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cares?’
    There was nothing to be said to this, though Marlo, in a perfect world, might have quoted The Female Eunuch . From the kitchen came bellowings (Sandy Campbell’s), murmurs (Doug’s), clatterings, clumpings, and the clink-clink of bottles. Auntie Noreen, drawing up her huge round-shouldered form a little, smiled as if captured by a pleasant memory.
    ‘Aunt, what did he mean about tomorrow?’ Marlo ventured. ‘The shop – why should I be in the shop?’
    But Auntie Noreen had applied herself to the tea table again, hovering between the remaining cream horn and the remaining vanilla slice in an agony that was no agony at all, since, with the swiftness of a buzzard alighting on a carcass, she transferred both to her plate. For so prodigal a mouth, Auntie Noreen’s was surprisingly small, a puckering purplish circle that sooner or later made most people think of an anal sphincter. ‘Thought I’d put you in the spare room, Marlene,’ the sphincter was saying. ‘You’re oldest, after all. Helen can go in the sleepout at the back.’
    ‘We’ve always had the same room.’ Skip thought sadly of the old house in Glenelg and their room above the garage. Caper’s flat, too small for them all, was far away down concrete steps and along a weedy path. She and Marlo had lived in a world of their own, one she never wanted to leave. On the walls Marlo hung foxed engravings, found in a junk shop on Jetty Road, of famous women writers: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Skip loved lying in bed at night with Marlo close by. Beside the garage, a Norfolk pine creaked in the wind; from further off came the gentle hiss and splash of the sea.
    ‘Your sister needs her privacy,’ Auntie Noreen was saying. ‘She’s growing up. I’ll bet she thinks about nothing but boys and make-up, eh, Helen? I suppose she’s got crushes on all the hit-parade stars. Does she drive you mad, mooning over them all day? Who’s her favourite – Johnny Farnham?’
    ‘We hate Johnny Farnham,’ Skip snapped.
    ‘Don’t reckon your sister does,’ leered Auntie Noreen, and took an oozing bite of cream horn. ‘Yairs, I know yous girls are going to love it here,’ she carried on. ‘After all, it’s your home now.’
    ‘Only for a few weeks,’ said Skip.
    ‘Weeks? I shouldn’t think so. I admit it’s a stretch for me, taking on yous girls. Not as young as I used to be. And it’s not as if I don’t have enough to worry about with me poor boy away, doing his bit for Queen and Country.’ Auntie Noreen gazed fondly at the mantelpiece, from where the young soldier stared back at her with a dutiful air.
    ‘Your son?’ said Skip. ‘You’ve a son?’
    ‘What, your mother never even told you that? That’s your cousin Barry – Barry Puce!’
    ‘He’s in Vietnam?’ said Marlo.
    ‘Aren’t you angry they sent him away?’ Skip asked.
    ‘Why should I be angry?’
    ‘They sent him to die in an unjust war.’
    Auntie Noreen blinked at her niece. Colour rose in her bloated face. ‘Now listen here, missy, I’m not having commie talk in my house. My Dougie did his bit in the last show – five years slogging through the jungle, gooks to the right of him, gooks to the left – and now it’s Baz’s turn. Make a man of him, it will.’
    Warningly, Marlo placed a hand on Skip’s arm, but Skip could not restrain herself. ‘If he were a man, he’d refuse to fight. He’d resist imperialist aggression. The Vietnamese are entitled to self-determination. They’re fighting for their freedom.’ She knew all the phrases: hadn’t she heard them enough from Caper, from Karen Jane? She’d heard them from Marlo too, and was disappointed that her sister sat there shaking her head as if to say: Stop.
    Auntie Noreen’s toad-neck swelled. ‘Vietnamese? Why the Yanks don’t just drop a big one on all those slitty-eyed Wongs and be done with it, I don’t know. I see one young lady’s got a lot to learn,’ she said,revealing