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?

Janie sat down on the edge of a single bed. She was in a room Rachel had never seen before. The bed had a striped red and blue bedspread. The walls behind were dark brown wood panelling. Janie lowered her chin and looked up at the camera with a mock serious face while she lifted a pencil to her mouth as if it were a microphone.

Rachel laughed out loud and clasped her hands together as if in prayer. She’d forgotten that too. How could she have forgotten it? Janie used to pretend to be a reporter at the oddest times. She’d come into the kitchen, pick up a carrot and say, ‘Tell me, Mrs Rachel Crowley, how was your day today? Ordinary? Extraordinary?’ And then she’d hold the carrot in front of Rachel and Rachel would lean in close to the carrot and say, ‘Ordinary.’

Of course she said ordinary. Her days were always so very ordinary.

‘Good evening, I’m Janie Crowley reporting live from Turramurra where I’m interviewing a reclusive young man by the name of Connor Whitby.’

Rachel caught her breath. She turned her head and the word ‘Ed’ caught in the back of her throat. Ed. Come. You must see this. It had been years since she’d done that.

Janie spoke into the pencil again. ‘If you could just scoot a little closer, Mr Whitby, so my viewers can see you.’

‘Janie.’

‘Connor,’ Janie imitated his tone.

A broad-chested, dark-haired boy wearing a yellow and blue striped rugby shirt and shorts slid over on the bed until he was sitting next to Janie. He glanced at the camera and looked away again, uncomfortably, as if he could see Janie’s mother thirty years in the future, watching them.

Connor had the body of a man and the face of a boy. Rachel could see a smattering of pimples across his forehead. He had that starved, frightened, sullen look you saw on so many teenager boys. It was as if they needed to both punch a wall and be cuddled. The Connor of thirty years ago didn’t inhabit his body in the comfortable way he did now. He didn’t know what to do with his limbs. He flung his legs out in front of him and tapped one open palm softly against his closed fist.