"They say it was a Chinaman invented the wheel," I said. I said it out of loyalty to Goon Tse Ying, but this is not the place to discuss Jack's attitude towards the coloured races.

"Is that so?"

"It is."

"And not a white man?"

"A Chinaman."

Jack shook his head. He found it hard to credit it. "Do you know his name?" he said.

"I don't," I said. "It was too long ago."

"I doubt a blackfellow could have managed it just the same. He'd be watching the snakes wheeling past and never give them a thought except eating them for his dinner. It was a wasted opportunity," he said. "If we'd had the wheel here we would be well ahead of Europe."

"If the blackfellow had the wheel," I said, "he'd have run rings around us."

"But you forget," Jack said, "that by the time we arrived we had the wheel ourselves, and gunpowder too."

"It was a Chinaman invented gunpowder," I said.

It was too much for Jack. He could not abide Chinamen, no matter what I told him. He sucked in his cheeks and blew them out. He kicked a jellyfish back into the water.

"Twist and giggle," he said, "turn and spin / Squirm and spit and grin / Just like a bally Chinaman / When someone pulls his string."

"There is no kinder soul on earth than the Chinaman," I said.

He narrowed his eyes a fraction and stared at me hard. By God he would have been a hard man in a fight, but he would never allow himself to get into one – he would always find a comfortable way to take in the most uncomfortable things.

"The poor little chap," he said. "Poor little fellow." I was Romulus and Remus to Jack, a poor little chap suckled on the tits of wolves.

Phoebe felt she had become invisible. She accompanied Jack and me to Belmont Common for flying lessons but no one spoke to her. She sat in the back seat and listened.

It never entered my head that she might want to fly. She expressed no interest. She said nothing. Sometimes I saw her listening with a little smile on her face. She made me flustered. I lost my train of thought.

She knew her father would never master the aeroplane, no matter how many lessons I gave him. He had even less feeling for it than he had for the Hispano Suiza. But she watched the circus silently, biding her time. Her father could never bring the stick down enough to land it. It was horrible to watch. The Farman floated in unsteadily, Jack in the front, Herbert in the back.

She could see me leaning forward and thumping her father in the middle of the back with my fist. She could hear me shouting, "Push it down, down, down." But nothing would persuade Jack to push the stick down towards the looming earth.

She visited Annette but they both made each other irritated. They bickered and fought. Her mother, once so concerned about the quantity of balls Phoebe attended, the parties she was invited to, and the friends she had, no longer seemed to worry. She made up her Christmas parcels for the orphanages, put money in envelopes for the men at the Ainsley Home, and fussed about with Herbert's socks.

For Phoebe the days over Christmas passed in a strange daze. Sometimes she felt so tense that she wanted to scratch her face until it bled but sometimes the feeling turned a degree or two and then what had been pain became pleasure. And in between those two extremes she spent whole days in a distracted state, a sort of mental itch that did not let her pay attention to anything or anyone.

She went to a few parties around Christmas (I watched her go, hopeless with lust and jealousy). She had her feet stood on by the sons of Western District graziers, two of whom proposed to her.

She hid amongst the throngs of bathers on Eastern Beach and burnt her creamy skin, perhaps deliberately. No one reprimanded her. She shed her ruined skin with fascination and did not answer desperate letters from poor Annette who spent her Christmas in a rejected lover's hell.

Phoebe did not speak to the person whose image remained continually in her mind's eye. She would not even ask him to pass the bread. She ignored him at bedtime and would not even say good night. She was reprimanded for her rudeness. She shed her skin in a bedroom curtained from the February heat, and waited.

It is time to deal with the neighbours and I am like Goon Tse Ying, capable of becoming invisible, sliding under doors, lifting rugs from floors on windless nights. I get a dirty pleasure sifting through their private cupboards amongst the dust and fluff and paper-dry conversations. I push my invisible nose deep into the sheets of beds and breathe in the odours of their unheard farts.

There were so many ways the McGraths had upset the upper crust in Western Avenue. The offences were as numberless as flies and even Mrs Kentwell had given up on counting them.

For a start: the yellowbrick garage Jack had built in the middle of the lawn. He had built it himself, but not too well. It was as blunt and as useful as a cow bail and two deep wheel ruts ran towards it, not neatly, for there were places where the Hispano Suiza had been bogged and other marks made by horses called to pull it out.

There was also what was known locally as "The Wall". The function of this redbrick wall which ran from the garage to almost the middle point of the house (it arrived opposite the big windows of the music room) was to protect Molly's flower beds from the winds that howled off Corio Bay. This function was not obvious to the Kentwells, the Jones-Burtons and the Devonishes who met to discuss each new offence, and if they had known it would have made no difference. They had no sympathy with Jack's bush-carpenter's approach to aesthetics.

The McGrath mansion had been built in 1863 and was originally called "Wirralee". This name had been incorporated in a leadlight window above the front door. They had seen Jack McGrath remove this window one afternoon in 1917. Mrs Kentwell saw it first.

"He has the ladder out," she told Alice Jones-Burton.

The two women put their hats on and plunged their hatpins home. They strolled along the promenade like policemen on the beat and on October 25th, 1917, shortly before noon, they witnessed the man with the binding-twine belt remove the"Wirralee" and replace it with a plain piece of glass on which a single cloverleaf had been sandblasted.

To understand the effect this had on the two ladies you have to remember that there was a big fuss going on about military conscription for the Great War, that the Catholics were against conscription, and what's more they were winning. On November 1st, 1917, the last attempt to introduce conscription would fail. In this heated climate a cloverleaf might easily be seen to be a shamrock, and the two ladies declared the McGraths not only traitorous, not only tasteless, but also Catholic.

If Jack had known all this he would have been terribly upset. He didn't like Catholics much more than he liked Chinese, although in the case of Catholics he would always say it was not the Catholic people he objected to but the religion and the priests particularly who "swig down all the altar wine themselves, and not a drop for the rest of them". He never knew that Molly was a Catholic, was still a Catholic, and had risked her soul by marrying him in a Protestant church in Point's Point.

Jack put the cloverleaf above his door because he was bored and because he was lucky.

There were no end of offences. The presence of Herbert Badgery Esquire was an offence. My Gentleman's Stroll did not impress Mrs Kentwell at all. She peered at me from behind fence or curtain and judged me a sharp character and a ruffian.

Western Avenue, she said, was on its way to being a slum, and when she saw the swagman arrive early one morning she knew her fears were well founded. She found it impossible to convey to her allies the true nature of this character. For when she referred to him as a swagman and they nodded their heads she knew she had not painted a proper picture of this grotesque.