“Have you got a problem with me being here?” said Ella.

“What? No, of course not.”

It was the Family Talent Night at Frannie’s retirement village. They were in a wooden-floored hall with glowing red heaters mounted up high along the sides of the room, radiating an intense heat that was making all the visitors peel off cardigans and coats. There were rows of plastic chairs set up in a semicircle in front of a stage with a single microphone looking somehow pathetic in front of fraying red velvet curtains. Underneath the stage was a neat line of walkers of varying sizes, some with ribbons around them to differentiate them, like luggage at the airport.

Along the side of the hall were long trestle tables with white tablecloths laid with urns, tall stacks of Styrofoam cups, and paper plates of egg sandwiches, lamingtons, and pikelets with jam and blobs of cream melting in the heat.

The front rows of chairs were already occupied by village residents. Tiny wizened old ladies with brooches pinned to their best dresses, bent old men with hair carefully combed across spotted scalps, ties knotted beneath V-necked jumpers. The old people didn’t seem to feel the heat.

Alice could see Frannie sitting right in the center row, engaged in what looked like a rather heated conversation with a grinning white-haired man who stood out because he was wearing a shiny polka-dot vest over a white shirt.

“Actually,” said Ella, finally managing to wrench Billy out of Alice’s arms, “it was your mother who rang and asked us to come. She said Dad had stage fright about this performance, which I find hard to believe, but still. The others all refused to come.”

How strange for Barb to ring up Nick’s sisters and actually ask them to do something, as if they were equals.

Alice caught herself.

Well, of course they were equals. What a strange thing to think.

But then, really, deep down (or maybe not even that deep down) she’d always thought of her own family as inferior to Nick’s.

The Love family was from the eastern suburbs. “I rarely cross the Bridge,” Nick’s mother had once told Alice. She sometimes went to the opera on a Friday night, in the same way that Alice’s mother might pop along to Trivia Night at the church hall on a Friday night (and maybe win a meat tray or a fruit box!). The Love family knew people. Important people, like MPs and actresses, doctors and lawyers, and people with names you felt you should know. They were Anglicans and went to church only at Christmas, languidly, as if it were a rather charming little event. Nick and his sisters went to private schools and Sydney Uni. They knew the best bars and the right restaurants. It was sort of like they owned Sydney.

Whereas Alice’s family was from the stodgy northwest, home to happy clappy Christians, middle managers, CPAs, and conveyancers. Alice’s mother rarely crossed the Bridge either, but that was because she didn’t know her way around the city. Catching the train into town was a big event. Alice and Elisabeth went to local Catholic girls’ schools, where the students were expected to become nurses and teachers, not doctors and lawyers. They went to church every Sunday, and local kids played the guitar while the congregation sang along in thin, reedy voices, following the words projected up on the wall above Father’s bald head while the light from the stainedglass windows reflected off his glasses. Alice had often thought it would have been preferable to come from the proper western suburbs. That way she could have been a gritty, tough-talking westie chick. Maybe she would have had a tattoo on her ankle. Or, if only her parents could have been immigrants, with accents. Alice could have been bilingual and her mother could have made her own pasta. Instead, they were just the plain old suburban Jones family. As bland as Weet-Bix.

Until Nick came along and made her feel interesting and exotic.

“So what do you actually confess at confession?” he’d asked once. “Are you allowed to tell?” He’d looked at pictures of Alice in her pleated Catholicschool uniform hanging well past her knees and said into her ear, “I am crazy with lust right now.” He’d sat on Alice’s mother’s floral couch, with a square brown coffee table next to him (the biggest one from the “nest” of coffee tables) with an embroidered doily on top, eating a thickly buttered piece of bun with bright-pink icing and drinking his tea, and said, “When was this house built?” As if their red-brick bungalow deserved such a respectful question! “Nineteen sixty-five,” said Barb. “We paid twelve thousand pounds for it.” Alice had never known that! Nick had given their house a history. He’d nodded along, making some comment about the light fittings, and he was exactly the same as when he was sitting at his mother’s antique dining room table, eating fresh figs and goat cheese and drinking champagne. Alice had felt faint with adoration.

“Will we sit with Daddy when he gets here?” Olivia tugged at Alice’s sleeve. “Will you two sit together? So when I’m dancing, you can say to each other, ‘Oh, that’s our darling daughter. How proud we are!’”

Olivia was dressed in a leotard with a frothy tulle skirt and ballet slippers, ready for her performance. Alice had done her makeup for her, although according to Olivia she hadn’t applied nearly enough.

“Of course we’ll sit together,” said Alice.

“You are the most embarrassing person alive, Olivia,” said Madison.

“No, she’s not,” said Ella, hugging Olivia to her, and then she pulled at the hem of Madison’s long-sleeved dark red top. “That top looks gorgeous on you. I knew it would.”