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Geoff’s death, Margaret was giving a birthday party. For her dead husband, in Rundle. Mandy, of course, was out of the country (he sent out another spiral of resentment towards her for this), and so Cathy and her new boyfriend Dave, and Stephen and Fiona and the girls—whom Margaret had assiduously tried to fashion mentally into her own grandchildren, despite the fact they didn’t know her name and wouldn’t recognise her in a photograph—must be there.
    It was months ago that Cathy bailed Stephen up about this. She had cornered him, and he had agreed. She made him promise. But everything had changed. Cathy didn’t know; nobody but he knew that after today there wouldn’t be any Fiona-and-the-girls to bring.
    He felt a panicked flare of fury towards his mother. He could imagine the invitation list, the dwindling set of his mother’s small-town friends boasting of their grandchildren and sons-and-daughters-in-law. He saw his mother’s urgent logic: she must work quickly, this state of affairs could only last so long before Stephen ruined it by losing another girlfriend. He was In A Relationship—it was an endangered condition, must be captured, preserved.
    But it was too late.
    â€˜We’ll see, Mum,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘I don’t know though, actually. I don’t know if we can make it after all.’
    â€˜Oh, Stephen!’ Margaret cried. ‘I emailed you, and texted, and you promised Cathy, you said you would !’
    He didn’t say anything. He heard her breathing.
    â€˜I don’t think I have ever asked you for very much,’ she said in a small voice.
    Oh, there it was. A final push of mutiny rose in him. He stood and looked around for his shoes.
    â€˜I think you should buy the television,’ he said flatly.
    She was silent. Was she crying? He strained to listen. In the long moment of her silence he heard the disappointment he had always been to her, and the vain effort she had always made to hide it. His resolve faltered.
    â€˜I’ll let you know,’ he muttered. ‘Fiona can’t make it but I might be able to sort something out.’
    She would know he was lying.
    â€˜Okay?’ he said, more gently. More silence. Well, fuck her then. He said curtly, ‘I have to go to work.’
    Margaret spoke at last, haughty and wounded. ‘Well. Thank you very much, Stephen.’
    Sarcasm did not come naturally to her; her bald attempt at it clutched at him. He began to speak but Margaret interrupted, quite coldly now, that she had the tennis newsletter to do and—with emphasis—she didn’t want to hold him up . She hung up.
    Stephen punched the telephone handset into the bedclothes and lay back again, groaning fuck and shit . He hated this obnoxious need of his mother’s for him to be improved, her years of cautious hinting that he could do better if he only tried. Her phases of sending him job advertisements cut out from the newspaper had evolved, of course, into sending him links.
    â€˜You’ve got a lovely mind,’ she wrote in one email a year ago. ‘We just wish you would use it.’ We , as if she was still talking about his father. Who else was meant by we? It was insulting. He replied with four words. I use my mind .
    But then, almost as soon as Stephen began seeing Fiona—even despite the strained familial complications—it seemed Margaret had decided this fact was achievement enough. She had adjusted her expectations of him so far downward over the years that even Fiona’s children by another man could somehow be counted as an accomplishment of Stephen’s. Margaret showed photographs of Ella and Larry to her friends—Stephen winced in shame and pity—as if they were her own grandchildren.
    He sat up, and now turned his blame to Cathy. She had, without protest, accepted their mother’s pretences about the stupid fucking party. She knew it was nothing