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always said. ‘
You’re
lucky. Watched any telly lately? If you have you’ll
know
you’re lucky.’
    Daisy put her right, letting her see the brevity of the programme, the limited number of items, the transience of applause.
    Here’s to you, Daise! Cheers!
    â€˜Let’s go back a little,’ she said to Daisy, mumbling away to herself in the mall. ‘I want to tell you about them, about the kids. Your turn next week. That
Brain
!’ she said. ‘That
Shamrock
!’

    Now yearning for the confidences, the shared comfort of age, she would write Daisy long letters full of plaint. Goodbye. Goodbye to those years in which she huddled in the same house, always the same, while son and daughter flap-doodled their way through Mickey Mouse humanities courses on straight C’s.
    Herself unsurprised, still on the secretarial game but translated, now she also had put a course or two behind her, into something a little more meaningful as a parliamentary worker, learning to keep her too ready lips closed, ploughing ahead to retirement down the track with only the occasional flirtation in sight. Dollops of carelessly dropped, scented dross, she told herself and also another elderly prospective escort who promptly, promptly … and, my God, there was a further not so fragrant deposit littering the fence marge.
    So who cares? cared? She had the kids, no longer kids, to worry about in the bleak evenings, wondering how straight C’s and humanities establish themselves and their holders in the expanding early sixties except in protest flings with mounted police or in baton-beaten greenie marches. There had been narrow squeaks with alternative communes seductively beckoning. Shamrock had taken a year off to find herself.
    â€˜Where will you look, dear?’ Kathleen had asked mildly.
    â€˜Oh Jesus, you do crap me off!’
    I lived through that, Kathleen admitted, through all that sulky acrimony, that impudent flouncing, until Shamrock hitched her way to a commune outside Mackay, an outwardly decorously run family group that, according to a chastened and returned daughter, was organised to punishment point by a failed law student with stunning connections in the state judiciary. Daddy had funded the farmlet, a pre-postmodernist remittance gesture. There was much regimentation her unaccommodating daughter had resisted. The male/female balance was preserved by rostered swapping. A kind of tremor, Sham insisted, ran through the group every Monday when the new copulation schedule was pinned to the breakfast-room notice board. Culture, too, was regulated. You will learn oboe. You will play bassoon. You will mould pots, paint, weave, wood-carve. But above all you will sleep with James, with Trevor, with Russell. You will help build the hayshed and do the washing and cooking every third day. (Hey, don’t the
men
get a go?) You will learn ballet, sleep with Shark, do the … Shamrock lasted only two months and revealed these things to her mother in later dribbles ofself-pitying confession. Her small face seemed permanently morose. There was a poignant squalor about her and about the disciples she described, whose earnings on regular week-day jobs and/or unemployment benefits vanished into an unaudited bank account for the failed law student, who did at least know dollars and which way to butter his bread.
    In the seventh week she had announced rudely that she was utterly tired of beansprouts and would, she swore, remember to her last breath the crocodile-eyed law failure (I
mean
, mother, how can you fail at law?) making hip roofs of his tapering unworked fingers and saying, ‘I’m not sure, Shamrock, whether you fit in with the ideology of our little family, whether you have assimilated the philosophic concepts of the group. Some of your partners … that is, your sexual partners … have complained about a lack of enthusiasm, of an … how shall I put it? … inert