There was no such thing as a good divorce for children. She’d read that somewhere, just a few weeks ago, before all this. Even when the split was perfectly amicable, even when both parents made a huge effort, the children suffered.

Worse than twins, her mother had said. Maybe she was right.

Tess threw back the covers and got out of bed. She needed to go somewhere; to get out of this house and away from her thoughts. Will. Felicity. Liam. Will. Felicity. Liam.

She would get in her mother’s car and drive. She looked down at her striped pyjama pants and T-shirt. Should she get dressed? She had nothing to wear anyway. She hadn’t brought enough clothes with her. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t get out of the car. She put on a pair of flat shoes and crept out of the room and down the hallway, her eyes adjusting to the dark. The house was silent. She switched on a lamp in the dining room and left a note for her mother just in case she woke.

She grabbed her wallet, took her mother’s car keys from the hook beside the door and crept out into the soft, sweet night air, breathing in deeply.

She drove her mother’s Honda along the Pacific Highway with the windows open and the radio turned off. Sydney’s North Shore was quiet, deserted. A man carrying a briefcase, who must have caught the train home after working late, hurried along the footpath.

A woman probably wouldn’t walk home alone from the station at this time of night. Tess thought about how Will had once told her that he hated walking behind a woman late at night in case she heard his footsteps and thought he was an axe murderer. ‘I always want to call out, “It’s all right! I’m not an axe murderer!”’ he’d said. ‘I’d run for my life if someone called that out to me,’ Tess had told him. ‘See, we can’t win,’ he’d said.

Whenever something bad happened on the North Shore, the newspapers described it as ‘Sydney’s leafy North Shore’ so it would sound extra heinous.

Tess stopped at a traffic light, glanced down and saw the red warning light on the petrol gauge.

‘Dammit,’ she said.

There was a brightly lit all-night service station on the next corner. She’d stop there. She pulled in and got out. It was deserted, except for a man on a motorbike on the other side of the forecourt, readjusting his helmet after filling up.

She opened the petrol tank and lifted the nozzle from its slot.

‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice.

She jumped, and spun around. The man had wheeled his motorbike over, so he was on the other side of her car. He lifted his helmet. The petrol station’s bright lights were shining in her eyes, blurring her vision. She couldn’t distinguish his features, just a creepy white blob of a face.

Her eyes went to the empty counter inside the service station. Where was the damned attendant? Tess put her arm protectively across her braless chest. She thought of an episode of Oprah she’d seen with Felicity where a policeman advised women what to do if they were ever accosted. You had to be extremely aggressive and shout something like, ‘No! Go away! I don’t want trouble! Go! Go!’ For a while she and Felicity had taken great pleasure in yelling it at Will whenever he walked into a room.

Tess cleared her throat and clenched her fists as if she was doing one of her Body Combat classes. It would be so much easier to be aggressive if she was wearing a bra.

‘Tess,’ said the man. ‘It’s just me. Connor. Connor Whitby.’

chapter sixteen

Rachel woke from a dream that dissolved before she could catch it. All she could remember was panic. Something to do with water. Janie when she was a little girl. Or was it Jacob?

She sat up in bed and looked at the clock. It was one-thirty am. The house smelled of sickly vanilla.

Her mouth felt dry from the alcohol she’d drunk at the Tupperware party. It seemed like years had passed since then, not hours. She got out of bed. No point trying to get back to sleep now. She would be up until the grey light of dawn crept through the house.

Moments later she had the ironing board set up and was using her remote to switch channels on the TV. There was nothing worth watching.

She went instead to the cupboard under the TV where she kept all her video cassettes. Her old VCR was still set up so she could watch her old collection of movies. ‘Mum, all these movies of yours are on DVD now,’ Rob kept telling her worriedly, as if it were somehow illegal to still use a VCR. She ran her finger along the spines of the video cassettes, but she wasn’t in the mood for Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn or even Cary Grant.

She pulled cassettes out willy-nilly and came upon one with a blank spine covered in handwriting: hers, Ed’s, Janie’s and Rob’s. They’d crossed out shows as they’d recorded over each one. The children of today would probably consider this tape an ancient relic. Didn’t they just ‘download’ shows now? She went to toss the tape aside and got distracted looking at the names of the shows they used to watch in the eighties: The Sullivans, A Country Practice, Sons and Daughters. It looked like Janie had been the last one to use it. Sons and Daughters, she’d written in her scratchy, scrawly handwriting.

Funny. It was thanks to Sons and Daughters that she’d won the quiz tonight. She remembered Janie lying on the living-room floor, transfixed by the silly show, singing along to the maudlin theme song. How did it go? Rachel could almost hear the tune in her head.

On impulse, she stuck the cassette into the recorder and pressed play.

She sat back on her haunches and watched the end of a margarine ad, with that comical, dated look and sound of old TV commercials. Then Sons and Daughters began. Rachel sang along in her head, amazed to find that all the words could be retrieved from her unconscious. There was Pat the Rat, younger and more attractive than Rachel had remembered. The tortured face of the male lead appeared on the screen, frowning deeply. He was still on TV, starring in some police-rescue show. Everyone’s lives had gone on. Even the lives of the stars of Sons and Daughters. Poor Janie was the only one stuck forever in 1984.

She went to press eject when she heard Janie’s voice say, ‘Is it on?’

Rachel’s heart stopped. Her hand froze midair.

Janie’s face filled the screen, peering straight at the camera with a gleeful, cheeky expression. She was wearing green eyeliner and too much mascara. There was a small pimple on the side of her nose. Rachel thought she knew her daughter’s face by heart, but she’d forgotten things she hadn’t known she’d forgotten – like the exact reality of Janie’s teeth and Janie’s nose. There was nothing particularly amazing about Janie’s teeth and Janie’s nose, except that they were Janie’s, and there they were again. Her left eyetooth turned in just slightly. Her nose was a fraction too long. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, she was beautiful, even more beautiful than Rachel remembered.

They’d never had a home video recorder. Ed didn’t think they were worth the money. The only footage they had of Janie alive was from a friend’s wedding, where Janie had been the flower girl.

‘Janie.’ Rachel put her hand to the television screen.

‘You’re standing too close to the camera,’ said a boy’s voice.

Rachel dropped her hand.

Janie moved back. She was wearing high-waisted blue jeans, with a metallic silver belt and a long-sleeved purple top. Rachel remembered ironing that purple top. The sleeves were tricky, with a complicated arrangement of pleats.

Janie was truly beautiful, like a delicate bird, a heron perhaps, but good lord, had the child really been that thin? Her arms and legs were so spindly. Had there been something wrong with her? Did she have anorexia? How had Rachel not noticed?