I feel embarrassed with Lynette. Not through exceptional narrowness on my part, I must say. As far as I am concerned she can wear her hair whichever way she likes. But other people stare. In a place like Hobart, what would you expect? And how must I look, as the man who is with her? She has her head half-shaved, pink eye-shadow, and lipstick almost black. And she touches things. Parking meters. Tattered posters. Bubble-gum dispensers. Me. And smacks her lips a lot, as if to test their greasiness.

She lays hand now on my woolen sleeve, and I see her lacquered nails, as dark as her lips, but green. ‘D’ya mind if we go to the museum, Uncle Ted?’ she says. ‘I’ve got me project to prepare.’

‘Of course not. I’d enjoy it,’ I say. Given Lynette’s usual attention span, I don’t think that will take her long.

‘On the poor, bloody aborigines.’

‘The Tasmanians?’

‘Yeah,’ she says as if surprised there are any other kind.

‘There’s not much left of them,’ I say. ‘To do a project on, I mean.’

‘Yeah, there is Uncle Ted. There’s heaps.’

We make our way to the museum, and the exhibition on the native Tasmanians is larger than I remembered. They have still got the old diorama, though, and I am always pleased to see that. It takes up most of an end-wall with  life-sized aboriginal figures in a bright scene of sea and sky. A man, woman and little girl stand around a cooking fire.

‘He’s got a beautiful body,’ Lynne says. ‘Pity he is only plaster painted black.’

I am taken aback by that, but she has turned to other things, and writes. She has unfolded sheets of crumpled A4 from her pocket, and rests them on the sloping glass of a display case.

‘See the rush baskets, Uncle Ted. The way they make them with shell decorations. We’ve been doing it at school. And I go to an aboriginal woman to learn how to make the shell necklaces.’

We have to find the display of shell necklaces next. Lynette is apparently very excited by them.

‘Poor bloody aborigines,’ she says again. ‘I wish we knew more about the way they lived. They were here for so long, and Tasmania is their place really.’

I do feel confronted by Lynette. ‘Not anymore,’ I say.

‘Yes. Still anymore,’ she says. ‘They’re still here, Uncle Ted, trying to remember their past. We should help them.’

I went swimming with Kevin Chivers one day at Midway Point when we were nine years old. I was always popular at school, sought after as a companion by other boys and able to take my pick, so had never considered a friendship with Kev before. Mum referred to him as ‘a poor little bloke’, which I did not understand but took to be a shameful thing. She said that his father was ‘a real roughneck’, and I did understand that the wild look in old man Chivers’s eye terrified all the kids. She said Kevin’s mother was ‘a baggage’, and that made me think of the way her tits wobbled about inside her dirty dress.

At school Kevin wore short pants, gray and too tight for him. He sat just in front of me, and when he stood up in class you saw where the edge of his seat made a red mark across the backs of his fat legs. Other boys spoke to him only to pass the attendance book, or hand out worksheets. Kevin never thanked anyone for anything, and when it came his turn to read aloud in class he was tediously bad at it. You could tell he was not even going to try, and you waited without much sense of anything being achieved. I took offence at that in particular, and Kev seemed to know I had it in for him. He flicked a wad of chewed paper at me during my turn, and had to go to the back of the room. Afterwards he was too worried to look at me.

So it was strange that the two of us went swimming together. I do not recall how that came about. It was a Saturday. They were sealing the roads around our district at the time, and I remember the smell of new-laid bitumen as I bicycled to his place. I kept thinking the smell was coming out of the trees, then remembering it was from the roads.

Kev’s little sister came to their front gate when I arrived. She had chicken pox and someone had painted every pock with a separate spot of white calamine. I thought that was very funny, and so did she. When Kev arrived he seemed to have grown older and more sure of himself than he was at school. He put my lunch box in a Gladstone bag on the back of his bike, with his own, and told his sister she was not to come any further than the gate.

It must have been a long ride for boys of nine to Midway Point where we swam. Everyone knew the place where sandstone ledges and shallow caves looked out on a rocky sea, but I had only been there with my parents before.

We hid our bikes in the bushes beside the road, then climbed through a barbed-wire fence to take a short cut to the water. You could not see the sea from the road, only the blur of sheokes overlooking it from the cliffs. Between lay a stretch of marshy land where brown grass sprouted from soft blue mud. We set out across it. Soon Kev said we should take off our sandshoes. They were already covered in stinking mud, and we tried to carry them away from ourselves, by the laces. We sank up to our ankles at each step, and the sensation without shoes made us laugh; spiky on top but soft and cold underneath. Then we made dirty prints on the smooth stones by the shore, before washing our feet in the even colder sea.

We washed our hands too and picnicked immediately among the boulders there, chucking our crusts into a pool. Kev had a hard-boiled egg, and I remembered seeing him eat those at school. He ate with his mouth open. Now he talked as he ate too, and spluttered me with bits of egg on purpose, not caring what I said about it. He gave me some of his raspberry drink, which I had never had before, then poured the rest out even though I had said I liked it.

‘You bastard,’ I said, and he looked embarrassed.

‘Let’s swim,’ he reckoned.

‘You’re stupid. We’ve just eaten,’ I said.

‘What’s that matter?’

He stripped off, staring at me as if it was some kind of a dare and throwing his clothes about carelessly. Then he jumped in with a shout. So I undressed and jumped in too.

The sun was hot by the time we came out again. We found a good spot to lie at the cliff-base with our heads in the shade and the rest of us cooking. Kev asked a lot of questions about the other kids at school, and I was surprised how much he knew about them already.

Later we went for a walk, poking at things among the rocks.

‘I can smell beer,’ Kev said suddenly.

‘Yeah,’ I said, though I was not sure what beer smelled like.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to a broken brown bottle just ahead, and a patch of froth still damp. ‘There’s someone else here,’ he said.

Not long after, we discovered a man and woman lying together in each others’ arms, another beer bottle beside them. We made funny noises but they did not seem to notice. Then we crept up round the back and looked down on them from the cliff. They stirred when we threw pebbles, which Kev thought was terrific fun. We came down the other side and crowed at them from the rocks further along the shore. Then we swam back and spied on the from the sea, causing them to sit up again, but that was all.

Then we swam out beyond our depth and trod water, considering ourselves very brave with no adults keeping us in check.

‘Ever swum in the nuddy?’ Kev asked.

He had large, baggy trunks which he took off under water and held above his head. I laughed at the idea at first but eventually wriggled out of mine as well.

‘Doesn’t it feel lovely,’ he jeered, ‘the water swishing about your bare bum.’

On the way home I remember the sour bitumen smell again, a hot smell now, and the noise of cicadas. We wove about the road on our bikes, shouting to each other. I could not hear what Kev was saying well enough to have a proper conversation, but I felt like shouting anyway. I wondered if his sister would be waiting for us at their gate, but she was having tea. At my place I told Mum it had been a good day, and she was pleased.

   Things did not work out at school, though. I thought the relationship would continue, but it did not happen. I could not pursue it in front of the other boys. I would sometimes talk to Kev when no-one else was around, and he seemed grateful for that. Once I borrowed some money from him.

I thought about this dilemma a lot, I recollect now, without resolving it. I thought about it sitting on my own in the roots of the big pine tree at school. I felt pleased with life most of the time in those days, and wished I could love everyone. But what if I can’t get things right? I worried. There was a part of me that tried too hard to be normal, and another part that knew that normal was not always right. What about my other task, I asked, of working out what is right for other people, instead of vice versa?

In New Guinea Dr Alan was very pleased to be given a whole house in one corner of the mission hospital compound to live in. It was of fibro-cement sheeting with a corrugated iron roof, painted a pretty blue and surrounded by banana palms, crotons and flowering bougainvillea, merging into the rainforest behind. A few coconut palms arched gracefully to one side, edging a little gully with a trickling stream. An old German nun – she must have been nearing eighty – ushered him up the wooden steps and into his spacious, albeit slightly mildewed, accommodation and showed him round. She had bought tea, sugar, rice, cooking oil, washing powder and everything else he might want to start with, as well as having placed a vase of frangipani on his living room table and a bowl of fruit in his kitchen. She also told him she had trapped one or two rats and showed him where she had repaired holes in the insect wire outside the louvered windows, through which they must have entered.

Just as well he had somewhere pleasing to live, since the hospital work disappointed him. There was no shortage of doctors, as he had been advised there was. The real problem was that the local doctors worked only a few hours a day, and even fewer now he had arrived. The real shortage was of patients, despite the large population the hospital was supposed to serve. The doctors and the nurses were also remarkably unfriendly, compared to what he expected. Was this because he was white? Or because they did so little work and attracted so few customers, and felt embarrassed?

Whatever the reason, he knew it was very important to make his solitary home life as enjoyable as possible. He was soon quite lonely, nevertheless, but toughed it out by cooking himself good meals, watching DVDs and reading novel after novel.

Home life had its problems too, however. The rats had not been kept out by the old nun’s repairs to the insect meshing, and many of them invaded the house each night. He searched in vain for how else they were getting in. He kept his bedroom door closed, and they did not come in there, but he heard them scampering about the rest of the house and sometimes squeaking. This made him shiver sometimes as he lay in bed.

Every morning he found terrible damage had been inflicted. In the bathroom they partly ate his soap, leaving tiny teeth marks on the piece that remained, and bit into his tube of tooth paste. He felt slightly disgusted washing and cleaning his teeth, and tried to think of other things. In the kitchen they ate everything not in a metal container. They gnawed through the yellow plastic lid of his cooking oil, for example, leaving tiny flecks of yellow suspended in the oil. How could he use that? In the living room they chewed his books and ate a hole in the tubing of his stethoscope, rendering it unusable. Worst of all, they left rat shit on every surface. What cleaning he did, and all to have the same problem the following day.

He bought rat poison in the form of little blue pellets and left heaps in every corner. But the rats did not eat them, and the heaps of pellets remained undisturbed. He discussed the problem with the other doctors, and a sort of friendship developed sharing this problem that was no-one’s fault, even if they could not see eye to eye on the medical work. They advised putting food with the pellets. But the rats just ate the food and not the poison.

‘No,’ they said when he told them this. ‘You have to put the pellets in the food.’

Next evening he used tweezers to insert the pellets one by one into pieces of banana and pieces of cheese, and even into pieces of soap. He went to bed with high hopes. In the morning, however, he found that the rats had eaten banana, cheese and soap and left sticky blue pellets uneaten.

He bought several spring-loaded rat traps as his next maneuver and baited these with banana and cheese. He found, in the morning, the rats had managed to remove the bait without setting off the traps. This made him cross that he was wasting so much money and effort in vain.

He discussed the failure with the general store owner, who sold him rat glue instead, guaranteed to work. This took the form of brown glue that did not set, in which the rats’ feet would get stuck. He laid a sheet of cardboard covered in glue on the kitchen floor and rose the next morning alarmed at the prospect of dealing with stuck, live rats. There were none. The glue lay undisturbed until he accidently put one bare toe on it himself, which was a terrible problem.

Next night he spread glue on the floor of a high-sided cardboard box and placed cheese in the middle of the glue. His plan was that a rat would have to jump down into the box to get the food, and thus get stuck. It would also be easier to deal with a rat in a box than on a flat sheet, he thought. Next morning, however, the cheese was gone but there was no rat and the glue lay undisturbed. He could not see how any rat had managed to do this. Did they work as a team, perhaps?

He discussed the problem with the New Guinea gardener, hoping to benefit from local wisdom. The old man smiled pleasantly, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Mr Rat, he more clever than you.’

In desperation he went to the convent to tell the nuns he needed alternative accommodation. There was nothing else available, they said. The old German women were sympathetic, nevertheless, and, after some deliberation, they gave him a little cat to take home.

The cat, however, was barely more than a kitten and able to sit in the palm of his hand. She rode comfortably in his pocket, in fact. When he got her home he decided he could not possibly leave her out to face the rats in the night, in case they ate her alive. So she spent the nights in the bedroom with him, purring loudly and licking his face from time to time as he tried to sleep.

This could have been said to make matters worse, except that Dr Alan and the cat became friends. He kept her locked in the house for several days, in case she ran back to the convent, and fed her well on rice and meaty cat food. She gained some weight and sleek good health, but remained a tiny, fragile thing. He talked to her a lot in the evenings, and got the impression no-one had paid her this much attention before. She paid him her catty attention in return.

Meanwhile the rats continued their nightly scampering and squeaking, as both of them now listened from the bedroom, and every morning Dr Alan cleaned the surfaces again and made good the damage as best he could.

Until one evening when everything changed. He sat on one of his cushioned wicker chairs, watching his television, and the cat sat on the other one, as usual. She washed her little body with her tongue, and he reached across to interrupt her and stroke her tiny head. Just then a large rat appeared from the kitchen, in full sight, apparently oblivious to their presence. Almost instantaneously the cat leapt from her chair, had the rat by the throat and shook vigorously. Blood spurted up the wall and the rat was dead. It was twice the size of the cat, but that was that.

Alan picked up the dead rat by its tail and carried it outside in the dark, where he threw it as far as he could into the jungle. The cat did not follow him. When he got back he found she had returned to her seat and was continuing her washing unconcerned. He brought soapy water to wash the rat blood off the wall, feeling slightly sick but grateful and astonished. He would buy her a fresh fish at the market next day, he decided, as a reward.

So it was that the cat roamed the house by night after that, while Dr Alan slept soundly in his closed room, and the rat problem was solved. There had been many of them, he was sure, but none returned. News had somehow got back to the rat population that a killer now patrolled the premises and kept his possessions safe.

I feel altogether flat since finishing the painting. From the effort of doing the whole place, perhaps. Just to concentrate on a job like that is hard for me. I would have a screw driver in my hand, say, I suppose for prizing the lid of a tin of paint, and I would be carrying the step ladder and thinking: What am I doing with this screw driver while I am shifting the steps?Then I would not seem to have the paint brush when I got up there, and so on. Sometimes I felt like giving up, but got a grip on myself eventually and worked things out in proper order. I am German, you see. Sometimes I did give up temporarily, feeling so tense I could hardly see, as if the colour of the paint hurt my eyes. Sometimes the muddle overwhelmed me, the paint on the soles of my shoes, the bits of painty rag, fingers sticking together, dried up paint brushes. I am German. I try to do things properly.

And I need space to breathe. Was I better off living alone? Too late now. The tenant has moved in. David. I had not finished. I never finish anything. But it was good enough for him at only sixty dollars a week. He also has the run of the place. He might count himself lucky, I think.

The dog is not used to him yet. She gives a bark when he gets home, as she has been taught to do. She puts a paw on my arm. One bark and one pat with her paw. I have to discipline her if she does more, they told me, to keep her properly trained. Then we go to check that it is David. He does not like that much, even though he is a vet. He must know something about a hearing ear dog. He will not have knocked, since he has his own key, but she hears him and barks and lets me know. Then we check. Whenever he comes in.

Which is often at irregular hours. This is his first employment, so they give him odd hours covering the practice, I suppose. Or else he has a girlfriend. Probably not. He is from Geelong and his parents brought half his stuff from their place when he moved in. They are bringing the rest later. He had applied for a job in Ferntree Gully, he told me, which he did not get. Then this one, where they are giving him a go. He runs the clinic on his own some days. I asked him how he liked it, and he said he did not. He said no-one enjoys having their fingers in pus all day. People bring in their cats with head abscesses from fighting, and things like that, he said. Then he went to his room. He seems pretty aloof. He is pretty tense himself. He has not got used to my lip reading, for instance. He shapes his mouth very deliberately when he talks to me, even though I told him it is better to talk in the normal way.

I suppose the dog will accept him eventually. She does not warn me now when Les comes over from next door. Les just makes himself known these days without her assistance, though I wish she would let me know. It startles me when Les appears out of nowhere, already in the room. He comes to talk because he is lonely, but I cannot follow a lot of what he says. I have told him this, but he takes no notice. What can I do? I pretend to understand.

That is a common problem for me with other people, having to act a part. At the pub it is all right if I meet someone who shares my political concerns. I know the type of person and what they are likely to be saying. It is likely to be interesting in return for my efforts. But if someone starts talking about his family, or the footy, I am trapped.

Ellen talks about her family a lot. What is more, she does not like the dog. She does not appreciate that a such a dog has to stay at your side constantly to be of any use. To give constant warnings. That means the dog sleeps in the same room as us. Ellen complains that the dog makes smells.

It was good of Ellen to help with the painting, but now she expects me to go to her place at the weekend and stay up later on Saturday night than I would like. She will be hurt if I do not make out to enjoy her company late into the night. All her girlfriends have a man. I fill that role and cannot refuse without guilt. ‘Just a gigolo,’ the song goes.

Women have always picked me. I am German and I am handsome. They want me, and I do not know what I want. Handsome gives them pleasure and not me. I go along with it. I feel guilty. Even with my ex wife there was never a real bond.  That is sad, but I would be sadder on my own completely. Always sad.

I try to find something to be sad about. I pretend my children have been killed, say, and feel sad about that. Then I wonder: What am I doing with these thoughts? The children are not dead. How does the song go? ‘When you feel sorry for all the troubles in China, then you are feeling sorry for yourself.’ But things are going better in China and leaving me behind.

I know I hate wars everywhere. I find the idea of human wave attacks repugnant. The idea of laying down a carpet of bombs appalls me. Other people’s children are killed. I live as if that was my burden. I think of taking a political stand to oppose wars, but I lack the strength. I remember Dresden after the bombing. No unpolluted water and everyone with an infected gut. I remember the stomach cramps. That you could feel as if your life was running out your arse and you were scared. There was shit everywhere when I was four years old. I saw a bayonet fight and I heard a man squeal out, on the other side of a wall.

Later, in our village, I mocked my father’s religious beliefs in my teens and never settled. Other young people found something. I grew up always on the move. I cannot function normally in normal society. I know that. I have no confidence that I can influence events. I push against a balloon that bobs away. I have no confidence I can be safe. I make up stories about schemes laid against me. But there are no schemes. I am just a disappointment, so I pretend my children are dead.

Now David has moved in, and the dog is very wary. She has been trained to warn me. Last night we had to check on him a second time after he went to his room. I had just got myself settled when the dog barked and put a paw on my arm. I was unaware of any sound, but she must have heard something. When he opened his door his face was wet with tears. She barked and barked. She is telling me he has to go.

Helen drove into the parking lot for her son’s school. It was evening. There were many spaces close to the overhead lights, but she left her pale blue car under a straggly gum in a far corner. She fumbled in the gloom while locking the car doors, and dropped something from her shoulder bag that she had no time to retrieve. She decided to look for it on her way out and set off for the gateway in the metal fence and the dim ribbon of concrete path winding between the shrubs. Although she was an exceptionally pretty woman, and her plain-coloured jumper and skirt had been chosen with care, she walked with hunched shoulders. She berated herself for her late arrival for the meeting, thrusting her small hands deep into her skirt pockets. The clacking of her shoes on the path irritated her.

Pete had left it to her to handle this alone. He had regarded her concerns about Terry as trivial, as he usually did, compared to his own preoccupations. Only by winding herself up to near screaming had she been able to wrest his attention from the article he was preparing for his Quantum Club newsletter. She needed him to turn on the washing machine once the baby had fallen asleep, and to remember the ten-o’clock dose of Terry’s antibiotic syrup, and to mend Mary’s sandal ready for her excursion tomorrow.

Reaching the entrance to the administration block she thought again of her own school. The columned porch was the same. It stirred uneasy memories. There was no time for that now. She shuddered and braced herself to go in.

Everyone was waiting for her in the crowded meeting room, so it seemed to her. Proceedings were suspended while the headmaster, Mr Varley, acknowledged her presence. Had they been talking about her? She adopted too late what she hoped was an appropriate facial expression, and found a seat in an anonymous middle row. Not settled enough to attend immediately to the matters in hand, she glanced about. She avoided looking at other people and her gaze sought out the dimly-lit upper corners of the room, where the ceiling was edged with block-molded borders meeting at right angles. Cobwebs above the dais surprised her slightly, though her mind was not focussed there either. Only for a moment she saw long silken threads catching the light. Mr Varley’s metal-framed spectacles flashed, and she realised he was speaking on the very topic for which she had come. It seemed impossible now that she would have anything to say.

She had felt deeply betrayed by the proposed increase in school fees, since it had been her idea that Terry should attend The Hall against Pete’s wishes. Pete had argued that they could never afford to send all three to private schools.

‘I just wish he was a normal child like them,’ she had said.

Pete had not liked that.

She had pleaded with him to see the difficulties.

Mr Varley spoke relentlessly about rising costs and standards to be maintained. He began to remind her of her father, increasing her discomfort. She had never noticed that in him before. She clutched a small tattered object in her coat pocket – Mary’s confiscated Fruit Tingles. She wished she could eat one. Mr Varley duplicated her father’s air of ‘only well-informed people need bother speaking to me’. She tried not to hear it like that. His actual words were of regret. He noted that not all parents could hope to keep their children at the school. She did not hear regret. She heard a hurtful intentionality in his voice, something personal, something directed at her. She had never been able to counter her father’s malice in comparing her with her more able sisters and their academic success. She remembered his metal watchband on his bony wrist as her held up her childish drawing of him with a look of distaste. The bitter, helpless feeling overcame her now, as it always did.

The topic changed. The opportunity to respond to Mr Varley had passed. Her plan for Terry had not been defended. It had been working well, she reminded herself angrily. His bullying of other children had stopped. His behaviour at home had improved. Both since the time he had changed school. The new teachers are getting through to him, she thought. Or perhaps just receiving the special privilege had satisfied his demanding nature? His younger sister Mary was learning to ignore his boasts about it. She attended the government school without complaint, but if Terry had to go back there …

‘I can appreciate his needs because mine are the same,’ she had told Pete.

‘No they’re not,’ Pete said. ‘Not at all.’

‘He just expresses them differently. I know he’s clever, like you are, Pete, but he has low self-confidence like me. I tried to spare him that, yet I somehow passed it on to him. It’s my fault.’

She was trying to make amends, whether Pete understood or not. He considered her a nuisance, but she was trying to help, to fix Terry’s problem. She was to blame. She was trying to help. She had a vision for her son, her firstborn, that he could succeed, as she had not.

‘Parents who would like to help …’ she heard someone saying. ‘ …sharing their difficulties …’ ‘… in co-operation.’

The spider webs visible against the ceiling had either multiplied or more of them were catching the light. Many threads now glinted and swayed in long loops high above the platform. Too high to reach, she thought. On the dais Mr Varley had been replaced by a golden-haired young man talking about an evening class for parents.

‘Several couples have spoken to me already,’ the younger man continued. ‘If anyone else is interested they might like to make contact with me after this meeting tonight. My name is Jason Roberts. I’m the school counselor.’

Helen clenched her fists nervously again. She had once spoken to Mr Roberts on the phone, after Terry had punched a younger boy. She had been grateful that the matter was being investigated systematically. The school had also made a mistake, she thought, putting Terry in a composite class. Perhaps Mr Roberts appreciated that. She knew that was asking for trouble, expecting Terry to share the teacher’s attention with younger children.

‘I do feel sorry for the little boy,’ she had told him. This was true. She had felt responsible for her son’s actions, knowing she had herself caused the harm. But she had also felt disappointed that Terry had been set up to fail, as she saw it, and this feeling combined somehow with a recollection of the unfairness of her own childhood. She had also been set up to fail. Had she explained that to Mr Roberts?

He approached her as other people were getting up to go, as she knew he would. ‘You must be Terry’s mother?’

She wondered how she had been described to him, that he identified her so readily.

He asked whether she had come on her own and said what a complicated life it must be for her, looking after three small children.

‘Well, a busy life,’ she answered with a little laugh, ‘but I hate all the repetitions.’ Did this make sense? She tried to assume a pleasant demeanour, to make the most of her good looks, but worried at the same time at the way he was looking her over, she thought. ‘I hate the dead certainty of everything,’ she said.

‘Do you?’ he answered.

‘Sometimes on one of my errands,’ she tried to explain, ‘I deliberately drive out of my way, just to come by a circuitous route, just to see what it’s like.’

She knew this was not what they were supposed to be talking about. She did not look at him too closely. She wondered whether she was supposed to call him Jason. She preferred ‘Mr Roberts’. ‘The increased fees may be a problem for us,’ she said, knowing this was not his concern either.

He said he hoped not, then asked about Terry’s behaviour at home, and how she managed as Terry’s mother.

Her first inclination was to lie. She expected this question, of course, but felt outraged by it, when it came. Then she admitted to having problems. Then she did her best to be honest. She talked at length, as everyone else gradually left. She wondered if Mr Roberts was listening. He kept interrupting her to say goodnight to other staff, and that he would switch things off and lock up. She kept losing track, or being unable to say just what she meant. In the end none of it sounded right. She might as well have lied. Nor did she like it that the two of them were being left alone.

‘I have felt tired from the day Terry was born,’ she said at last.

‘I understand,’  he said.

She wondered if he did. ‘There were all girls in my family,’ she offered.

‘I see.’

She wondered if there was any point going on. Terry’s aggressive outbursts had begun with the arrival of the other children, as if he refused to be displaced. But why? That she could not explain, and no-one understood. Pete had punished him, but to no avail. She had pampered him, and pleaded, but had made no difference either. ‘I hate the uncertainty,’ she said.

‘I understand,’ Mr Roberts said again.

Perhaps he did understand in some mysterious way, but she felt no relief. Having to talk about it had only confused her more. She remembered with regret that she had once thought Pete understood her. That confused her now too. He got drunk to have sex with her now. ‘I hate it that Terry is so self-centred, so out of touch,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop him breaking things. He hurts his sisters. He demands my attention. He ignores what I say. Should I give him attention?’

‘I suppose that depends what you give.’

‘I don’t want him to be like that at all. Not my son. But I don’t want to ignore him.’ She did not say how Pete ignored her. How desperate that made her feel. How self-centred Pete was. The possibility of being alone and failing as a mother flickered across her mind and was gone.

‘Will you discipline him for me?’ she asked. She wanted to smack Terry very hard but knew that would not be right.

‘We might work on that together. At the parenting class.’

‘No! I can’t,’

‘Perhaps it is your responsibility to come?’

‘What do we pay school fees for?’

They were alone in the empty meeting room. She looked away from him, up again to where she had seen the glinting spider webs. Then she looked down at her feet and found she had dropped little pieces of torn lolly paper on the floor. Mr Roberts looked at them too. She wondered if he wanted to have sex with her.

He asked if she would at least come with him to get an introductory booklet from his office. She heard herself agree, then found she was expected to follow him along a corridor into the darkened inner recesses of the building.

‘Is there a light-switch?’ she asked.

He said nothing, and she felt as though she was being treated like a naughty child herself, scurrying along behind him to be given her instructions. They turned a corner into an adjoining corridor, and Mr Roberts found a light-switch there. The lights came on suddenly, without a blink: downlights making a series of illuminated cones through which they passed. She had to remind herself where she was. This is the school counselor and I am going with him to get a pamphlet to help me with Terry, she told herself. After they had turned another corner she began to notice from behind what a powerfully-built man Mr Roberts was. She saw that he walked in easy strides with his male bottom tucked in. His hands hung by his sides where his pockets should be, but he wore trousers without pockets, to her surprise.

What’s a man like this doing at a girl’s school? she asked herself. But this is not my school, she remembered. This is Terry’s school. It is all boys here.

‘Here we are,’ Mr Roberts said, showing her into an office and snapping on a more neutral light. The faces of dozens of little boys looked out from a notice-board opposite the door. Terry’s would be among them, she supposed, but she had no time to look for it. Not under these circumstances.

‘Hang on for a tick,’ Mr Roberts continued, turning a friendly face towards her.

She waited while he rummaged in  desk drawer.

‘This is what you’ll need.’ He handed her a soft-covered booklet of slightly battered appearance.

‘But this is your own copy,’ she said.

‘Take it.’ His voice had a musical quality now.

She took it. Her hand trembled.

‘You have at least decided to consider my proposal,’ he said. His gaze was too steady for her liking. Was there a hint of mockery in his pursed lips? Her level of alarm increased.

‘What’s that?’ she exclaimed with sudden horror. She had seen something ugly on the wall behind him.

‘You like my monster?’ he answered immediately, turning and waving his hand towards a lurid poster. A naked creature half-man, half-bull, glared with eyes like flames. ‘He lives on human flesh.’

‘Oh, very funny.’ She stared at Mr Roberts in disbelief.

He smiled broadly. ‘It amuses the boys,’ he said.

She felt intensely angry at having been so disconcerted by this man.

‘I’m not sure you do understand your son, in fact,’ he said, speaking softly and moving closer.

She decided to go. She left the room too quickly. She hurried along the corridor as he padded after her, calling her name. She felt a prickling of her back and on the backs of her legs, as if she was about to be seized from behind. At the corner she hesitated, beside herself.

‘To your left,’ he called cheerfully.

She raced on, aware that he was pausing to switch off lights as he followed her. Only when she got outside the building did she give a shout of ‘Thank you!’

She tried to pretend nothing was wrong, but clattered from the porch, through the dark shrub garden, clumsily across the graveled car park. At her car she remembered having dropped something when she arrived, but again could not stop to search, even though she knew she would never be coming back. Not with the increased fees, she told herself.

Her heart pounded. She drove out of the car park and in the street turned the wrong way. She drove on, regardless She could not go home either. Not to Terry and Pete. Gleaming tram lines stretched ahead of her and she followed them, the wrong way, straight on. In the privacy of her car she screamed.

            They were the only two white people living in the hospital compound, and they had not had much success establishing a social contact with the other doctors and their wives, all of whom were nationals. Most days they kept their own company.

            The balcony of their house looked out over sweet-scented frangipanis to lawns and brightly coloured shrubs, and the hospital outpatient entrance. Under the huge shade trees there, families of Niugini people sat throughout the day. Drivers sat in the cabins of their vans, listening to their radios. Women talked gaily. Children played. Above the trees the great vaporous clouds floated in the tropical sky. The Sisters in white dresses looked out of the hospital doors.

            The doctor looked out too, standing on his balcony, after lunch. He saw, stumbling across the grass towards him, a brown skinned infant in the bright sunlight. She held her twinkling hands before her and lurched clumsily after a motley puppy, wagging and bouncing away. An older child was sent to take her back to the mothers.

            ‘I still find them engaging, despite everything,’ the doctor said.

            ‘I suppose so,’ his wife answered from indoors.

            ‘Working in the hospital you see them suffer such cruel twists of fate with such good grace.’

            The wife had heard this before. She sweated over finishing a letter home with a blotchy pen on damp writing paper.

            ‘Don’t work too hard,’ she said. ‘Not in this climate.’

            The doctor walked across the hot compound to resume his duties for the afternoon. At the Outpatient Clinic the Sisters waited flowerlike to greet him.

            ‘Hot out in the sun,’ he told them. He liked the Sisters, every one.

            ‘Yes, it’s hot, doctor,’ they sang affectionately.

            They were good at their work, too. When the emergency cases arrived, they applied their simple knowledge with methodical effectiveness. He liked their belief in the importance of what they did. He liked their belief in the country’s unlikely future. He liked their belief that of course people like him would come to help them.

            Passing among them he went on to the emergency room where a junior nurse, in blue, assembled an old fashioned oxygen delivery set. His first patient was there, a chubby baby barely able to breathe. The mother held the baby’s plump foot as its rib cage heaved and its throat rattled.

            ‘Some of them lives, and some dies,’ the junior nurse said.

            He started to object, then said nothing.

            ‘That is what I tell her to say, doctor,’ the Sister explained, coming in behind him.

            The doctor smiled. He put his arm round the hunched mother briefly. Then he listened with his stethoscope, checked what antibiotics had been given, saw the oxygen tube secured with sticking plaster, and got on with his day.

            ‘Three more to see,’ Sister told him, ‘and then you are wanted for one of the old men in Ward Five.’

            ‘Thank you Sister,’ he said.

            They worked busily side by side, the Sister on more practical tasks, the doctor checking nurses’ decisions and writing up patients’ notes. Everywhere he went in the hospital he saw more Sisters with shining eyes and soft smiles. He sometimes imagined he was in a garden, despite the illness and the worry.

            He went home early because the heat exhausted him as his wife had warned.

            ‘Successful afternoon?’ she asked, wiping her hands on a damp tea towel.

            ‘Fifty-fifty,’ he answered.

            ‘I knew that’s what you would say,’ she muttered. She was making pizza for their evening meal.

            He picked up the book he had been reading on the colonial history of Papua New Guinea. The old photographs intrigued him, of early explorers and smartly dressed planters, and of native people of past generations with painted faces and head-dresses of feathers and leaves.

            ‘I could imagine staying on here and making a life,’ he said, off guard.

            ‘Don’t say it again. We’ve agreed,’ the wife protested.

            ‘I only said I could imagine it.’

            She gazed at him sadly. ‘You’ve done what you can here,’ she said.

            He went on reading the book, enjoying the music of the New Guinea place names and the stories of brave or evil deeds.

            ‘I want to feel that life is an adventure always,’ he said. ‘I want to chase adventure across jungle clad mountains and coral seas.’

            ‘Well I shouldn’t have tied you down, should I?’ The wife spoke without expression now.

            ‘I want to be with these people and see what happens to them too. I want them to say: “You are our doctor”, as though I belonged to them, as though I had a place here.’

            ‘As though…, as though…’ his wife could only repeat, laying out the pizza on a greased tray. ‘Make yourself a place then.’

            The husband looked out at the rose and gold clouds in the magnificent sky.

            ‘Anyway I do love the people,’ he said. ‘And this is what practicing medicine ought to be.’

            The wife was too busy to respond again.

            The husband saw the families leaving the outpatient area in the vans.

            Someone knocked at the door.

            ‘You answer it,’ the wife said.

            ‘I am doing.’

            The day Sister was there, her white uniform luminous against the twilight behind her.

            ‘The four new admissions, Doctor,’ she said. ‘One died already, but three are doing O.K. The others said I should come and tell you before you go.’

          A difficult request, but did that matter? The lady had turned on him her glance, breathed forth her wish and waited.

          ‘I want that.’

          Tradition backed so gallant an enterprise. Her prestige his reassurance, he pressed on. As for her interest in him, a few seconds had sufficed to determine his endeavours for two weeks. What games he played. Her thoughts, he said, were on him as he worked. His dwelt on her, and on her wish.

          The first night, and the crescent moon lay on the horizontal like a silver bowl. The damp air chilled his fingers, carrying the ladder out. He erected it against the shed. He climbed with zest, clattered across the roof, reached up, and then let fall his arms. A single down-stroke. He put the ladder away and then went home.

          Next night the moon had partly filled but tilted – so spoiling the illusion of liquid content, assuming instead the aspect of a leaf. It fluttered in the sky. He climbed an earthly tree to pluck it without success.

          The third night, appreciative of its height and sky-bound character – no bowl nor leaf of light – he saw a craft out on its way. Ensuing nights it brightened as it sped and climbed up hills, and higher hills, and mountains in his dreams. A billowed sail, it filled, it flew, it rolled and reached the zenith of the sky.

          A parachute by the seventh, now it must come down. But no, it seemed to fall across, enlarging as it went – an ever distant moon so clear, so bright. A moon beyond his reach.

          He watched each night thereafter; thought ‘How wonderful!’ But what use that? The eighth, ninth, tenth, ‘How wonderful!’ But to what end? A ball of light at last, its beauty was complete. It held, it hung, it went, it fell afar.

          ‘I want that,’ she had murmured. He had heard, had worked, reached up, climbed and watched. But now he laughed.

          On Friday the shops were busy when he bought the cheese. In joy and jest he took it, and she smiled.

          She  took the gift. ‘It is the moon,’ she said and smiled again. ‘Most excellent. It is the moon, dear boy.’

As we all climb the street Molly holds my hand. She asks a question about this England where we lived before we moved to Australia. That was three years ago, and she is now seven. I am noticing with pleasure the orderliness of terraced houses clustering up the slope. We are in Sheffield, visiting old friends. In the high street at the top, shop windows gleam small-scale and many coloured. The woman in the confectioner’s helps Molly decide on pink or green, piglets or frogs. I buy chocolate and say thank you. The woman would like us to feel welcome but she is shy.

I have found I am out of step with my old friends here. With Chris, our host, in particular. I still dwell on his conversation with me last night and his conviction that Britain must retain at all costs her position of power in the world, that Britain’s nuclear arsenal is indispensable and so forth. He also offered his condolences that I am now living ‘in the Antipodes’. I had forgotten these British mindsets and was taken by surprise.

On the corner, men in motor cycle jackets idle, looking young and tough and out of work. The ‘at all costs’ Chris talked about might well include their cost, I think. They show no reaction when a jet fighter from the nearby air force base screams across the sky, high up and fast. It bothers me though, reinforcing my annoyance.

I do forget, of course, as the day passes. Our two wives get on well, as they always did, and Chris has a particular fondness for Molly, which I appreciate. His children are older now and studying in other cities, but I remember how much he enjoyed them when they were Molly’s age. I remember good times we had.

We go for a stroll on the Rivelin Valley path. The outskirts of the city end abruptly in ancient countryside, in timeless hills and this valley of majestic trees, now bare. Recurrent stonework of another century interrupts the stream to hold bright pools linked in sharp cascades. Water power, moss and random cave-ins and recoursings have returned to nature this scene of former industry, making it a pleasure park for Sunday walks.

The air is fresh in our nostrils, as Chris talks to the two women and I resume companionship with Molly. She is a cat now, looking for mice, she says, and will only converse in meows. I meow back, knowing this will not last long. At seven she asks a lot of questions, which a cat cannot do. Our first born, adored in babyhood, she is now her own person with her own command of any situation. As soon as she was able she ran beyond our reach, and loves the out of doors.

Mud underfoot. A purple and rust glow of winter woods. Twigs pattern the air and criss-cross in thorny thickets either side. Huge trunks rise from sculptured slopes of dead bracken and flattened grass.

‘Is this a magic place?’ Molly asks.

‘It is like where fairy stories happen, isn’t it?’

‘No. I don’t mean that. Anyway, there are fairies in Australia.’

‘Oh, you just mean it is beautiful?’

‘Why is it beautiful?’ She tries out the word.

‘The dim light,’ I explain, ‘makes the colours deep.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s not why.’

‘OK.’

As if to prove her right, sunshine appears and the valley changes as we proceed. Colours lighten to a more lurid intensity, but it is more beautiful. Naked to the sky, exposed by the trees’ bareness, the place seems suddenly exposed and vulnerable. Sunbeams catch at the twisted ends of branches, low-angled, shafting across them to fire the frizz of winter grass.

‘What happens in this place?’ Molly asks.

‘A lot has happened. People have lived here for thousands of years, and a hundred years ago poor people worked here, making things.’

‘But what happens now?’

‘Nothing that pleases me,’ I say.

She does not hear me and hurries on. ‘I like it here,’ she says.

‘This is England. You were born here.’

‘I know. I like it out in the open here.’

‘Out in the open,’ I repeat, and Molly presses her head into my side, winds my arm around her neck, and half hangs on me as we continue walking.

 ‘Tired?’ I say.

‘Course not.’

We have lagged behind the others but pause to split a misshapen fungus with our feet. We separate to pick our way along a sticky section, then over stepping stones across the river to where the path returns on the other side. At the turning we pass the corner of a frost-bitten field, stretching away to a vast building of dark red brick from Victorian times. It has many chimneys and many broken glass window panes. Near the river we find a ruined shed, once a stone boat house. There has been a fire and the charred door timbers glisten with frost. Inside are frozen newspaper cinders and a burnt coat.

‘How ghastly,’ Molly says. Another new word for her.

Just then another jet plane screams over us. Very low this time, it tears the strip of sky the valley’s length and leaves us its shuddering after boom.

‘Something lives here,’ Molly says. She has found a burrow under ferns with fresh diggings at its mouth.

Shelter for some old boy, I think, wishing I could stop thinking about that God forsaken talk with Chris and his attachment to nuclear weapons.

Waking up early gets things off to a bad start. A low sky gives a bad look to the day .

‘No good missing your train,’ said Mrs. Plumb carefully.

‘No good living,’ thought Mr. Plumb.

He set out through the grey morning, looking forward to his trip to London not at all. Others of his workmates might have enjoyed the time off and the sights.

‘Too miserable to enjoy anything,’ he told himself and smiled, though weakly and not for long. His face felt tense. His throat ached with tension and his eyelids seemed netted with tight threads. He tried to raise his eyebrows, in a puzzled, amused way perhaps, but there was no mobility. He was old.

Once on board, having noticed little of the station that was unexpected, he pursued his thoughts along usual paths. The train windows needed washing. Why had they been allowed to get like that? The other passengers were equally scruffy. Was it worth trying to read? He was trying to read The Diary of Samuel Pepys but the sentences seemed convoluted, and his attention strayed. At times the good humour penetrated, soothing him fleetingly. The train rattled and creaked, travelling fast.

He found himself gazing at the passing countryside instead, and the sadness he saw there also soothed him. Muted tones were further dimmed by the dusty glass, yet ancient things flew by. Old barns, fields, hedgerows and cottages formed pictures, glimpsed and gone. A small factory supervened, then streets of closely packed houses and a station platform. He longed for the country again. It came again. In patches only, but its effect persisted.

A young woman took possession of the seat beside him. Jerked by the train, she bumped her large hips against his shoulder as she got herself organised. She had luggage and the racks were full. A large, open bag went under the table in front of them, and a large, leather briefcase, with metal corners, flat on top of their table. She seated herself by pushing the floor bag out of the way with her foot, choosing to ignore that it then encroached on his leg room. She opened the briefcase and rummaged inside, supporting the lid with her head. She chewed gum. She bustled purposefully.

Her smooth, black dress, he noticed, was of good stuff, her plump arms pale and freckled. She wore a small, silver watch with diamonds flashing. She chewed vigorously, unconcerned, now reading her book too, a paperback folded back on itself. She had managed to arrange, on the lid of her case, tissues, purse, apple, nail varnish, vinyl spectacle sack, ticket, toffees, bookmark and comb.

He wondered at her self-assurance and absorption, then wondered about her life. She was returning to London, he had already decided, where she lived in a bedsitter untidily and pursued some pushy career in an office nearby. Would she have lovers? Perhaps she paid for them with gifts, or they were attracted by her aggressive competence and likely success. These thoughts centred on the lace between her knees where her skirt split. Her black petticoat too was of quality – pretty, old-fashioned, expensive – but her legs were fat and white. He became aware of the faint smell of French perfume.  She breathed heavily and adjusted her glasses on her nose. Her hands were chapped.

She read on until an attendant came selling coffee in plastic cups. Alert to that, she stopped him and made a purchase, then found she had nowhere left to put her coffee down. She looked towards the empty area of table in front of him, seeming about to annex this territory as well, but hesitated and looked helpless.

He was about to make claim by putting his own book down, when he said, ‘You can put it here. I don’t mind.’

‘Don’t you?’ she said.

She turned her face toward him and thanked him in a piping voice with a slight lisp. She smiled, and he looked into her eyes just long enough to see the little girl who had loved her daddy and had been given presents and sweets and an easy life. He saw childhood still there in the grown woman.

Turning to the outside again, disarmed, he saw a painted barge on a dull canal and forgave the world for a moment.

I confess to feeling awe-inspired when I first met Harry. Outclassed perhaps. His off-hand charm – which I would later recognise as shyness, self-distraction or even want of courage – impressed me in the beginning as total confidence.  He would have been handsome in his youth and retained, in his late fifties, some of the associated swagger.

What was it in his pink face, grey hair and aging frame that so distinguished him? His eyes, large and sharply blue, were set in a masculine face. He was of a good height and straight-backed, carrying his clothes well. His jacket of speckled tweed, stretched at the elbows, uneven at the hem, became him better than its crisp new equivalent would ever have done. Beneath it he wore an unlikely shirt of fleecy white with thin blue lines in large squares. That too looked just right, to my way of thinking. Even his woolen tie, knotted awkwardly so that the narrow end was longer than the broad, tempted me to consider foolish emulation of the style.

Embellishing all of the above was his mellifluous voice, in which the softest of Irish twangs soothed the ear the more as the afternoon progressed and the whisky – Scotch as it happened – lent its tenor to the occasion. Harry loved parties and they loved him. Everything he said was positive. A continual smattering of ‘wonderful’s and ‘well done’s augmented the intense interest he appeared to take in everything that was said.

We conversed with a lively Jewish woman. Her name was Lorna, I think. That is to say, Harry and Lorna conversed while I listened. She was clearly enthralled and turned the conversation, naturally enough, to matters of male and female relationships.

‘I was speaking to that woman over there’ she said, with an indicative gesture of her head towards a woman in lustrous pink on the other side of the room. ‘What some poor creatures have to put up with in their husbands!’ So saying, she glanced at Harry as if to add, ’You, of course, would never treat a woman badly.’

I confess to being bored by Lorna. I was in my twenties and of an age when middle-aged women held no interest for me. Who needs mothering? Middle-aged men, on the other hand, represented an opportunity to impress with my manly independence and ambition, and I wanted Harry to myself. 

How fanciful I was, I think in retrospect, to imagine that mimicking Harry would ever be of use to me. What is more, I later learned that the woman in pink was Harry’s wife.