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thank you.’
    â€˜I wonder if she’s vegetarian.’
    â€˜Of course she’s vego. She has dreadlocks.’
    â€˜It’s not the law.’
    â€˜It is. Dreadlocks, vego.’
    â€˜Maybe.’
    â€˜Mm. Goodnight.’
    â€˜Should I make the pilaf?’
    â€˜Lovely.’
    â€˜The banana curry?’
    â€˜Hmm.’
    â€˜I know, no protein. Vegos hate that.’
    Lotte gave a little sigh, a puff, as if she had sunk deep through leagues of ocean and landed on the sandy floor of sleep, towing her father behind her on the seaweed strings of dreams.
    â€˜What about the lima bean dish, but without the bacon?’
    Tom snored and Grace smiled. She was pretty sure a deal had just been struck.

    That night, Eddy breathed in a steam of peas and gravy, and watched his mother stab another slice of overcooked roast lamb and shake it off onto his plate. He nodded to his father’s offer of wine, a startlingly bohemian turn on the part of his parents in recent times, who had drunk beer or Coke with their meals forever, and then he picked up his knife and fork and assembled his most incredulous face.
    â€˜This looks fantastic , Mum!’
    Merle beamed. ‘Oh, phooey. It’s nothing.’ She flicked him one last potato quarter.
    Romy raised her knife and fork cautiously. She had two microwaved Sanitarium tofu burgers on her plate; the same as every time they went to Merle and Ray’s place for dinner. Merle must have a sack of them stashed in the deep freeze. To the side of that, Romy had four dry roast potato pieces, with no trace of the Gravox and chicken-fat gravy, and a tablespoonful of rehydrated peas. In addition, as if to acknowledge and apologise for her paltry understanding of what on earth a coeliac vegetarian did eat, Merle had added something new; a little flourish which might be an attempt to be a bit interesting, artistic. It appeared to be pineapple which had been sliced and then fried, in a mix of breadcrumbs. Or something. Eddy followed Romy’s stricken gaze and saw where it rested. Surely that could not be . . .
    Merle leaned between them, her kind eyes turning back and forth reassuringly. ‘Do you like pineapple, Romy? I just wanted to make you a little something . . .’
    â€˜Is that bacon?’ Romy poked at it with her knife. Ray rose across the table to join the examination, his face full of a sullen threat that was not directed at the plate.
    Merle nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s a Pacific dish. I got it from the Women’s Weekly cookbook, because you were talking about Pacific foods last time you came over, remember?’ Her tone turned instructional. ‘You just mix a bit of all-spice and a handful of bacon chips . . .’
    â€˜I don’t eat meat .’ Romy made the statement, its contents only too well known in this household, with apparent satisfaction. Gotcha. Nowhere did she cling to her vegetarian principles quite as firmly as in the home of her boyfriend’s parents. She had been known to scoff the odd sausage roll in the wee hours after a night of drinking; she would sometimes absently take a marinated drumstick from Eddy’s hands and gnaw off the crispy exterior as if she were in a trance-like state, as if eating your boyfriend’s meat would not count before a jury of the greatmeatless. But at the Plentys, her state of ecological, gastronomic purity was complete. Here in this suburban home of plastic plants and macramé owls, here she was as meat-free as the Dalai Lama.
    Merle’s horror was tidal, physical. She seized handfuls of her own face, she shrieked into her hands. The origins of bacon chips had obviously somewhere slipped off her radar, and she had recategorised them as a spice, or a flavouring, or something.
    â€˜Oh, darling! Oh, I’m so sorry! God, what was I thinking! Bacon chips! Bacon! Of course! Ray, I’m going crazy! Ray you sat and watched me cook this for Rommers, and it