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weren’t prejudiced or anything but they didn’t think they would risk it themselves.
    â€˜Darling,’ Mum says. ‘I’ve just told you. It’s not age that’s the problem.’
    â€˜What, then?’
    â€˜Well, you and Philip are never really together, for a start.’
    â€˜We are. We spend all our holidays together.’
    â€˜Holidays,’ she says.
    â€˜And I’ve been to Canberra twice. Three times, in fact.’
    â€˜Three times in two years?’
    This is Philip’s second year in Canberra. You can only do Forestry at ANU or Melbourne Uni, and he went to Canberra so we could be closer and he could come home sometimes at weekends. And he did for the first three months, nearly every weekend, then the work got harder and he had to play sport for his college, and they had drama and things where they could only practise on the weekends. And I understood all that, because I had things at school too, but still.
    â€˜I only went three times,’ I told her, ‘because you wouldn’t let me go more often.’
    â€˜What did you expect me to do? You were only just sixteen, you had your life here. Your school, your work, your family.’
    â€˜Maybe if I’d gone more often, we wouldn’t have split up.’
    â€˜That’s not true, Laura, and you know it. If people live apart and they’re surrounded by other people –’
    â€˜Their own age, you mean?’
    â€˜Yes, their own age.’
    â€˜See!’
    â€˜And their own interests,’ she says. ‘Especially when they’re living together in a college, day in day out.’
    â€˜He was sleeping with her while he was still sleeping with me.’
    â€˜Oh, darling,’ Mum says – and she doesn’t say it’s wrong or anything, as you’d expect. ‘I know how much it hurts,’ she says instead.
    â€˜How could you?’
    â€˜You think I never went through this?’
    â€˜You ?’
    â€˜It’s as if,’ she says, ‘your whole world has come to an end.’
    Sometimes – with mothers – you don’t know whether to be more amazed or embarrassed. And you want to hear more, and you don’t. Or you do, but only in the way Katie wants to know. Katie’s my little sister and she’s eight, and at that age you want to hear about your parents’ marriage if, say, you’re looking at the photo album and can’t believe how stupid everyone looks, especially Philip who’s wearing the dorkiest suit and tie. And it’s okay then to ask, how did he propose and what did he say, and what did you, but not about love affairs with other boys, or even men – your own mother ! – especially when you get older and are seventeen, like I am now. The last thing you want to hear about then is your mother going out with someone when she was seventeen and breaking up with them and her whole world coming to an end, and yuk. It’s obscene, the whole thing.
    â€˜Have you told Toni yet?’ Mum says.
    â€˜Not yet.’
    â€˜Shouldn’t you?’
    â€˜It’s none of her business.’
    â€˜It might help.’
    â€˜It won’t. She’ll only be sympathetic, and things.’
    â€˜Like me?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜And you don’t want that,’ she says. ‘You want to blame everyone and everything, and have them feel the same pain as you.’
    â€˜That’s just stupid,’ I tell her.
    And it is stupid, mothers can be so dumb sometimes, it’s amazing how they ever brought you up. And they’re so smug about it, and keep talking about how time heals and how you’ll see things differently and how you’ll even laugh about it in years to come, and that’s when I go totally hormonal because I know what Mum and Philip are doing, shaking their heads in their bedroom, and laughing and being sympathetic and that, and saying they’re feeling for me but