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circumstances, I found myself creating excuses for Greg’s bad behaviour. Besides, I had just come out of a bruising five-year relationship and wasn’t keen to jump straight back into another one. I decided to enjoy whatever attention Greg showered me with.
    All of which would have been fine were it not for the fact that Greg soon after asked me outright to be his girlfriend. And the inference was very much that we be exclusive. We were, he had decided, at some sort of a crossroads, and I needed to decide whether I was interested in a relationship with him. And so I decided, on balance, yes, I was sufficiently flattered and sufficiently interested to give it a go. Again, sliding doors.
    The following weekend, I had a trip planned to Sorrento with a girlfriend who Greg had decided he didn’t like, and he made sure I was aware of his displeasure. But I wasn’t about to let anyone tell me who I could or couldn’t spend time with, and so I went. When I returned, he was really off-hand with me, actingaloof and indifferent. I challenged him, saying, ‘Either you’re being like this because you’re seeing someone else or you don’t want to see me anymore.’
    He promptly replied that he was seeing someone else, alluding to the fact that she was some sort of sex goddess. I was hurt, because he’d lashed out and wounded me in the one part of my life he knew I was especially sensitive.
    I don’t know if it was because I had lost my mum at six and never really had a role model for relations with members of the opposite sex, but I had never been totally at ease – or especially confident – about sex. I remember being fourteen years old and having boys wanting to kiss me or hold my hand, and I always pushed them away. My nickname in the village among boys of a certain age was ‘untouchable’. In that sense, my being sent to boarding school was quite a relief, because I didn’t have to deal with any of that stuff.
    And so when Greg sought to hurt me with that comment – the truth of which was anyone’s guess – I thought to myself, he can go and get stuffed. I had spent all those years in a small village dealing with abandonment and rejection issues, always being especially careful of giving too much of myself away for fear of being rebuffed, and here was Greg repaying the trust I had begun to place in him by treating me like dirt.
    Looking back now, it was the first really obvious sign of his need for power and control in a relationship – two qualities that would go on to become a hallmark of all our interactions. But, of course, I didn’t recognise it at the time.

5
Isolation
    Later in 1992 I moved into my new place in Belgrave, out to the east of Melbourne. It’s a beautiful part of the world – famous as the home of the Puffing Billy steam engine. Perched on the edge of the Dandenong Ranges National Park, it’s green and covered in bushland. It was, I had decided, the perfect bolthole for a girl from the country: close enough to commute to work in the CBD and just far enough away to feel like I was out in the country.
    My house was a little run-down shack of a place – no more than a wooden cottage in the hills. At the time, I was just excited at how much land I was able to purchase for the same amount it would have cost to purchase a shoebox in Richmond, which had been my alternative option. Nottinghamshire, from whence I had come, is really flat and mostly featureless. The Dandenongs by comparison are undulating and covered in the most gloriously unkempt bushland and forest.
    But from the moment I moved in I was miserable. I soon came to hate the house and I started to feel increasingly lonely. I now lived a long way from my friends, and there were no close neighbours.
    The financial pressure of the mortgage, combined with an increasingly precarious work environment, made me anxious as I had never been before. I had a job I was