8.

The auctioneer’s hammer banged down at one-twenty-seven, Claire squeezing my hand as if it were an executioner’s gunshot. I breathed out smoke and watched the small crowd in front of the house from the other side of the street. A woman jumped into a man’s arms with a scream.

‘You okay?’ Claire asked, looking up at me.

‘I think so.’

‘What now?’

‘Maybe I’ll have a drink or two then move to Sydney.’

She went home after that.

Documents were signed, hands shaken and a deposit paid while I prepared to farewell another thing on the increasingly short list of what had made up my life. Linda spread a ‘SOLD’ sticker across the sign – a lone air bubble irking me.

‘Well, you made this unnecessarily excruciating, but it was good doing business,’ she said, shaking my hand.

‘It’s what I do. Thank you for everything. Don’t worry, I won’t suggest a drink.’

‘I’ve got time for a celebratory one, but just one.’ She heaved a cheap bottle of champagne from her expensive handbag ‘It’s tradition.’

We clinked glasses together in the living room. Already I felt like a guest there.

‘You know, you never mentioned why you were selling this place,’ she said, relaxing into one of the beige couches dumped in there for the open houses.

‘You never asked.’

‘You didn’t seem like the telling type.’

‘Fair point. I grew up here with my mum. It was hers, but she passed a little while ago.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. No father in the picture?’

‘He ran off to America when I was a kid and neither of us heard from him again. He died over there later that year – a car crash. Left in March of seventy-seven, dead by September.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘There’s nothing to say. He got what he deserved; it was me and my mum who didn’t.’

‘How so?’

‘He might’ve stuck around if I hadn’t shown up.’ I exhaled. ‘But I did, so, there goes that. I deserved two happy parents; she deserved someone by her side in those final moments.’

‘You really believe he left because of you?’

‘Eh, maybe,’ I said, finishing my glass and pouring myself another.

‘Hmm, so, America? He was from there?’

‘No.’

‘Why then?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry, this is really none of my business.’

I stared into space.

‘You know, I’ve spent most of my life asking that same thing. Now I realise I’ll never have the answer. Only two people might’ve known why he did what he did and now they’re both gone. I’m just left behind, sort of … stranded with the questions.’

‘Maybe accepting there isn’t an answer is kind of an answer?’

‘Maybe you’re right.’

Linda left me with a kiss on the cheek and a ‘good luck’ more sincere than I’d imagined her capable of. I closed the front door and leant back against it, looking around the room of the home which was no longer mine. No shower of relief or happiness rained over me like I had expected, nor even the sadness I’d felt before. There was nothing, and it was more agonising than anything else could’ve been.