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practice.’
    He rolled his eyes and snorted. ‘Proper practice. Not ten minutes shitting myself in peak-hour traffic.’
    We were built to the same genetic design but Red was half a head taller and two shoe sizes up. And when he was exasperated he was every inch his mother, Wendy.
    â€˜You sure?’ I said. ‘It all adds up.’
    â€˜Shut up and drive,’ he said. ‘I’m starving.’
    He’d had his learner’s permit for three months and he knew the basics, but it’d take more than an occasional innercity shuffle to clock up the hundred hours recommended by the Transport Accident Commission. He’d need a few decent runs up the freeway, some night driving, a bit of wet-weather work, the odd long haul. It wasn’t going to happen tonight.
    â€˜Suit yourself,’ I said. ‘Can’t say I didn’t offer.’
    I moved into the traffic flow and turned at the corner where the Carters’ Arms Hotel had once stood. The spot was now occupied by Papa Giovanni’s Pizza and a branch of the Bank of Cyprus. In the olden days, back when I was younger than Red, my father was the licensee at the Carters’. We lived upstairs, hotel-keeping then being a family business. A peripatetic one, in our case, my father being my father.
    A crawl-line of tail-lights stretched ahead. I dodged down the first side street, opting for the longer but less congested route. The dusk had taken a Turnerish turn, the clouds tinged with pink, the fresh-lit lamps of the outspread suburbs glinting in the gloaming, flecks of mica in a slurry of wet sand. In the far distance, the Dandenongs were a low bulge blurring into the horizon. There was a damp chill in the air, harbinger of the encroaching winter.
    â€˜Payday, eh?’ I said, slowing for a speed bump.
    â€˜Uh-huh,’ he nodded. ‘$81.60, after tax.’
    I extracted four twenties from my shirt pocket. The supermarket job was Red’s idea, a token of his commitment to self-reliance and financial independence. But his wages, notionally earmarked to buy a car, tended to get frittered on six-packs, taxi fares and mobile phone top-ups. Still, the gesture was laudable, parentally speaking, so I matched his earnings dollar for dollar.
    â€˜Don’t drink it all at once,’ I said.
    We hit Heidelberg Road, crossed the Merri Creek bridge and turned down a short cul-de-sac abutting the parkland leading down to the Yarra.
    The neighbourhood dated from the beginning of the century, built to cater for the Edwardian petit bourgeoisie. From its neat brick maisonettes and double-storey terraces, shopkeepers and artisans who had risen above the proletarian morass of nearby Collingwood could turn their aspirations towards the big houses across the river, the boom-era mansions of Kew.
    Our place was a single-storey duplex, half of a matched pair. Its interior had been considerably remodelled over the years but the original façade remained intact, complete with a fretwork arch above the front door and leadlight magpies in the windows.
    It was smaller than the house in Thornbury I’d bought with Lyndal not long after my election to parliament. But with Lyndal gone, the Thornbury place felt like an empty shell, an echoing reminder of her and the child she was carrying when she was killed.
    Over time, my rage had burned itself out. I’d learned to live with my grief, to mourn and to move on.
    Or at least to move house. So what if Clifton Hill was outside the boundaries of Melbourne Upper where, convention dictated, I ought to reside among my constituents? Such scrupulousness was more honoured in the breach these days, and Clifton Hill was only a spit and a piddle from the electorate anyway. More to the point, it was very convenient for Red, what with the network of bike paths just beyond the back gate, the railway station and the bus to school a few minutes’ walk away.
    Not that he’d need bike paths and public