Dad died when I was twelve. I slept through all the fuss of the police coming, and if Mum cried at all she did it quietly, because I slept through that as well. When I got up for school in the morning, she was sitting at the kitchen table in the same clothes she’d had on the day before. The ashtray was full.

‘He’s dead,’ was all she said, and here’s the truth: I felt like it was Christmas morning and I was about to open something I really, really wanted, and that’s not even the awful bit. A second later I had this incredible wash of worry—what if she meant someone else?—and I think my voice shook a little bit when I asked her, ‘Who?’ to be sure, to be absolutely certain.

‘Your father,’ she said then, but I knew she meant King, and I was Christmas-morning happy all over again.

Everyone knew he wasn’t my father, though no one seemed to know who my father actually was or, if they did, they were never going to tell me. Nanna got drunk once and said she doubted Mum even knew herself, but that was the only time anyone even acknowledged it wasn’t the man we were all supposed to pretend it was.

King was short and fat and everyone thought he was a merry old soul, hence the nickname. They didn’t know him like we did. He liked to be in control. He wanted receipts from his housekeeping and change down to the last cent, and if he didn’t get it then he liked the way Mum’s feet struggled to reach the floor, and the way white dimples spread beneath thick fingers at her neck when he pushed her hard against the wall. He liked the sounds we made when he threw a glass across a room. He liked the look on your face when he snapped a thing you loved across his knee. He liked the way you pushed against him when he twisted your arm around and up your back.

It was a hit-and-run, the police told Mum. He was left flattened like a crow on the side of the highway in the middle of the night. No one knew for sure what he was doing out of his car (or out of his bed, for that matter), but they didn’t dwell on that. He often went out late, came home late, stayed out all night. Mum didn’t mind. They were the nights he went straight to bed or fell asleep where he fell on the couch or in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. They were the better nights.

The Carney Courier called him a Pillar of the Community. He was hit by a white van or truck, they wrote. They could tell from the angle and the force that hit him. They must have picked the colour from paint chips in among the blood and bits of bone.

The hit was buried and the run ran. They never found him. ‘We’re optimistic,’ Sergeant Scanlan told the Courier, but they wouldn’t have been. There’s seventeen hundred kilometres of Bruce Highway between Brisbane and Cairns; the driver could have been travelling either way, and every other car in Queensland’s white.

‘A truckie, probably,’ Mum said. ‘They’ll never find him, and what does it matter? There’s no bringing him back.’

Thank God.

It was quiet for a couple of years then Mum met Graham, who was really nice. He was happy to sit through movies he’d seen and didn’t spoil the endings. He looked at you properly when you spoke, and his face actually responded to the tone of the story you were telling, so you knew he was listening. He kissed Mum on the lips when he came over. He bought me a Bon Jovi t-shirt for my birthday and wrote more than to and from in the card (not much more, but enough for it to mean something better than here you go).

Graham had a good position in the Commonwealth Bank, and there was talk of moving to Melbourne and having a fresh start. He organised his transfer and they went for a week to get the lay of the land, Mum said; to have a look and see what they thought. ‘It’s quite cold there,’ she warned me. ‘It rains a lot.’ I didn’t care about the weather. I was fourteen years old; Melbourne for me meant the latest movies, the latest fashions, Hey Hey It’s Saturday and Luna Park. I was desperate to ride the Great Scenic Railway roller-coaster. Daryl Somers had done it with a cameraman beside him in the front seat, and I couldn’t wait. I told the girls at school I was moving to Melbourne and enjoyed the sort of fuss I’d never had before. ‘You’re so lucky!’ they said. They all wished they were moving to Melbourne!

As it turned out, Mum and Graham just didn’t come back from that week away. It was all organised with a flood of phone calls, but instead of going to live in Melbourne, I went to live with my oldest sister and her husband on the new estate.

Looking back now, I think Mum had done all the mothering she wanted to do. She had three teenagers slamming doors and fighting over eyeliner already when I came along to give her years more sticky floors and shitty nappies. With me there in Melbourne, it would have been a move but nothing more. A carrying on of the life she was living. You don’t get many chances to begin again, and when the tram stops you only have a moment to decide. I don’t blame her now for getting on, but I did for a long time. She grew to be someone else in cold, rainy Melbourne. She built herself a career in real estate, bought herself expensive shoes and drank from long-stemmed glasses. She reinvented herself completely, like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl.

Michele and Dan gave me their spare room reluctantly. They had a toddler and a new baby and didn’t pretend to be taking me in for any reason other than the money Mum gave them in exchange.

‘I’ve enough on my plate without you playing up,’ Michele said. Short years before, she’d played netball, run most mornings and raced out to a party every Saturday night, but babies left her with barely enough time to wash her hair. ‘You’re going to need to pull your weight.’

‘One step out of line and you’re out,’ her husband warned me.

‘Once she’s finished year ten, she’ll look for a job,’ Mum promised them, and made me promise her, and that’s exactly what I did.

I was interviewed at the chocolate factory the week after my exams. The woman in the big chair had very short hair and a little dove tattooed on her wrist. She said there was no need to wait for my results, as if she knew already that I’d failed, and she didn’t make me wait to find out if I had the job. She said, ‘I don’t think there’s any need to drag this on, do you?’ with a light little laugh, and I started on the Monday.

Full training provided, she’d said, but to be honest there wasn’t much of it. How much training do you need to drive a sweeper and fling a mop about? It’s not brain surgery. There were two days of induction, with fire training, which was the most exciting thing I’d ever done. We got to put out a blazing fire, and learned which things would burn low and smoulder, which chemicals gave off toxic fumes, and not to park the sweepers anywhere they were likely to ignite. But mostly the training was Health and Safety: keeping your hair in a net, your nails short, and walkways clear.

The money was good. The girls I worked with were okay, and the company was generous. They threw a Christmas party every year in the function room at Carney’s, with a sit-down dinner and dancing, candles on every table, a huge tree in the corner and all the wine and beer you could drink—and that was on top of your pay-packet bonus and the frozen turkey everyone took home on Christmas Eve.

‘You really fell on your feet there,’ Mum said, and I let myself believe the pride in her voice, and neither of us mentioned that the woman with the little dove tattoo was Graham’s sister.

I was a good worker, and I stuck to most of the rules because that’s what they paid me to do and there was sense to them. If I forgot to sign out when I nipped to the Coke machine in the middle of the night, I was back on the floor before anyone noticed I’d been gone, but I could see how a cigarette butt or a finger cut off in the twist of a diamond ring would lose us all our turkey bonuses.

Eddie and I met at the Christmas party. He didn’t work at the factory, but he was going out with a girl who did, and she danced a lot with the factory manager that night. There was nothing in it. Mr Shale had a pretty wife and a little girl he brought with him to work sometimes (I’d know she’d been in because his desk would be covered in pictures of potato people holding hands). ‘Stuck up little shit,’ I’d heard Margy Clarke call him through gritted teeth, but he wasn’t. He was richer and smarter, but he had a smile and a greeting for us all on his way in every morning, as we were on our way out.

Anyway, what with Eddie’s date dancing so much with the boss, I got to dance with Eddie, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We got married in the Baptist church on Lakeview, though neither of us were Baptists. It wasn’t a big wedding, but there were enough of us to half-fill the function room at Carney’s, and book a DJ and a strobe light. Mum and Graham came up from Melbourne, Michele and Dan came with their kids. My other sisters and Eddie’s brother, Shane, were too far away by then, but Eddie’s cousins were there and his parents and Nola. He had a few school friends and some of them had partners and children.

It was a nice wedding with plenty of laughter. Feet were tired from dancing, and shoes were carried out. The bar was busy, and the food was good (Michele threw up in the car park and blamed the chicken, but everyone knew it was the chardonnay).

We took a tent to Eungella for our honeymoon. I would have preferred Fiji, but we didn’t have that sort of money, and Eddie wouldn’t have wanted to go there even if we had.

‘I’ve absolutely no desire to go abroad,’ he said.

The Courier stopped him in the street once for a thing they used to do called ‘Local Profile’. They took a photo of him, side on, and asked him ten questions. I can still remember most of his answers:

Favourite food? ‘Reef and beef.’

Favourite drink? ‘Bundy and Coke.’

Movie? ‘Three Amigos.’

Singer? ‘Johnny Cash.’

Dream holiday? ‘To go the length of the Bruce Highway in a camper-van,’ he gave them. I don’t know what I would have said, put on the spot coming out of Discount Dan’s, but not that.

I asked him, ‘Wouldn’t you like to see the pyramids? Wouldn’t you like to go on a safari?’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with Queensland?’

Not long after the wedding, Michele and Dan moved to country New South Wales. My other sisters were long gone. Liz taught photography in Sydney, and Fran was a motorcycle courier in London. I never saw any of them again. They say blood’s thicker than water, but what does that mean? Soup’s thicker than water. If you think about it, there’s not much thinner than water, actually.

Mum stopped by once on her way to or from Mackay, visiting someone on Graham’s side. Eddie and I were living in his parents’ caravan at the time, but I told her we were planning to build at Maggie Beach.

‘Why?’ she asked, as if there was a deeper reason than cost and space. ‘What the hell would make you want to live out there?’

‘If it’s money,’ she said, in a moment when the two of us were by ourselves, ‘you know there’s some put aside for you for later, for a rainy day.’

‘We’re fine, thanks.’ I didn’t want her fingers in my pockets, but she wrote a cheque before she left.

‘I don’t know what I did so differently with that one,’ she told Graham as they drove away and he wasn’t quick enough to wind up the window.

Of course, she did know. Everyone knew: the man I’d called my father, Liz and Fran, Michele and Dan, the Lambs and the Coulters—they all knew. Little Lucy would learn, and baby George would be told when he was older. The girls at the factory knew. The whole town knew Joanna Cole had cheated on her husband. But Eddie was the only one who let on he’d ever wondered who it was she’d cheated with. The only one who ever let me wonder too.

I think that’s what drew me to him.

‘I don’t think it was anyone special,’ I said. But I’d always hoped he might turn out to be.

‘You’d think someone would remember,’ Eddie mused, because the features blunted by my mother’s were not Carney County’s.

‘Just someone passing through.’ I shrugged, as if it were a cardigan I did not want on my shoulders, when what I wanted more than anything was to pull it close around me. Close enough to learn its thread and weave and smell, to feel its warmth, know its pulls and buttons, cross my arms and tuck my hands back up into its sleeves.