‘I do not think you’ll drop him,’ he says now, in a resigned, I’ll-be-the-mature-one voice. ‘I do think you’re looking a bit pale.’

‘Thank you, but I’m fine.’ She doesn’t tell him about her headache. She wants him to go back to work. Maybe it will be easier without him there. She can stop worrying that he might notice she is all wrong as a mother. Perhaps the problem is just that she feels self-conscious.

‘I’ll make sure I can get the afternoon off for the funeral,’ says Callum.

‘Good,’ says Grace vaguely. She watches him stand up, stretch and go to leave the room, with his breakfast bowl still sitting on the table.

‘I’d better get dressed for work.’

‘Do you think you could put your plate in the sink?’

‘Sorry.’ He turns around and puts the bowl in the sink and conscientiously fills it with water.

She is still eating her toast. He puts one hand on her shoulder and she tilts her head and presses her cheek against his hand.

Jab, jab, truce! This, it seems, is marriage–or their marriage, anyway.

She has regained the high ground with the cereal bowl. He’d felt guilty, she can tell. He has been making a huge effort since the baby was born.

‘I’m Callum Tidyman,’ he had told her at the wedding, much later in the night, when they were all waiting outside the reception place for the bride and groom to hurry up and leave on their honeymoon. They just happened to be standing next to each other, thanks to some careful shuffling on Grace’s part. He was sweaty and messy from his dancing, his shirt coming out the back of his trousers.

He continued, ‘And I’m not.’

‘A tidy man?’

‘That’s right. I’m a slob. I’ve rebelled against my name.’

‘Yes, well that’s nothing to be proud of,’ she said sternly and flirtatiously, already noticing with interest that she was behaving differently than she did with other men.

Back then, she would never have believed it possible that they would one day have an operatic fight over a wet towel left on the bed, or that the sight of a breakfast bowl with a concrete-hard ring of leftover cereal could make her want to bash her head against a wall. Now, when she hears Callum perform his ‘tidy man’ joke for other people, her smile is a stiff grimace. Oh, ha, ha.

Of course, this whole tidiness issue has got out of hand since they moved into her mother’s house–her childhood home–on Scribbly Gum Island.

Even though her mother Laura is thousands of miles away, on a meticulously planned world trip, Grace can feel her presence in every domestic move that she makes. She finds herself holding glasses up to the light, squintily inspecting them for streaks. Every third day she pulls on long, yellow rubber gloves and gets down on her hands and knees to violently scrub the kitchen floor. ‘Feet,’ she says sharply to Callum whenever he walks in the door, and then waits for him to kick off his shoes with a bemused expression.

‘Do you think she’ll ground you if we leave a mark on the place?’ he asked her once, before the baby was born.

‘Oh, we’re leaving marks,’ said Grace. ‘I’ll be hearing about them for years to come.’

He said, ‘We don’t have to live here, you know. If it makes you unhappy.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Grace made herself laugh. ‘It would be stupid to pay rent when this place is sitting here.’

Grace and Callum are building their dream home in the Blue Mountains. ‘Building your dream home is a fast-track to divorce,’ one friend helpfully told them, just after they’d signed all the contracts. When Laura had offered her home on the island while she was away for a year it had been too good an offer to refuse. Grace was pregnant and she and Callum had been spending a lot of time at the kitchen table with a calculator, calculating how far they were in over their heads. It would have been madness to turn down Laura’s offer. It was such a normal, everyday thing for a mother to offer and a daughter to accept.

‘Fantastic,’ Callum had said.

‘Scribbly Gum isn’t the most convenient place to live,’ offered Grace.

‘Yes, but free,’ he’d said cheerfully. Things to do with family are simple and straightforward to Callum. There are no murky depths of unexplained feeling.

Grace can’t even explain to herself her resistance to accepting favours from her mother. After all, they are perfectly civil with each other these days. Sometimes they even laugh together, just for a few seconds, and then there is always an awkward silence–but still. In fact, they’d become so close to normal that at the airport seeing her off, Grace had almost said, ‘I’ll miss you’, but then she had a disconcerting memory of her mother’s face looking right through her, smiling slightly, humming a tune while thirteen-year-old Grace beat the insides of her wrists on the edge of the dining-room table and begged, ‘Please, Mum, can we please, please stop it now?’ So Grace hadn’t said, ‘I’ll miss you’, and her mother hadn’t said it either.

Callum, of course, had thought that living on Scribbly Gum Island would be a wonderful adventure, but then Callum thinks that anything new is a wonderful adventure, from trying a new brand of tomato sauce to having a baby.

‘Sleeping like a baby,’ he reports now when he comes back into the kitchen, looking unfamiliar and grown up, wearing a shirt and tie for the first time in two weeks. ‘You won’t hear from him for another two hours at least, I’d say.’

Watching him, Grace realises that Callum will actually miss the baby while he is at work. All his Daddy instincts have clicked so neatly into place, unlike her missing Mummy instincts.

‘Are you taking Vic?’ she asks.

‘You bet. It’s the only fun part of going back to work.’

When they first moved onto the island, Grace had shown Callum Laura’s little outboard motor boat.

‘What’s she called?’ he’d asked.

‘It’s just called the tinny,’ said Grace. ‘It’s not like a sailing boat.’

Callum had replied, ‘You can’t just call her the tinny, like she’s a can of beer. At least call her Victoria Bitter, after the world’s best beer. Vic for short.’

So now the old tinny was called Vic, and Grace feels an obscure sense of failure that she’d never thought to give it a name. It looks perkier now it has a name.