Claudia crouched down in the corner where the kitchen benches met across from the island. She would’ve preferred to be under the dining table surrounded by tucked-in chairs, but in one of a series of betrayals by her body over the past twenty-eight years she had grown too tall to sit comfortably under there. Instead she crouched in her black boots, staring down at her pale blue socks, a fried egg drawn on each side. She had on a loose white cotton T-shirt with giant roses in yellow, pink and blue drawn all over it, and tucked into her dark denim cut-offs. ‘I look good,’ she thought to herself as she quietly wept. She heard the footsteps of Phinn coming down the hallway followed by Rachel (you live in a house for eighteen years with the same people and you too would be able to distinguish between the footsteps of the 28-year-old kind male and the 65-year-old frustrated mother). She pulled the top of her shirt over her face so she could not see them for a few more seconds and squeezed her last tears out of her eyes.

‘I am going to write a letter to the shopping centre. You can’t just put a pole there; they really should pay for it to be fixed.’

‘You can’t back into a pole and seriously blame the shopping centre for putting it there!’

‘There’s so much concrete, it’s very bright, you can’t see properly and there’s no reason to put the pole—’ Rachel’s sentence fell off a cliff. ‘Claudia?’

Her second daughter wiped her face while still focusing on her ankles and then looked up.

‘What are you doing down there, you dumb doob?’ Phinn asked.

Despite her best intentions and efforts up until that point, Claudia sniffed and a fresh burst of tears came on.

‘Dad’s not coming to the dinner tonight,’ she said, putting her face back in her arms.

‘Oh sweetie.’ Rachel crouched down next to Claudia and rubbed her back, only triggering another cascade of tears. ‘Sweetie, why isn’t he coming? How do you know?’

‘He texted me. He didn’t tell me why; he said he had too much to do. I was really looking forward to this. I’m not going to get to hang out with any of you much on Saturday. Tonight was supposed to be the night for a proper family dinner; now he’s not even coming.’

Rachel cocked her head. ‘Well, you know what he’s like. He doesn’t mean anything, this is just the way he is.’ She traced her fingers up Claudia’s spine, a spine she had been tracing since it was an hour old, a spine she had been tracing since before Claudia could even remember.

‘You know, sometimes I get the feeling Dad doesn’t even like me.’

‘Sweetie, of course he loves you, you’re his daughter.’

‘Of course he loves me, that’s not what I said. Sometimes I think he doesn’t like me. I know he loves me, but I get the feeling he doesn’t like me as a person. I think he finds me high maintenance. Or too foreign to him. Or something. He never seems to feel obligated to make the effort for me. It’s like, just because I’m not as oversensitive as my siblings, he can be mean to me.’

‘Your siblings are not oversensitive.’ As ever Rachel was unbothered by the actual point of the conversation; she only heard descriptors she objected to. You could tell her that your best friend was dead, but if you used a nickname all you would get is scolded for not using the name your best friend’s mother had given them.

Rachel stood up, dragging Claudia by the elbow with her. ‘Your dad does like you; he’s just a grumpy old man sometimes. It’s been a big week. You’ll still have a great night. We will all be there – don’t let it ruin your special night.’

Claudia nodded into her mother’s shoulder.

‘Now, sweetie, if your father isn’t coming, why don’t you let Mick come along? It will be nice. You like Mick, he’s a lovely man, and it would be nice to have him at one of the celebrations.’

Claudia nodded again. ‘Sure, if Dad’s not coming, then Mick could at least have dinner with us.’

She did not notice Phinn had not said a word the entire time.

*

Phinn waited until Claudia had left the kitchen and glared at his mother. ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’

Rachel pulled eggs and tinned food out of the same shopping bag, shaking her head at the ineptitude of the packing skills of the woman at the checkout. ‘She doesn’t need to know the car is scratched. She’s already stressed.’

Phinn shook his head and followed his sister. His steps slowed as he reached the bedroom door. He was a lifelong student of conflict avoidance. While his sisters had raged around him as children, he had counted how many times he could hit a tennis ball against the water tank with a cricket wicket.

If Phinn had been Queen Victoria, Ireland would have been under Home Rule in 1849, just so she would not have had to undertake an awkward propaganda visit to the country. If he had been in the Iraqi prison Camp Bucca with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliphate would never have been declared because he would’ve distracted the future Islamic State leader with a game of cards rather than get involved in a political discussion.

*

When Phinn was fifteen and his long-awaited growth spurt was still very much delayed, he had been in the main street with his mother when his mate Tony had yelled at him from across the street. Tony was a year older and three times bigger. He was a surf lifesaver who fancied himself as a bit of a hometown hero but, as he did with most people, Phinn had always got along with him. They were mates. He yelled some insult that was muffled by two cars but Phinn got the general gist. This is how boys communicated; this is how mates spoke to each other. ‘You dumb piece of shit!’ Tony hollered. Phinn, forgetting he was standing with Rachel for a second, exuberantly yelled back, ‘You’re ugly!’ Tony crossed the street.

Phinn bounced towards him, holding his skateboard under his arm. He held out his hand for their traditional bump of acknowledgement. That’s when Tony punched him in the face. Dazed, Phinn staggered forward and dropped his skateboard.

‘Mate?’

Tony hit him again, this time in the chest, winding Phinn for a few seconds. The next punch landed under his right eye. The next one was the one that got him on the ground. Rachel stood on the footpath screaming

‘Tony, you son of a bitch, I know your mother, get off him! What are you doing?’

Phinn felt Tony’s shoe in his ribs and, from his horizontal vantage point, watched him walk away. He let his eyes sting with tears for a moment but blinked them away before Rachel dragged him up by his elbow and spent the car trip home yelling at him for fighting.

Rachel didn’t seem to understand that Phinn had just been beaten up in front of his mother. He hadn’t landed a single punch. He didn’t care about the physical pain. Nobody gives a shit about that. It was another reminder he was small.

Phinn never found out why Tony suddenly turned on him, and for some reason it was Tony who he thought of as he walked towards his sister’s room to detonate a bomb because it was the right thing to do.

He leaned on the doorframe as his sister lay across her bed scrolling through Twitter. Sensing his presence, Claudia rolled over and, without looking up, said, ‘Phinn! Listen to this tweet from @dril: “This whole thing smacks of gender,” I holler as I overturn my uncle’s barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit.’ Claudia cackled to herself and finally looked up. ‘What’s wrong?’

He sighed and sat down on the bed. ‘Mum told Dad that Mick was coming to the dinner tonight.’

Claudia shrugged. ‘She can tell him whatever she wants; he’s the one who isn’t coming.’

‘No, she told him that before he said he wasn’t coming.’

Claudia sat up straight. ‘What?’

‘When we were at the restaurant decorating it for the reception tomorrow, Mum came up and was talking to Dad. She said she was going to bring Mick since he probably won’t be allowed to come to the wedding and it was the right thing to do.’

‘What did Dad say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Did they see you?’

‘I don’t know; I had walked into the kitchen but Mum knew I was there when she walked out.’

‘So she just watched me cry about how Dad doesn’t like me, and she just stood there and pretended she didn’t know a thing about it?’

Phinn sighed and moved closer to his sister so he could put an arm around her. ‘Yep.’

‘Unfuckingbelievable; that woman is unbelievable.’ Claudia put her head in her hands. ‘So, I am getting married, his daughter is getting married, and there is meant to be a dinner so the parents can all meet each other and we can have a nice time, and really it should just be us and our parents but fucking Mary is coming along because she sees no issue in crashing her niece’s special night and she wants to bring Mick, and Dad is so fucking immature that he can’t just suck it up for his daughter and be in the same room as someone he doesn’t like? Instead he just doesn’t show up because he doesn’t like somebody; it doesn’t matter that it might mean something to me.’

Phinn looked out of the window and on the street envisioned George and Rachel as human beings. As their own individuals, who were not – as the siblings mostly believed – an extension of themselves, whose lives did not surge and recede on the whims of their children. It is not unique to discover your parents are fallible, but it can be savage.

Phinn took a breath.

‘Both of our parents are arseholes, yes.’