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badly. As a house guest, she was fidgety and unpleasable. From the height of her own motherhood, Stephanie was coming to understand that after the divorce her mother had painfully built a life for herself. It was admirable; many abandoned wives of that generation recited a daily litany of resentments and dedicated their lives to trashing men. Her mother had swallowed pain and waged war on hardship with a show of smiling serenity. She had painted a bright facade on her shame and presented it with such conviction that when another man had appeared he had taken her at face value as an elegant, independent woman; so there she stayed, petrified in competence. Only her daughters knew how fragile she was, how thin her veneer of calm. Her second marriage was a support to which she was clinging in terror. Sometimes Stephanie felt that her daughters reminded her of her dark years.
    She made food for Max. She talked to him, her hollow happy words falling into the silence like water from a fountain. The sun poured over the table-top. The buds of her Souvenir de la Malmaison were blushing and swelling. Time is vague to a five-year-old, a long time could be two days or two weeks. He would never know about this. Stewart would be home before the time when it would be necessary to tell Max anything. It seemed wrong to be forced to make this monstrous calculation. The whole thing seemed wrong.
    â€˜Ted – Chester.’
    In the corner of Ted’s office stood a tree in a tub, a tree which was meant to be living but had died. Its shrivelled brown leaves rustled spookily in the current from the air-conditioning vent. Ted swung around in his chair to get the miserable sight out of his eyeline. ‘Chester!’ He responded with maximum cheer.
    â€˜Ted, people here are looking at a site on the Thirty-four extension past Whitbridge. Adam’ll fill you in – it’s between two little places, Butterstream and …’ there was a pause and a crackle on the line, ‘Strankley. There could be something out there for us.’
    â€˜Got you. I’ll take a look.’
    About a year earlier, the BSD had stopped saying ‘our people’ when referring to the site acquisition division of Magno; it became ‘people here’. At the same time, he started to talk about ‘us’. Ted anticipated the day that Chester would say ‘my people’and mean Tudor Homes. BSD was Adam’s name for his boss. He had told Ted it was an old Afrikaaner acronym for Big Swinging Dick.
    Ted keyed ‘Butterstream, 34X past Whitbridge’into his notebook and felt a tremor of premonition. Chester had nominated a notorious region. The extension of the 34 past Whitbridge had mired the Department of Transport in a public enquiry into the highway’s route across an area known as Strankley Ridge.
    Ted folded his arms and sat on the edge of his desk. He had three things on the walls of his office: a large abstract painting selected by the suite’s decorator, forty-two brightly coloured rectangles in lines on a white ground; the original 1910 advertisment for homes in Maple Grove; and a map. On the map he traced the 34, which branched west from the city’s orbital highway north of the 31. The 34 ought to have run in a straight line to meet the 52, leading due south from the Coffin. Instead it kinked southwards, as if avoiding the horror ahead.
    Geographers first called the imploded industrial conurbation of five towns grouped along the coal seams and canals of the northwest the Coffin. It was a good name for a feature which was coffin-shaped, and distinguished by exhausted fuel, redundant industry and mass unemployment. People said a young man leaving school in the Coffin had a 60 per cent chance of remaining unemployed all his life.
    The Transport Department wanted to extend the 34 logically to meet the 52 running south from the Coffin, through smiling irrelevant farmland, thousands of pointless pigs, millions