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veranda at sunset in a green and yellow folding chair.
    â€˜There’s one thing and it’s definitely a true thing,’ said Maria in a sing-song voice, ‘the men who come here don’t come because they want to live to be a hundred.’
    Maria spread her long fingers and light shone through the tiny webs between them.
    â€˜Phillip Jong, respected member of the Melbourne City Council, Herb Langley, star footballer turned coach, Dixie Smith, businessman, Frank Kelly, MLA -’
    â€˜Four men?’
    â€˜All died in parlours in the last year. There’s one thing and it’s definitely a true thing. It’s true about you and me and it’s even true about Freda there, winking fit to beat the band.’
    â€˜What is?’
    â€˜It’s an undeniably true fact that we’re dangerous.’
    Maria laughed, then coughed. Pearls of sweat stood out on her forehead. I followed her gaze around the kitchen, where layers of repair were tawdry and threadbare, where it came to rest on the cake.
    No one spoke. It seemed like the end of the party. I got up and took some leftover pieces of cabana out to Jack the cat.
    If we ever had gone for a trip out to that farm, if John had ever invited us, it might have given us a point of reference, a shared memory that would have stayed with us, helped us through the next few weeks.
    That night John died in his bed of natural causes. He’d been dead for two days before the postman found him in front of the television, in the striped folding chair, with his head on one side, the colours in his long pink and white legs having run together, and a fateful look, a look of fulfilled ambition on his face.

Commuting
    Sophie has her eye on a house. She walks past it every day, and she talks to Melissa about it, with the mixture of make-believe and confession that forms the major part of her conversations with her daughter. It’s only the nicest house she’s ever seen.
    Sometimes there’s washing on the line at the back. Once she heard music coming from the front room, but she’s never seen the people who live there. She has no reason to suppose the house will be sold, but this doesn’t stop her from dreaming she has enough for a deposit.
    â€˜Just you and me,’ she says to Melissa. ‘Think of it – all those rooms!’
    Melissa turns in the stroller and arches her back. She knows this tone of voice of her mother’s, and answers enthusiastically. ‘Da-da-da-da-da!’ Five single commanding notes.
    â€˜You wish,’ says Sophie, laughing, then more softly, ‘I wish too.’
    Great trees shade the house, trees that might have been there before any white person. One stormy afternoon they watch them, crossed and contorted by the wind. And the house stands up between them, goes on standing. It just has to.
    Melissa’s stroller has a hood, and Sophie turns it so that it’s facing away from the rain, but stands with her own face to the sky. ‘Look!’ she shouts in triumph. ‘Look!’
    By five o’clock the dirt outside their block of flats will be as dry as ever.
No Trace.
    Sophie wonders whether the house has any sort of special history. Simply being old in a new suburb is enough, but still she wonders. It doesn’t have the design of a farmhouse, and she can’t imagine it ever being surrounded by sheep. It’s made from large blocks of stone, the colour of the French mustard in the Deli section of the supermarket. Sophie imagines the blocks being manoeuvred into place, the extraordinary muscular sweat of the builders.
    There are other large houses on the hill, houses whose paintwork is barely dry, whose new brickishness is not yet softened by trees. Sophie barely glances at them, while she pushes Melissa’s stroller energetically towards her chosen one. She thinks of her house watching as the suburb rises to meet it, and says, in answer to her daughter’s questioning