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reached over and poked him in the gut.
    “What’s this? Looks like flab, Dominic.”
    Tom loved calling him that too, just to piss him off.
    “Little shit,” his father said, holding his gut in and slapping his abs. “Watch this body. It’s what yours’ll look like one day.”
    “Mum noticed it from the kitchen,” Tom had lied, grinning. “She was like, ‘Check out that carcass, will ya!’”
    Before he could duck, his father had hooked him around the neck with his elbow and they struggled for a while. They were both killing themselves laughing and neither gave in. It was allowed toget as vicious as they wanted, without any repercussions, and thosedays it was the only physical contact they had with each other. Tom got the upper hand, but he knew he could lose it any moment.
    “She didn’t seem to have a problem with it last night,” his father managed between grunts when they hit the ground.
    Tom shoved him back and had tried not to choke at the idea of whatever his parents had got up to the night before. He’d just been given a reason to be in counseling for the rest of his life.
    Later, they carried the slab of timber onto the grass. He could tell the table was going to be beautiful and he could understand his father’s obsession with getting it right. They both stared at it for a moment. The smell of it, mingled with the silky oak and lavender in the backyard, made him smile.
    “Nice,” Tom said.
    “Getting there.”
    “Can I borrow fifty bucks?”
    He got the look.
    Tom laughed. “I can’t fit a job in between band and uni, and they pay peanuts for gigs these days.”
    “What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.
    “I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”
    “You know why that is?”
    “Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.
    “Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.”
    “Can’t I just ask you for fifty bucks and you be Marcel Marceau?”
    His father, the smart-arse, mimed out the handing of the money and they were both grinning again.
    “As long as I don’t have to chase you to pay it back.” He looked at Tom suspiciously. “What’s it for?”
    “Membership for the Young Libs.”
    “Yeah, very fucking funny.”
    Tom had laughed at the expression on his father’s face. “I’m wooing a girl.”
    He remembers seeing Tara that night and how he kissed her and how they ended up in Georgie’s attic. And how one week later they ended up going all the way in her parents’ house. Then his life became all about “after London” and now Tom’s taking those deep breaths, like the ones a counselor told him to take, because he thinks he can’t breathe. Until he sees it there in the in-box and his heart lifts: [email protected]. At thirteen and three quarters, as she persists in reminding everyone, Anabel’s news is limited to what their mum won’t let her do and the ongoing bitter battle with Trixie Pantalano, her nemesis, in a bid for top of the class for Year Eight, and someone called Ginger who fights her on everything to do with the social justice committee. But the soap opera she’s filming to document her life makes him laugh every time she sends him the next segment. The kid can do deadpan better than anyone he knows, better even than their father. In today’s episode, she’s sitting at Grandma Agnes’s table lamenting her life in a sonnet. She’s got the iambic pentameter down to perfection. He can hear the click of a computer in the background and imagines that his mother is holding the camera while she’s working on some legislation. He gets a