I’m snapped back to reality when I reach home. It’s like a bakery’s vomited all over our kitchen.

Shit.

Mum’s woken up from her drunken coma and while I’ve been gone she’s been doing her best Suzie Homemaker impression. She’s tottering dangerously as she takes another batch of cupcakes out of the oven and I race over to help her before the whole tray lurches sideways and the cakes somersault to the ground. Her hands are trembling as much as mine still are.

‘Look what I made for us!’

A cloud of flour surrounds her. She’s trying her hardest to be a good mother and I feel bad for wanting to abandon her this afternoon.

‘Yummo,’ I force myself to tell her, and open the fridge to pour some milk for us. There’s a lone, wilted carrot and some week-old leftovers, half a tub of butter and a clutch of eggs remaining.

‘You didn’t get any other groceries?’

‘Remember how much you used to looooove my cupcakes?’

I step past her and turn off the oven. She’s wearing that desperate smile, and I recognise it as the one I wear when I want people to like me. I kiss her cheek and it tastes like flour. I think of my history lesson, about when the people in France revolted. Marie Antoinette heard the people’s cries that they were starving and in the pictures from the history books she was dressed in layers of lace so she looked like a meringue herself, a curly wig like whipped cream balanced high upon her head.

Marie Antoinette looked at all the gaunt, hungry faces of people who were desperate because they didn’t have any bread to eat, and she famously replied, ‘Let them eat cake.’

They took her head instead.

My stomach pinches as I look around at the three batches of cupcakes. I’m starving and I’ll have to eat cake.

Most importantly I need to get to the bottom of who was at the phone booth. Somebody probably called up as a prank, and then I must have flipped out and imagined the otherplace while they were talking. I mean, I had just killed Mitzy.

I am a dog murderer.

The dog is dead.

I killed it.

Shit.

But I can’t think of who the person on the phone would have been. I take out the scrap of paper from my skirt pocket where I wrote down the number of the box. Flicking through the yellow pages I get the information number for Telstra. The woman on the other end is helpful in a bored kind of way. I get the impression that answering phones in a call centre isn’t really her life’s passion, but she looks up the number I give her in her files and she listens attentively when I explain to her where the box is located.

‘Darling, that phone box couldn’t ’ave been ringing,’ she says after a pause. ‘It’s been disconnected. It stopped workin’ years ago, sweetheart, we just haven’t got around to replacin’ it yet, budgets being what they are.’

I thank her quickly.

Nobody could have called that phone box.

The phone couldn’t have been ringing.

And yet . . .