It was during a surprise test on genetics in her biology class, that Connie realised that her father would have turned fifty today, if he were still alive. She had just answered a question on inheritance when she happened to look down at the date on the bottom right corner of the sheet. The thought hit her on seeing the numbers, and she did her best to put it out of her mind, to try to concentrate on answering the questions in front of her. But the thought was alive now, and would not be banished. She started to etch a face on the margins of the page; it was her face she was drawing, in fine blue biro lines. Her aunt Tasha always said of her that she had her father’s features, and it was true that when she looked at a photograph of him she recognised as her own the strong, square jaw and the slightly over-sized ears that she hated about herself. But she had also inherited her mother’s thick blonde hair and large mouth. (She also hated this about herself. Her mouth was too big, her lips were too full, her teeth protruded—that was why she rarely smiled in photographs.) She turned the page and tried to concentrate on the series of diagrams, charts and data detailing the frequency of respiratory illness in four generations of human twins. She had to evaluate both the genetic and environmental factors on the inheritance of disease. Again, her eyes kept straying to her father’s birthdate on the bottom right-hand corner of the page, but she forced herself to focus and soon enough was finished and leaned back in her chair.

The tram was packed with schoolkids—from her school, the girls’ school up the road, the Catholic boys’ school—and she and Richie pushed their way through the crowd and sat on the dirty steps of the emergency exit. Richie was leaning his elbows on the sportsbag on his lap. He was humming a song.

Don’t ever get married. It makes you boring. She and her mum had been baking a chocolate cake in the dingy little kitchen in Birmingham. It was her seventh birthday and it was the only cake she ever remembered her mother baking. At the time she had thought that her mother was talking about her own marriage. Connie was still such a baby back then, the comment really had not made much sense to her. But she had never forgotten it. It was only after her mother’s death that she realised her mum was probably referring to the other man she was in love with. Dad told her about it soon after the funeral, that they’d moved to Birmingham because her mum had fallen in love with a married man, a Pakistani who would not leave his wife. And looking back, it was unlikely that her mum would have referred to her own marriage as boring. There were a thousand other words she could use to describe it—weird, infuriating, deranged—but not boring. Her father had never told her the man’s name, but she was pretty sure she knew who he was. She remembered a well-built man with a trim beard, who carried himself regally, wore a suit, and drove a BMW into which her mother would disappear from time to time. He never came to the door; she was never introduced to him. The affair must have ended because within the year they had moved back to London. Birmingham is a fucking hole, her dad had complained, and he was probably right. Though he too had a thing for South Asian men, so he probably didn’t have such a terrible time there. For herself, all she remembered was that it was bitterly cold in winter and that she was one of the few white girls at the local comprehensive. She had even picked up a few words and phrases in Urdu; that was her Birmingham legacy.

‘Will you marry me?’

She filled the cat bowl with biscuits when she got home, and Lisa purred around her ankles. It was still daylight and Bart wouldn’t stop prowling the neighbours’ yards until dark. She switched on the computer and connected to Messenger. She did the maths and worked out that it was just after eight in the morning in England. Maybe Zara was online. But only Jenna’s and Tina Coccoccelli’s avatars were visible. She quickly typed a message to Zara and sent it off into digital space. She chatted with the girls for a few minutes but signed off when she heard her aunt enter the front door. She went into the kitchen where Tasha was standing, her backpack still on, rubbing her hands together.

When they got home there was a message from Rosie on the machine, asking if Connie could do some babysitting on Thursday evening. She glanced at the clock. It was not yet eleven, so she picked up the phone.

She lay in bed and listened to the muted sound of the television. She kept the light on and looked at all the pictures on her wall. Last summer she had stripped the room bare of all her posters, all the images of movies stars, celebrities and pop stars; she chucked out Robbie Williams and Gwen Stafani, Missy Elliot and Johnny Depp. The only picture she couldn’t bring herself to part with, was one she had ripped out of a TV Week, a small black and white photo of Benjamin McKenzie from The OC. It reminded her of Richie and she kept it Blu-Tacked at one edge of her bedroom mirror. Across from her bed the wall was dominated by a large print of nineteenth-century London that her aunt had bought and framed for Connie’s sixteenth birthday. Her desk sat underneath it. There were only two posters on the walls now. One was of a clear blue desert sky shot through with razor wire, protesting the inhumane detention of refugees in Australia. She had snaffled it at an anti-racism rally the year before. The other poster was a stark image of an Arab child with a petrol pump murderously aimed at his head. In Arabic and in English the stark red lettering read NO TO BUSH’S WAR FOR OIL. Zara had sent it to her for her sixteenth birthday. The walls were now full of photographs of real people, people she knew: Tasha in a blue raincoat holding an over-sized black umbrella; Richie grinning maniacally at the camera, wearing his daggy Thank Drunk I’m a God T-shirt; she and Jenna and Tina dressed up for a party; Zara in a long-sleeved white hoodie with an image of Kurt Cobain stenciled across the front; her own Year Ten school photo, the one in which her legs didn’t look fat. Then there was the photograph of her mum and dad, looking like she had never known them. Her father was pencil thin, his hair cut short except for a greased quiff at the front and dyed a peroxide salt-white, her mother in garish eyeliner and lipstick, her hair in a mohawk. They looked like gangsters, not like in rap videos and ads for Coca-Cola, but like romantic outlaws from deep in the last century. Her mother wore white lace stockings and had a brooch of the Japanese imperial flag pinned to a cup of her exposed bra. Her dad was smoking a cigarette, had a white shirt on, the top button done up and a thin black tie; he was leering comically into the camera as her mother gave him a look of open adoration. Just above the photograph of her parents she had stuck a photo of last year’s work Christmas party, everyone a little drunk, smiling stiffly into the camera. They all formed a semi-circle around the table, Aisha in the centre, with her and Hector at either end. He wore a suit, elegant as always, and he looked so good. He looked so good it hurt. Her eyes drifted from her father to Hector, and then back to her mother and then to herself. In the photograph she was looking at Hector with the exact same expression as on her mother’s face. How was it that she had never noticed it before? She blushed, and quickly turned off the light.

‘Jordan’s having a party. He wants you guys to come.’

Her father had said it. He’d said it to her mother. Her mother had been weeping, distraught, crying about some man, and her father was comforting her. Connie was painting with watercolours in the middle of the room. They must have been in the house in Islington that they shared with Greg and his boyfriend Clem, and Shelley and Joanne. She had loved that house even though it was cold and the hot water never seemed to work properly. It was full of places to hide—it even had an attic. She had three mothers and three fathers in that house.

‘Nick Cercic was asking heaps of questions about you. Heaps.’

‘Do you want to go to a party instead of the movies on Saturday?’

In English she and Mr Thompson argued furiously over her interpretation of The Quiet American. She hated the passivity of the woman in the book and wanted her to take responsibility for her fate. She didn’t answer Mr Thompson when he interrupted her and asked if she was wanting to absolve the Europeans and North Americans of their colonial exploitation of Vietnam. She was furious at his accusation. This is not at all what she had meant. She wanted the female to do more, say more, be more. She hated that the character had given herself over to drugs.

‘Nick said you bent it like Beckham this arvo.’ Richie was on his knees on the floor, slowly building a railway circuit for Hugo who was staring at him with rapt attention, interrupting from time to time with an anguished cry, No, not there, Don’t put that there, put it there.

As soon as Gary and Rosie walked through the door she knew they’d been arguing. She and Richie had tried to put Hugo to bed but he had refused and was lying on the lounge-room floor in his pyjamas watching Pinocchio. He rushed to his mother. Rosie loosened the clasp on her bra and began feeding the child. Gary groaned. He walked out and yelled from the kitchen.

By the time she finished her schoolwork it was nearly midnight. Her aunt was in bed and the house was quiet. She shivered. She closed the bathroom door and began to run a bath. She stripped and looked at herself in the mirror. Her legs were too fat. She wished she could have a body like Aisha. She patted her stomach and groaned. Her pubes were too thick, too bushy. She would shave. She would get a Brazilian the first chance she had. She was hideous. She turned off the taps and slowly put her feet into the water. It was scalding. She shivered, enjoying the excruciating contrast, her legs burning and her torso freezing. Slowly, she eased herself into the tub.

The clinic waiting room was full when she got into work on Saturday. Tracey was on the phone and had given her a wry smile as she walked in. She heard the phone ringing and ran into the office and picked up the line. She scanned the computer. Every consultation was taken, they were booked up till closing.

There was no time for a break. But even though it was rushed, even though there hadn’t been a moment when the waiting room wasn’t full or the phones weren’t ringing, she enjoyed the shift. Aisha was quick, thorough and kept to a martial pace.

Trace had left a few slices of chocolate cake she’d baked the night before in the office fridge. There was a note beside it, in Tracey’s hurried, oversized handwriting. Richie ate over half of it last night. He is NOT having any more. Enjoy. In between consults, Aisha and Connie hurriedly crammed scoops of the cake into their mouths. It was sweet and oily and satisfied Connie’s hunger. The phones had finally quietened and the last consult of the day, an elderly Italian woman with her yappy Maltese Terrier, was waiting her turn. Connie had started counting the money in the till, preparing for closing. The bell on the front door began to violently clang and a young woman rushed into the clinic holding a dog in a bloodied towel. The animal, a kelpie, was breathing with difficulty. Connie banged the till shut and rushed over to the woman.

‘It needs surgery.’

Her experience assisting in surgery was minimal. When she had first started work at the clinic, she had just turned fifteen and for the first six months her duties were confined to cleaning the cages, washing up, reception. Slowly, however, Tracey had encouraged her to take more responsibility with the animals and to train during surgery. Connie found that she was not squeamish at all. She had no fear of administering pills or even giving subcutaneous injections to the animals. But she did find surgery overwhelming. Both Aisha and Brendan had stressed to her the importance of anaesthetic monitoring and she was drilled on emergency procedures in case of a negative anaesthetic reaction on the table. The cold reality was so different: the complicated respiratory tubing and dials of the monitoring machinery, her near paralysing phobia that the animal would go blue, fall into a coma. But she knew that being anxious or panicking about it would not help Aisha at all. The vet was finishing up with the last client and Connie retrieved a list she had typed up months ago from her work basket. With Trace’s help, she’d listed everything she needed to remember for surgery. She pulled out the necessary surgical kit, the gloves and scalpel for Aisha, and then she prepared the injections for the animal.

The surgery proceeded quickly and succesfully. Connie watched Aisha perform her work with admiration. Within twenty minutes she had turned the anaesthetic off and they were waiting for the dog to wake.

Aisha dropped her off at Rosie’s. It was just after five in the afternoon. The front door to the house was open and Connie walked through the hall, past the kitchen, through the lean-to sunroom that always seemed to smell damp—even in the height of a dry summer—and into the backyard. Richie was stretched out on the grass, and he grinned, then winked, when he saw her. Hugo was crouching in the untidy vegetable patch, half-hidden amongst the tall shoots of the broad beans. He ignored her.

She lay in the setting sun, her eyes shut, listening to the thud-thud of the ball being kicked between the boy and the teenager. She had fallen in love with Melbourne when she experienced her first late autumn in the city, when the bitter cold was kept at bay by the determined effort of the hardy antipodean sun. The English sun was weak. She didn’t have to open her eyes, she knew Richie and Hugo were there, that they were safe in the garden. This was like they were married, she thought, like Hugo was their child, this backyard was theirs and they were a family. Maybe this would be what the future would be like. Of course, Richie couldn’t be her husband. She couldn’t imagine a husband. Not if Hector couldn’t be it. She heard Hugo laugh and then there was a sharp pain in her side as the ball slammed into her. It stung.

The blind was drawn in the kitchen and the room was dark and cool. That morning’s dishes were still piled up on the sink. Connie switched on the kitchen light and then turned on the kettle. She could hear the boys playing, heard Rosie laugh, encouraging her son. Connie slipped into the lounge room and walked over to the bookshelf. Guiltily she glanced behind her, trying to ignore the ugly clown on the wall, and she pulled out the photo album. She flicked through the photographs, the young adults at the beach. She just wanted one more look. A blank rectangle stared out at her. The photograph of Hector was gone.

They walked across the park. She was deliberately silent, her face hard, but Richie did not seem to notice. He was humming beside her. It was really shitting her.

‘You look great.’

She looked into the mirror. There was a mole on her left shoulder. That was visible. There were too many summer freckles on the bridge of her nose. Her breasts looked huge. Her legs were too fat. She could see all this, but it didn’t matter. She had never looked this good. She felt wonderful, she felt like a movie star, like a model, she felt older and more sophisticated than she had ever felt before. She couldn’t wait for Jenna and Tina to see her. She imagined Richie’s reaction, his awe, and it made her want to laugh. She would sit up straight all night. She would be grown-up in this dress. No slouching, no being a teenager tonight. She’d have to be careful with any food or drink. She’d have to be careful where she sat. There would be a hundred things she’d never have had to think about at a party before, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because she had never looked this good. She swung away from the mirror and looked at her aunt on the bed.

Jenna had screamed when she opened the door. Tina, behind her, let out a series of gasps. They pushed Connie down the long, dark corridor into the living room, where Jenna’s mother, Fiona, was curled up with her girlfriend, Hannah, watching television.

Tina and Jenna had also dressed up, but next to Connie, Tina’s tight-fitting boob tube and Jenna’s skin-tight jeans and scarlet halter-top seemed adolescent, and inelegant.

Walking to Jordan’s house, her elation faded. The night air was sharp, and there were goosebumps all over her arms. At the last moment her aunt had given her a black lace shawl as protection against the cold but it was flimsy and she was shivering as they walked down Bastings Street. She also found the shoes difficult to manage, she had to walk slowly, deliberately, so as not to stumble. They were not very high heels, but the shoes felt tight and uncomfortable. She envied her friend’s denim jackets and runners. Tina had three badges on her jacket: a peace insignia, a Robbie Williams pin and one that read Vote for Pedro; Connie was tempted to ask to wear one, to counteract the formality of her own outfit. She was conscious of stares from the people they passed on the street. At High Street a group of wog guys and girls were standing smoking outside a reception centre. She heard one of the boys call out, Check her out, and a few of the younger men had wolf-whistled. She shouldn’t blush. She was going to spend the whole evening trying not to blush. She glanced back at the group of wog boys, all smoking, in their best suits, looking like they owned the world. She was not going to think about him tonight. He would not spoil her night.

By ten-thirty everyone was drunk or stoned. Or both. Jordan had brought out his decks and Ali and he were taking turns DJ-ing. Connie, who would usually have drunk bourbon, drank vodka with lime instead. She looked terrific, she looked just like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation, and she had her aunt to thank for that. She nibbled at some food, but had no appetite. She was also scared of spilling something on the dress. All she really wanted to do was dance. Jordan called on Costa and Lenin to shove all the lounge-room furniture against one wall. He had set Christmas lights up in the room and placed an enormous Chinese lantern over the globe that dropped from the middle of the high ceiling. The lantern was so overwhelming that Lenin, by far the tallest person at the party, had to avoid dancing underneath it or his head would knock it. When he occasionally did, the lantern would swing, sending a shaft of light zigzagging across the bodies of the dancing adolescents. Jordan played old seventies metal and hip-hop and jagged punky rock and Ali played rap and urban, electro and top forty. And Connie danced. She danced to Justin and Christina, to Eminem and 50 Cent, she threw off her shoes and jumped around the floor to the Arctic Monkeys and to Wolfmother. She was dancing to an old-school Usher, ‘You Make Me Wanna’, when Ali came up to her. She had her eyes closed and could sense him dancing next to her. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He was dancing around her, slowly, confidently. He knew how to swing his body, how to move his feet and arms. He was a great dancer. She moved in closer to him. He was mouthing the words of the song; a line of sweat, a teardrop, was running down his chest. She wondered what it would taste like. The song was fading to an end and Ali rushed to the decks. She closed her eyes and kept dancing. She would not think of him, she would not think about Hector. The syncopated rhythms of Destiny’s Child flooded from the speakers. Connie opened her eyes to find Ali, behind the turntables, smiling shyly across at her. She lifted her arms and let out a whoop of delight. Then he was beside her, and they were dancing again.

By midnight Jenna was in tears on the front verandah. The city lights glittered below them as she sobbed in Connie’s arms. Tina was sitting beside them, stroking Jenna’s hair. Lenin was perched against the verandah wall, a mop and bucket beside him. The light from the moon and from the city behind him cast a faint tangerine aura around the mad frizz of his jet-black hair. He looked angelic, thought Connie. It was Lenin who’d mopped up Jenna’s vomit. Jenna was distraught because Jordan had gone off to his bedroom with Veronica Fink. Everyone knew they were fucking.

‘You want a smoke?’

He held her hand for the rest of the night: when they danced, when they went to get a drink. He even held her hand at the end of the party when it was just her and Ali, Jenna and Jordan, Tina, Veronica, Costa, Lenin and Casey sitting in the lounge room listening to Devendra Banhart’s Nino Roja. Jenna and Jordan were sitting together on the couch, his hand in her lap. Veronica didn’t seem to care.

He walked her home, hand in hand. They didn’t talk much. He had on one of Jordan’s jumpers, black with a turtle neck. She liked the look of him in black. He walked her to her house. They kissed again.

She couldn’t asleep. She fired up her computer and then opened the bottom drawer of her desk. Under the bottles of liquid paper, Post-it pads, notebooks and pencil was an old tin box; the image of the smiling Prince Charles and Lady Di had faded so she had no nose and he had no chin. She opened the box and shuffled through the papers inside, the cards, the ticket stubs to Placebo and Snoop Dog. The letter was at the bottom, where she always put it. Her aunt did not know she kept it. Her father had given it to her, when he was dying in the hospital in London. It’s a copy he had told her, a copy of a letter I sent to your aunt. She’s replied, he added: She said yes.

It was midday when she woke. Her head throbbed and she groaned when she looked over at the pile of schoolbooks on her desk. She shuffled into the kitchen. Tasha was cooking lunch and the room smelt of lemongrass and coriander. Fillets of John Dory were sitting on a plate.