trying not to hurt, trying to attain a nearly impossible goal – made me feel so heavy, so leaden, that I could barely stand; and then, without warning, I doubled over and vomited on the grass, and before I could stand up again I had to lean right over with my hands on my knees as I vomited again.

Well, I thought, this is a low point.

There was a garden tap right by the gate. I ran frigid water over my hands, tried to push it up and over my face, gulped as much as I could, and spat. I attached the hose that sat there and sprayed a jet out over the mess I had made until it had all run off under the bushes. And then I turned the hose on myself, on my face, on my forehead, in my mouth, trying to wash it all away.

I switched off the tap and shook my numbed fingers dry and slumped back onto the tangled grass of my grandparents’ yard. I looked up at the moon, smiling its shiny face at me, until finally the drifting clouds slipped fully over it and everything around disappeared into a cottony darkness.

10 January 1996

The week before that day

Cathy had always run Danny’s birthday parties.

She had spent too many years being disappointed at her own lacklustre birthdays – marked only by a slightly-more-special-than-usual dinner with her parents – that she decided when Danny was just a little kid that it would be different for him. Danny wouldn’t miss out like she did.

She’d begun when she was nine and he was five. She’d planned the parties meticulously – even then, a natural-born manager of people and events. She’d sorted out the games, the balloons, the cake, the friends, the music. One year she had Danny and all his friends running around in the paddock in the mid-January heat with super-soakers while she wore a whistle around her neck, calling the game. The next year she took over the Dutch Room and put together a grand board-game tournament, with a running tally and everything. She even made take-home lolly bags for all of Danny’s friends.