Companion Moon

On the way to work I passed commuters, two Nordic backpackers, people waiting for the methadone clinic, lawyers and fashionistas. In Taylor Square there was the smell of old urine on hot concrete, vomit, fresh coffee and newsprint. The overused sleeping bag of a homeless man. Life in the city felt different from where I grew up; the buildings were taller, and the walls had more cracks in them. Things were raw and interesting. People came in more forms and colours; there was less white. When I first moved over the bridge it was as if my suburban bridle had been removed; I could see further to the peripheries. Unblinkered.

I passed a defendant, a person ranting to no one I could see, a group of doctors, store clerks, electricians, a sex worker. I passed a drag queen wearing stilettos – I could see her mascara had run, that she had been crying. I passed a nun. I passed the statue of Jesus at Sacred Heart, his arms raised and palms facing upwards as if to say I had nothing to do with this. I passed my own reflection in the glass of an empty storefront. I looked different from how I had as a girl: sometimes it still caught me off-guard. My thighs and hips. A bust. All that shape laid over that skinny girl within me. I wondered where I fit in among all of this, the best and the worst of it.

As I walked down Victoria Street the Macquarie Institute logo fell into view: a blue cartoon person flying a double helix behind them, like a kite. Just before there was St Thomas’s Hospital. As I approached, dread coalesced in my stomach. What if I was pulled inside the building by an invisible undercurrent? I saw the red signage for the emergency department and smelt the familiar combination of gravy, alcowipes and dirty shoes. I’d started my internship in the emergency department of another hospital not far from here. Sick, unlucky, needy, drunk, addicted, homeless, hopeless, foolish and forlorn. The department was a place of drama and confusion. Everything ran at a fever pitch. In one shift you saw it all.

I worked with an extremely competent and incredibly cynical senior registrar during my first week. He joked darkly that he could make the provisional diagnosis of any patient who presented: genes plus environment.

I exhaled slowly once I was on the opposite side of the hospital, relieved not to be inside there.

On the corner of Burton and Victoria Streets there was a bus shelter where a man lived. He had grey straggly hair and a beard and wore a black ski jacket. Some mornings he sat up and drank out of a disposable cup while he smoked a cigarette. Other mornings, like today, he lay in a foetal position on the bench, facing away from the street.

Inside the rotating doors, the research building was made of pale blue walls and soft lighting. Past the reception was a slow-turning stage holding an elongated sculpture of DNA that nearly touched the ceiling. The sugar phosphate backbone was made of steel. Each base pair was comprised of plates of stained hexagon glass. The DNA spun on its double helix axis; I’d read that the stage was motored by solar power.

I felt tiny discoveries being made as I walked past other laboratories. Scientists wearing perspex glasses and white coats pipetted solutions into tiny test tubes. Cell cultures grew in a bright red medium as researchers tended to them. Knowledge makers. I heard the hum of productivity, of discoveries being woven in looms and hung out over the banisters to solidify. There was an ordered calmness; just standing there made me want to be my best version.

I was a student in the neurodegeneration group that investigated diseases of memory, mood and movement. Conditions where the dense white forest of brain lost function, when cells became entangled, dysfunctional, hijacked. The connections came apart; neurons shrivelled, breaking down those pathways that made us who we were.

I remembered my first day here in January, two months ago now, waiting outside the entrance to the laboratory. There was a large oak-framed picture I mistook for abstract art. When I stood closer I realised it was an anatomical etching: a large ovoid structure in horizontal with two components. A speckled outer layer like coarse sand: the grey matter. Inside was a paler structure in the shape of an H: the white matter. Traversing the white matter were hundreds of spindly neurons, front to back and side to side, overlapping, building up like spiders’ webs. Collaterals in the spinal cord of a chick embryo on the 15th day of incubation was the title.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ a voice behind me had asked.

I turned to see a man in his mid-fifties with a welcoming smile, full head of grey hair and lean build.

‘Professor Olsen?’ I asked.

‘It’s a drawing by Ramón y Cajal,’ he said, looking back at the picture, ‘a founding father of neuroscience. There are more in the lab: come in.’

Inside the laboratory, his office held a large desk completely covered in piles of journal articles, manila folders, draft manuscripts, conference brochures. Professor Olsen looked at me from across the desk.

‘So, you’re a medical doctor … interested in research?’

‘I’m kind of a doctor,’ I said. ‘I didn’t quite finish my internship …’ My voice trailed off.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

‘There was too much …’ I began, and then, ‘… I found it very confronting.’

‘I was never interested in studying medicine,’ Professor Olsen said. ‘Interested in disease? Yes. In furthering science and contributing to the development of new therapeutics? Absolutely. That is what we, as a group, are about. But the rest of it? All the tears and the blood and the … bodily fluids?’ he used both his hands to sweep something invisible away from his chest. ‘Forget it.’

‘Yes, I found the internship challenging,’ I began. What I didn’t say was there were people older and frailer than I had ever seen before. Bodies twisted into foreign shapes by illness, and from them came unusual sounds. ‘And yeah, there was a lot of fluid,’ I added. Organs and liquids, spilling or being drained. Bits cut out. All those borders became blurred: those that kept the insides in and the outsides out. There were lines between regular people and doctors. The other interns and I crossed them, became altered, changed into something that, before, we weren’t.

‘All your medical training will be so beneficial in research. If you want to help people, I mean really help people, you are in the right place,’ Professor Olsen continued. ‘We have a fantastic project for you.’

When he talked, the professor spoke at a speed that was noticeably faster than a regular person, as if his mind raced ahead and the slower mechanics of his mouth were trying to catch up.

Two other PhD students started with me. Jonathan was tall and striking with dark floppy hair. I noticed he had a platinum band on his ring finger. Serey was shorter than me with waist-length black hair that she wore in a brass clip. With us all in front of him, Professor Olsen explained that the three of us would be looking for genes that might predispose to Alzheimer’s dementia. The group had been studying a family with a large number of members affected at a young age. Of the fifty shortlisted candidate genes the lab would have to work through, Jonathan, Serey and I were allocated the first three.

‘One of your genes,’ the professor said, looking at us intently, ‘could hold the answer.’

We were assigned desks in the lab, adjacent to our work benches. Jonathan and I were at opposite ends of the same bay, and Serey was directly in front of me behind the partition, so often we could hear each other and have conversations without eye contact. Jonathan’s desk was pristine and ordered. After the first week he had filing trays and a set of ringbinders that were labelled even though he had no data yet. In the corner of his desk was a framed photograph of his wedding day: he and his wife holding hands and laughing as they looked at each other’s eyes in front of a forest of tall alpine trees.

‘She’s stunning,’ I said to Serey when she caught me looking at it.

‘Yeah, she is. She’s Indonesian. I’m obsessed with her dress,’ Serey said. The gown was sleek and streamlined with a deep V-neck and spaghetti straps. It was intricately beaded.

‘Why would you bring that to work though …?’ I said, but really what I was thinking was: How can this guy have it so together? Jonathan was twenty-four, only two years older than me. In addition to his Melbourne University degree and university medal, he already had a first-author publication. He also had an annoyingly good sense of style – he was a modern poster boy for science. All I had to my name was the spectacular failure of my first career and a series of relationships that never seemed to get off the ground.

‘I dunno,’ Serey answered. ‘Maybe he loves her or something,’ she added sarcastically.

After two months of working there, I found the order in the lab was calming. The day had a routine, beginning with the delivery of freshly cleaned coats, the hum of laminar flow hoods being turned on, the sound of pens logging temperature charts. There were no emergency departments, no doors direct to the street, no cardiac arrest calls. Everything was measured, timed, and organised. I could feel myself healing: parts that were broken coming back together. Cracks in the ice reversing.

‘How are you doing?’ Cate asked me, later that night. After I started at the Macquarie Institute, she would often catch the bus from the city after work on Thursdays to meet me for dinner.

‘Better.’

We were eating dahl, cauliflower curry and naan on plastic chairs before a film at a vegetarian movie house called Govindas. Despite having her growth spurt first, Cate didn’t end up much taller than me, and we could both fill a C-cup bikini. That’s what I was thinking as she talked, her long brown hair hanging down past her shoulders and her asymmetrical fringe brushing against her pendant earrings: I got there, through puberty, in the end.

‘How’s life in caption land?’ I asked. Cate had a part-time job writing subtitles for television shows.

‘It’s pretty good. I get to watch TV all day. Sometimes people speak too quickly or use words I’ve never heard of.’

‘What do you do then?’

‘I just guess, or use the closest word I know. I’ve had a few shockers.’

I had my phone face up on the table and while Cate talked I saw a message notification with an image.

Elijah

I swiped my thumb right to unlock the screen and tilted my phone to landscape so I could see the picture more clearly.

Check out the scene from this arvo

He’d put the photo through a black and white filter, but I recognised the smooth concrete ledge of Clovelly instantly. The picture was taken near the steps on the southern side. A father with broad shoulders stood in black board shorts and a long-sleeved rash vest. In front of him was a boy of around eight or nine with fair spiky hair and a smaller girl, perhaps five, with long dark curls. Both the kids wore short-sleeved wetsuits. Two lifeguards, a male and female, squatted in front of the boy. The focal point of the photo was the boy’s left leg, which was raised out in front of him.

I put my thumb and first finger on the screen then, spreading them to zoom in. I could see there was a head on the boy’s leg, with eyes jutting out and tentacles that wrapped around.

Is that an octopus?? I typed.

Yup. It’s called a Gloomy ’Pus, Elijah wrote back, and I laughed aloud.

The image was beautifully composed – the horizontal axis transected by the light paint of the safety line near the edge, the ocean in the distance and a group of sunbathers to the right. I saw then that the little girl was pointing at the sea creature, her face crumpled in a worried cry. But the boy to whom the cephalopod was attached was leaning in, looking it straight in the eyes, inquisitive.

‘What is it?’ Cate asked, reaching out her hand.

‘It’s from Elijah,’ I said, passing her the phone.

‘Fuck.’ Cate’s eyes darted as she absorbed the picture. ‘He’s so talented.’

When I had the phone back, I typed to my brother: Amazing shot. I love it. Looks a bit like a Max Dupain. G x

After dinner we lay in the cinema on oversized crimson pillows and waited for the film to start. The room was dim and slowly filled with people. It had the faint smell of lost popcorn kernels.

‘I’m seeing someone,’ Cate whispered as she looked at me with excited eyes. ‘A guy from the captioning centre.’

I spoke softly to Cate as the lights went down. It reminded me of being on her trundle when we were ten, having sleepovers – before we had anywhere better or more exciting to be. Or when we lay on our stomachs at our place playing cards during school holidays. Tanning on our towels at Tallow Beach after Year 12, with headaches from too much vodka the night before. Now we were no longer girls, but the tag of womanhood felt new and scratched against our skin.

I wished I had the courage to share with Cate what was happening at my work, the feelings I wasn’t allowed to be having.

~

‘Has it started yet?’ Zed – he was never completely in or out of my life. The night after I went to Govindas, he and Elijah bustled into my apartment carrying a six-pack of beers each.

‘Just ten minutes ago,’ I answered. They both hugged me on the way in; my brother squeezed me tightly and lifted me so only my toes touched the floor.

When I was working at the hospital I had lived with Cate and two others in a share house in Newtown. After I dropped out of medicine and had trouble with my sleep, the frequent comings and goings of so many flatmates was too disturbing. Mostly I didn’t mind living on my own, but I liked the sight of my brother and Zed filling up my apartment. They made the walls vibrate slightly and shimmer with warmth.

Zed stretched out on one couch and Elijah sat on the other, leaving enough room for me, his socked feet on my coffee table.

We had a fairly well-kept tradition of watching new seasons of the TV show Survivor together when it aired on Friday nights.

‘They’re trying to build their camps,’ I said, turning up the volume just as there was a knock at the door.

‘Who’s that?’ Elijah asked.

‘I ordered pizza,’ I said.

‘Yes!’ Zed exclaimed, throwing back his head. ‘You’re the best, Grub.’

‘I know, I know.’ I went to retrieve the food.

‘Where did you order from?’ Elijah asked when I returned with the three cardboard boxes.

‘That new woodfire place on Carrington.’

Zed sat up swiftly on the couch then and looked more like a boy than a young man. ‘You didn’t get me some weird flavour, did you?’

‘Ham and pineapple, your favourite,’ I said, pushing it into his chest. ‘Like I don’t know you,’ I added in a way that made him blush.

On the TV, the camera panned over the turquoise Pacific until it landed on the palm-tree lined island of Samoa.

‘The surf looks epic there,’ Elijah said, watching an offshore wind blow white spray from a wave set.

The twenty-four contestants were divided into three teams. They had to build a camp, including shelter, and hunt and forage for food with limited supplies. Every week the teams competed in an immunity challenge. The winning group won a statue that protected them from attending tribal council, where they might otherwise be sent home – the losing team had to cast votes to eliminate one member. It went on until there was only one winner. Occasionally people left early due to burns, gastro or homesickness.

‘Which team am I again?’ Zed asked.

‘You’re red, I’m yellow, Grub’s blue,’ Elijah said, eating a meat-laden slice.

On the screen the red team’s sleeping shelter, made from tree limbs and palm fronds, was crashing down after heavy rains.

‘Ah, man! The red team is shit!’ Zed said.

‘I reckon the woman on my team who keeps telling everyone she’s third-generation army has a chance of winning the whole thing,’ Elijah said.

‘What about the young bloke on my team who’s an undercover cop but hasn’t told anyone yet?’ I said.

‘Haha, classic Survivor,’ Zed said.

‘How do you reckon we’d go on the show?’ Elijah asked.

‘Nah, I’d be hopeless,’ I said, holding a piece of pizza in one hand and sipping my beer from the other.

‘Elijah would be fine: there’s heaps of swimming challenges and besides, all the chicks would fall in love with him,’ Zed said and I laughed.

‘Don’t sell yourself short, mate,’ Elijah said. ‘You’d be good at the whole game within the game stuff, all the scheming and deal making. You’ve got that survivor mentality.’

‘I could carry the chickens,’ I suggested, referring to the week before when the teams had to transport the birds from boats to the shore.

‘Don’t forget the puzzles, and the logic problems they sometimes put at the end of the obstacle courses – you’d be good at those,’ Zed said. His mobile phone rang then and he lifted his hips to retrieve it from his back pocket.

‘It’s the security guy from the bar,’ he said with a meaningful glance at my brother. He got up to take the call on the balcony, saying, ‘Tell me if the Gold Coast meter maid comes on.’

‘That’s it, we have our first job for him,’ Zed said when he returned a few minutes later.

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘Elijah and I are both sick of the grind: we’re going to make some bank,’ Zed said in a way that made money sound both like something to be acquired and also a destination. ‘There’s a security guard at the bar who runs a bike courier company on the side; he pays good rates as most of the work is out of hours. After we get some cash flow, Elijah can spend more time making his art. I’m sick of managing pubs – I need to get back out on the water.’

‘Yep,’ Elijah said, nodding in agreement. ‘It’ll be sweet,’ he said before skolling the rest of his beer.

‘Hey, man, we should bounce soon,’ Zed said.

‘But they’re just about to set up the immunity challenge!’ I said.

‘Our first job is tomorrow and we need to source some bikes,’ Zed said.

‘Yeah, okay,’ Elijah said, taking the last of his pizza as he stood up. ‘One for the road?’ he said to Zed, lifting the carbohydrate at him.

‘I’ve finished mine,’ Zed said, eyeing off my order. ‘What kind do you have?’

‘Vegetarian.’ To which Zed curled a lip in mock disgust.

‘Meh.’

‘Can’t believe you’re leaving so early,’ I said, walking them to the door.

‘Thanks for dinner, Grub,’ Zed replied, already halfway into the elevator.

‘Yeah, thanks, Grub,’ Elijah said, hugging my shoulders goodbye. ‘Hey, I’ll give you a call during the week.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said, staying at the door until the elevator closed, before returning to see who would claim the wooden idol.

~

After three months I could work independently in the lab. Part of my project was to grow nerve cells in culture. They divided over and over like immortal weeds. Then I altered the expression of levels of my gene. I learnt how to turn genes on and off. They had switches. It was my job to try to figure out what my candidate gene was doing to the nerve. It was easier for me to look at life like that, in tiny lucent pieces, rather than studying a whole person. Examining cells under the fluorescent microscope was intoxicating, like stargazing. It made me feel in some small way that parts of human beings existed that were always beautiful.

There was a knock on the darkroom door.

‘Are you finished in there?’ Jonathan.

‘Nearly, just a few more slides to look at.’

The door slid open and let brightness into the room. Jonathan closed it behind him and then sat in a chair next to me, waiting for me to finish.

‘How’s your project going?’ he asked. ‘All good?’ Jonathan’s voice was light and jovial. There was another thing about it that was distinctive, a slight impediment perhaps. Some of the words were imperfectly formed and disappeared into the back of his throat. Also, his Ss got caught on the edges of his teeth and made a whistling sound.

‘My neurons are growing well, and the transfections are working …’

‘But …?’

‘Well, I’ve over-expressed the gene, and nothing seems to happen to the neurons. I think now I need to underexpress it. To knock it down.’

I spoke to Jonathan as I focused down the microscope. I was trying to concentrate on taking the pictures but I could smell the scent of his skin mixed with his aftershave. When I looked up I could just make out his face, looking at me, while he sat there nursing a slide holder.

I met Elijah across the road for lunch; he was finishing a cigarette.

‘A smoker now, are we?’ I asked.

‘It helps me think,’ he replied.

We sat at an outside table of a Thai restaurant where the air smelt of sesame oil, fish sauce and chili. We ordered pad see ew and ate with plastic chopsticks. He’d walked down from the College of Fine Arts in Paddington, where he was studying.

Elijah was more sinewy than he used to be. He told me once all he wanted to do was eat art. But for the last few years it had appeared almost the reverse, as if the creative world had consumed him; he spent his days in lectures and in the studio, and his evenings and nights at galleries and clubs with other students; his skin longed for the sun.

‘This is for you.’ Elijah slid an A5 piece of paper across our table. It was orange with a multitude of tiny drawn hand-coloured circles: hundreds and thousands. In the middle were details for an exhibition in Surry Hills. The letters were all in lower case, in an old-style print.

‘unseen colour.’ I read the title.

‘This is what I’ve been working on. Hey, do you have a colour photocopier at your work?’

‘Yeah …’ Favours. There were a lot of them these days.

‘Do you think you could run a few of these off for me?’

Back at the Macquarie Institute I left Elijah at my desk, which held my computer and piles of journal articles, my notebook and datasheets.

‘Wait here,’ I said.

When I returned from the photocopier with his replicates, Elijah was reading one of the journals.

‘It says here that there used to be two moons.’

I tried to make out what he was looking at, but from where I stood it was upside-down. I saw a sphere with geothermal mapping.

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, it says there was a “companion” moon that used to be between the earth and the moon and then …’

Elijah clenched his left hand and brought the right hand towards it in a partially opened fist. ‘The companion moon collided with the real moon and kind of …’ he opened his right hand to form a cup around the left fist ‘… coated it. That’s why there are raised areas on the far side.’

‘Weird,’ I said as I moved next to him to read over his shoulder.

For a moment we looked at the article together. The authors, who were scientists from the University of California, described what was an unsolved planetary question around the ‘lunar dichotomy’ – why its two hemispheres were so geologically distinct. Their modelling predicted it was because the far side resulted from the secondary satellite colliding with the one we see now. The moon we knew carried the evidence of its companion as a mountainous and cratered carapace.

After Elijah left with his stack of photocopies I tidied my work area. I had my own Cajal drawing that hung just next my desk. The page was broken down into layers like a cross-section of earth. An outer ganglion layer and inner plexiform layer. The different kinds of cells had nuclei in distinct layers, dropped like seeds. The dendrites received signals from photoreceptive cells, their axons grew down and transmitted the signals to the rods and cones that determined how we saw. The rods helped us see in low light and the cones gave us colour vision. It was titled Golgi stained retinal neurons.

The issue of Nature Elijah had read now sat on the top, holding evidence of a sibling moon. It was strange to think that the night sky could have held two moons, orbiting side by side.

~

On the last Friday of that April our lab had a research meeting with collaborators at Sydney University. Afterwards I decided to take the long way back to the station and found myself standing outside a two-storey bookshop housed in a heritage building; Terrace Books, the hand-painted sign read. I started thumbing the discounted books on the folding tables outside before the store called me in.

Inside were low-rise displays of new releases and then rows of tall, double-sided wooden shelves with little signposts denoting the categories. A narrow staircase led to the second level; there was an arrow pointing up with the words Second-Hand Books. There was good music playing, a male singer with a bittersweet voice and guitar, the volume not loud enough to be intrusive but not so soft that you couldn’t make out the lyrics. I’d forgotten how much I loved stores like this. After I browsed around for a while, looking for a book Serey had told me about, a guy who worked there approached me. He was around my age, maybe a bit older. He wore suspenders on his pants and had thick old-fashioned glasses. His black hair was long on top and shaved around the sides. Hyun was written on his name badge.

‘Hey, can I help you with anything there?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, I’m looking for a book a friend told me about … I can’t remember the exact title.’ I drummed the fingers of my right hand against the fabric of my jeans, trying to recall the details. ‘It was about an African American woman. Some tissue from her cancer was taken without her knowledge, for research … would that be in the science section?’ I asked.

‘Yes! The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: that’s a remarkable book. It’s in biography, follow me.’

‘I hear they are still alive, her cells,’ Hyun said as he handed me the book. Henrietta stood smiling and confident on the front cover in black and white, hands on hips, wearing a skirt suit and dress hat.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘they’re called HeLa cells.’ It was hard to reconcile the fact that there were scientists at the institute growing live cell lines, decades later and thousands of kilometres away, that derived from the woman in the book.

At the front register I handed Hyun the book so he could scan the barcode.

‘I like this music,’ I said as he peeled off the price tag and slipped the paperback into a brown paper bag, folding down the opening.

‘It’s Bon Iver,’ he said, handing me my purchase. ‘Enjoy the read, let me know what you think.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the package, already planning when I could next stop by.

~

I clicked the end of my pen down and opened my journal. I found it easiest to draw and write like this, leaning against pillows in my bed, my legs warm under the doona. Dr Wesseling suggested I start journaling as a way of processing what had happened in the hospital, what happened in the world. I’d started the ritual after I left my internship but found it more and more useful as time went on. Occasionally I doodled or sketched. Often I wrote whole passages. Other times my thoughts were less well-formed and arrived in bullet points or lists. Sometimes I went looking for poetry; sometimes poetry was found. I usually wrote either late at night or first thing in the morning, trying to pin down my dreams; my mind was more amenable to being prised open at those transitory times. Creativity was interesting like that: you had to catch yourself off-guard.

The night before I’d dreamt of hands working in a surgical field. In the morning I held my left hand in a relaxed pose, palm facing up. I sketched it: I had an idea to draw the fleshy outline and then label all the bones inside, like we’d done in anatomy class. I started with the carpel bones, eight of them all nested together to make the wrist.

Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. I drew their shapes, fitting together like a Mesolithic puzzle.

There was a mnemonic we used to remember the order of bones during exams, but I couldn’t recall the line itself. I tapped the end of the pen against my forehead, trying to find it, but couldn’t. I put the pen inside the journal pages and closed the book around it, getting out of bed.

I was just about to start the shower when I remembered the mnemonic.

Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle.

~

Serey’s family was from Cambodia; when the war happened her parents spent three years at a camp near the Thai border, where her oldest sister was born. She told me this as we sat on a sofa in her share house. We held celadon bowls of her homemade noodle soup. The broth was hot, sweet, sour and spicy all at the same time. Serey had an extra bowl of chili paste that she kept spooning into hers.

‘When the war happened all the people who had gone to university were rounded up and killed,’ she told me. ‘Doctors, lawyers, accountants … even if you just wore glasses. Dead. Artists too. If you were a musician, dancer, singer, they wanted to kill you. My parents both taught at the university so, obviously, we had to leave.’

‘My father did this smart thing: he took the diamonds from my mother’s engagement ring and put them here,’ she said, pointing to her left shoulder just under the collar of her shirt. ‘He sewed them under his skin. After we finally got to Australia he took them out and sold them so we could start a new life.’

‘You ever seen a dead body?’ she asked.

‘Uh, only when I used to work at the hospital,’ I said.

‘If you go to Phnom Penh,’ Serey said, ‘you’ll see this tower filled with the bones of people who were killed.’

‘I know wars like that,’ I said. ‘When my nonno was younger, at the same time in Europe they were killing all the Jewish people. Business owners, musicians, mathematicians … anyone really. They sent them to labour camps where they had to work all day, and were hardly fed. Then later they started killing them in showers with gas,’ I said. ‘Even after they were dead they didn’t get any peace. They took their hair and their skin and used it to make things. They took all their belongings. Even their shoes.

‘My mother’s family was in Alexandria,’ I explained, ‘so they were never rounded up into a camp, but my nonno was always afraid that the war would reach them, or they’d be persecuted by their own government. Later, after the Suez Canal crisis, they were forced to leave their home. They could only take one suitcase each and had to abandon their houses and businesses. They just had to move away and start all over again. He still has nightmares about it. About the fear. He keeps packing things up, packing his case. After they came to Sydney he was still convinced they would be blamed and have to run further, to survive.’

Serey nodded and I was struck by the ways our family stories somewhat echoed each other’s. ‘My parents never spend money on nice clothes or cars or things like that. When we were growing up all their money went on our schooling. They always say, “When war comes, it will be harder to take away what’s here.”’ Serey tapped her right pointer to her temple.