I’m sorry, I know I’m meant to be writing about happy memories.

But I can’t think of anything happy today. I’m all filled up with sad.

Last night was another bad night at our house, Ms Hiller.

My parents had finally almost forgiven me for inviting Alyssa over. They’d realised I was only trying to help. They knew I hadn’t intended to make things worse.

How was I to know that seeing Alyssa would make Fergus angry? Or that Alyssa would cry and say she thought it was better for everyone if she just put Fergus behind her?

That was what upset me most of all, Ms Hiller: that someone could want to put my brother behind them. That someone could want to forget him.

But I forgive her, Mr Hiller, because she also said she loved Fergus. She said she never wanted to leave him. She just couldn’t handle his sadness. She wanted to be happy. Phil makes her happy. You can’t be mad at someone for wanting to be happy.

And even though it didn’t play out in exactly the way I’d planned, Alyssa’s visit (while undeniably a horrible disaster) changed something in our house.

For so long now, my parents have been saying that Fergus will get over this in his own time. That he’s an adult. That we can’t make him do anything. But it’s been a year. A year of Dad going to Centrelink on Fergus’s behalf; a year of Mum and Dad paying his car and phone registrations, even though he never uses his car or his phone; a year of waiting. After what happened with Alyssa, Dad decided, finally, that he had to do something.

At six-thirty last night, Elizabeth arrived.

She was wearing a bright-red shirt, black skirt, awesome black patterned tights and red knee-high boots. Her hair was longer at the front than it was at the back. It was dyed bluish-black and shot through with chunks of burgundy. She didn’t look like a caseworker. She looked like an indie filmmaker.

Mum had made a special effort to be there. She showed Elizabeth into the front room, where I was pretending to do my homework.

‘Elizabeth, this is our daughter Clementine. We have another daughter, Sophie. She’s at a lecture this evening.’

‘Clementine. What a lovely name,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I always wished I had an unusual name. Elizabeth is so dull. And my middle name is Jane. Elizabeth Jane Smith. Yuck.’

‘My middle names are Alwyn and Shirley,’ I said, ‘after my grandma and my favourite auntie.’

‘Lucky you. All great names! I think Jane was my dad’s cocker spaniel!’

She smiled then, and I smiled back. I felt as though I could trust Elizabeth. I hoped Fergus would feel the same way.

‘Can I stay?’ I asked Mum.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘This affects our whole family.’

‘So how will this work?’ Dad asked Elizabeth.

‘I guess that depends on Fergus,’ she said. ‘What I would like is for one of you to go up to his room and ask him to come down and see me.’

‘You can’t make him come?’ I asked.

Elizabeth shook her head. ‘Sorry, Clementine. I can’t. He has to decide that for himself.’

‘He won’t come down,’ I said, my chin trembling. ‘And it’s my fault.’

‘Clemmie.’ Mum stroked my hair. ‘You know that’s not true.’

‘You said it was!’ I cried, pulling away. ‘You said I mucked everything up, by inviting Alyssa here.’

Mum sighed. ‘I’m sorry for getting angry at you, Clem. I shouldn’t have. But now isn’t the time to discuss that. Not in front of Elizabeth.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Elizabeth gently. ‘When this sort of thing happens, it’s hard on everyone. There may be a time when you decide you want family counselling, to work through the impact this has had on all of you. But for now, it would be wonderful if we could ask Fergus to come down and have a chat.’

‘We can try,’ said Dad, ‘but as I told you on the phone, he very rarely leaves his room. I think it’s the only place he feels safe.’

‘I’m hoping he will come to feel safe with me,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But it might not happen quickly. This might be a long journey. We might make the first step tonight. We might not. If it is indeed depression that we’re looking at, it’s a tricky beast. It takes time to tame it.’

‘Depression?’ I said, feeling so quiet and small. ‘So it is . . .’

Elizabeth nodded. ‘It might well be, Clem. From what your dad has told me. But I’ll need to talk to Fergus to be sure.’

‘But depression—’ I felt hollow inside, even saying the word.

‘Is maybe not what you think it is, Clem,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s an illness, like cancer, or diabetes. It’s not just somebody feeling a bit blue. And it’s not something a person can simply snap out of.’

‘It’s not something that can be fixed?’ Now I really was going to cry. Everything I’d thought and believed was wrong.

Elizabeth smiled and took my hand. ‘Of course it can be fixed. And I’m the best person to implement that. But Fergus needs to work with me. He needs to want to change things.’

‘I’m going to get him.’ I jumped up.

‘Clem—’ Mum called after me, but it was too late – I was already leaping up the stairs.

‘Fergus!’ I banged on his door. ‘There’s a woman here to see you. Her name’s Elizabeth. Will you come down, please?’

I waited. Silence leaked from Fergus’s room. I tried again.

‘Gus? Come on. She’s come all this way to see you. You can’t let her down.

‘Fergus?

‘Fergus Stephen Douglas Darcy, come on! I’ll break your door down!

‘Fergus, seriously, this is so not cool.

‘Fergus!!!’

Finally, I heard Fergus’s bed creak. I imagined his feet padding over the carpet. I pictured his hand resting on the door. And then . . .

‘Make her go away.’ His voice was so close. It made my heart hurt. A moment later, I heard the creak again as he returned to his bed.

I walked glumly down the stairs. ‘He won’t come,’ I told them.

‘Don’t feel bad about it, Clementine,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We can’t always make other people do what we want them to. As I said, Fergus has to do this himself.’

‘But that’s what everybody’s been saying, and nothing’s happening!’ I protested. ‘At least I tried! If you just wait for him, nothing will happen. You said you can fix him, but you don’t know my brother.’

And I meant it – because the one thing that hasn’t changed about Fergus this past year is his stubbornness. Fergus has never liked being told what to do. He’s always done things his own way.

At the start of Grade 10, Fergus told Mum and Dad he wasn’t going back to school. He said the teachers wanted to fill his head up with stuff he didn’t want to know.

‘I like learning,’ he said. ‘But I want to learn what I want to learn. The teachers at school teach the same thing every year. You can tell by the way they drone on that they’ve said it a million times. Their brain isn’t even thinking about it anymore; their mouths are just moving. Their eyes are dead. Their minds are dead, and they’re trying to make us have dead minds, too. I want to learn cooking. I’m going to go around to all the restaurants and get a job as an apprentice. That’s my decision, and it’s final.’

Mum and Dad tried everything to get him back to school. They tried grounding him. They tried cutting off his allowance and taking away his Xbox. Nothing worked. Gus was a racehorse with his blinkers on.

It was only after he’d gone around to every restaurant and cafe in Burnie, Wynyard, Penguin and Ulverstone and been told by every chef that he needed to finish Grade 10 to be taken on as an apprentice that he relented. For the next year, Fergus did the bare minimum in all classes except for cooking and music, and the minute he finished Grade 10, he was out of there and working in a restaurant.

Fergus was stubborn then. He is even more stubborn now. Because something very important has changed.

Fergus wasn’t afraid, back then. At least, I didn’t think he was. I thought nothing frightened him. But now he’s definitely scared. I know it. And he doesn’t know how to deal with it. So he isn’t.

‘He needs to be given a big shove,’ I said. ‘Or else he’ll never come out.’

‘No, Clementine,’ Dad said. ‘You tried the big shove, with Alyssa. And that ended—’

‘Badly, I know. I understand that. I understand now that I can’t fix Fergus. Elizabeth is the best person to do it, but I think—’

‘I’m sorry, Clementine, but I’m afraid a big shove might be counterproductive,’ Elizabeth said. ‘How do you think Fergus will react if we try to wrench him away by force from the place he feels safe? This is likely to be a gradual process. So you need to focus on getting on with your own life. Try to take your mind off it. Try to think, right now, of something you’d really like to do. Somewhere you’d like to go. Someone you’d like to see . . .’

Elizabeth smiled at me, and winked.

And I thought of Fred Paul.