She takes Sharon back to the only home she knows, the house at Cannon Hill. To the little room with the ice-chest at the back, to the noisy routine of her parents and her younger siblings. She is nineteen years old. A new mother again with a new baby, but waking each morning to the absence of the other. Each morning she lies there in her narrow bed, summoning the strength to get up, to face the long minutes and hours without him.

She can see Peter in the new baby’s face, hear him in her cry. She clasps Sharon to her, finds it difficult, initially, to leave her for even an hour. If she does she is anxious until the baby is once more in her arms. At night she dreams of drowning in a calm sea, of surfacing briefly to scream at those on shore, but her cries are soundless. She has no voice. The water pulls her down and still she struggles upwards, flailing. She wakes before the drowning, before the inevitable. But still feels powerlessness in every part of her. For the rest of her life she will be frightened by the prospect of immersion, will not swim in the sea or a backyard pool or even the shallows of a sluggish creek.

Blindly, she claws around for ways to get her son back. Thinks of catching a train to Sydney, surely Adriana will help. Scribbles notes to Michael, full of demands, then screws them up, bitter origami, and drops them in a bin. There is no sense, she remembers, in writing letters to a man who can’t read. Futility grows with every day.

So getting out of bed in those early months might be the easy part, because it means night and all its demons are gone and she can enter the day once more, the busy, active day. She has another child to feed and care for and besides, she has to rebuild her strength, recover herself. Recover herself. It’s true that she feels something essential, something innate, has been taken, some vital part that needs to be restored before she can breathe properly again. Her whole body feels unreliable. She gets to the end of each day and it feels like a miracle, at times: her heart has kept beating, her body stayed upright, all the way through that succession of hours. Each one of them is a quicksand of bottomless grief and yes, it is miraculous that she manages to step around them. Some days the quicksand looks like a mercy; she wants to enter it, and sink.