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And then there was Gemma.

She was the black sheep her family had to have. There was no way she would ever reach the dizzy heights Ben had scaled. Not that she wasn't smart enough; she was smart enough to know that she didn't want to throw another log on the bonfire of their vanities. And she set about making it her life's purpose to prove it. She was asked to leave a couple of the best ladies' colleges, and
finally was forcibly removed from another. She experimented with alcohol, drugs and sex, had brushes with the law, moved out of home at the tender age of fifteen with the first in what would prove to be a long line of no-hoper boyfriends, only to return after a couple of months and start the hoopla all over again. All the while Gemma seemed to take strange delight in watching her parents squirm and blanch as they continued to make every excuse under the sun for her. They were always there to pick up the pieces, or more correctly pick up the tab, paying her debts and her fines while continuing to finance her increasingly hedonistic lifestyle. It became almost a sport for Gemma: she really wanted to see if she could break them. When would they say enough was enough? Apparently never. They were either idiots, or, worse, what Gemma secretly suspected and even quietly feared, throwing money at her was easier than trying to have a meaningful relationship with the person she really was.

Of course she absolutely ruined things for poor Phoebe. The reins were wound in so tight around her younger sister she could barely sneeze without her parents knowing about it. But somehow Phee managed to survive pretty much intact while keeping everyone happy, which appeared to be Phoebe's specialty. She was school captain and dux, while excelling equally in sport and music, later graduating from university with first-class honours in law. Gemma didn't know how she did it all with such grace.

‘You have to learn to work with them,' Phoebe used to tell her, ‘not against them. They're not trying to control your life; they just want you to be happy.'

‘I am happy,' Gemma always insisted. ‘Very happy.'

‘But couldn't you try being happy in a way that would make them happy too?'

Gemma doubted it. She sometimes felt as though she'd landed from Mars into this strange family where she just didn't fit. She knew she wasn't what they hoped her to be. Despite all their protestations, her parents expected their children to fulfil their own hopes and dreams. And Gemma was not going to give them the satisfaction.

The prospect of another grandchild would be too much for her mother to ignore. Her need to take over would consume
her; but Gemma hadn't even decided what she was going to do yet – only that she would go ahead and have the baby. Keeping it was a whole other can of worms, one she was not ready to open yet. The only thing she was sure of was that the more people who knew about the pregnancy, the less chance she had of making her own decision.

‘You can't tell them, Phee,' she said seriously. ‘Not yet anyway, not till I've at least got a job and somewhere to live.'

Gemma was watching Phoebe closely, watching her put all the pieces into place, waiting for the penny to drop . . .

‘Um . . . what are your plans in the meantime?' Phoebe asked tentatively.

‘Well, I was kind of hoping I could crash here . . . just short-term.'

Phoebe missed a beat. ‘Oh . . .'

‘I know it's a lot to ask –'

‘No, no, it's not,' Phoebe said weakly. ‘It's not that . . .'

‘It's Cameron, isn't it?' Phoebe's husband. The original man of steel. Or he'd probably prefer titanium or something more upmarket. ‘I know he doesn't like me, Phee.'

‘Maybe that has something to do with you throwing up on his shoes the first time you met him.'

‘He still hasn't gotten over that, eh?'

Phoebe shrugged. ‘It's just that he likes his privacy . . . likes things to be a certain way . . . He's very . . . particular.' Phoebe sighed heavily. ‘What the hell. You're my sister and you need us. Cam's just going to have to handle it.'

Helen was sitting on the back step nursing a cup of tea between both hands, gazing out at the yard, waiting out the time till she could pick up Noah from preschool. The lawn desperately needed a mow, the edges a trim; a passionfruit vine running
rampant over the shed needed to be tamed. The whole yard was looking sad and overgrown. Not that it had ever been a picture – she and David weren't exactly your
House and Garden
kind of people. Helen thought it was probably because the house wasn't actually theirs. And now she didn't know how much longer she'd be able to hang onto it. It had been going round and round in her head for weeks now, and she was still no closer to a solution. Mostly because she hadn't really done anything about it. Except mull. And that was getting her nowhere.

So she cleaned. She cleaned out cupboards and wiped down shelves, benches, walls, architraves, skirtings, windowsills, anything listed on the back of the bottle of Spray'n'Wipe. It was full of useful suggestions. Helen had sprayed and wiped parts of her house she had never thought to spray and wipe before. And it gleamed. Even Noreen had remarked how immaculate the house was looking, although she'd said it as though it was weird. Or as though Helen was weird. Clearly she was not grieving the way Noreen and Jim expected, and they intended to do something about it. And for some reason they chose Noah's birthday, of all times, to bring it up. It was a hard enough day as it was; Helen felt it was somehow wrong that birthdays and holidays kept on coming after someone had died. Christmas was almost another year away, mercifully, and she fully intended to ignore her own birthday this year. But she couldn't ignore Noah's fourth birthday, and she didn't want to. She'd even bought him Wastelanders figures, a vexed issue that had been under discussion for a while. The Wastelanders were all Noah could talk about and all he wanted, but David had been ambivalent, despite the fact that Noah only knew of them at all because of a daily five-minute cartoon on the ABC. Surely if they were on the ABC they were okay? David was inclined to agree, except they were made in the US, and he had an inherent distrust of anything that came out of the US. However, Helen believed even David would have softened under the circumstances and she went ahead and bought Noah three figures and the DVD. The look on his face as he opened them was enough to convince Helen she had done the right thing.

Jim and Noreen were invited for lunch in an attempt to make
it a little more festive, but as soon as Noah was absorbed playing with the presents they'd brought him, Jim took Helen aside. They were prepared to look after Noah, he told her, so Helen could go back to work and things could get back to ‘normal'. She'd had enough time off, he declared; she needed to get out of the house, to have something to occupy her. Helen wanted to tell him she had plenty to occupy her. There were lots more surfaces to wipe for one thing; hadn't they ever read the label on the back of the Spray'n'Wipe bottle?

The thing Jim should have realised, the thing she shouldn't have had to explain, was that she cleaned solely for the reason that it gave her something to do during those long, dire hours after Noah was tucked up in bed. There was no one singing out, ‘Put the kettle on while you're up'; no one to split an after-hours, adults-only chocolate bar with, before hiding the wrapper so Noah wouldn't discover it in the morning; no one to commiserate with about the abysmal shows on TV while they sat and watched them anyway. There was no one simply to pass the time with.

So Helen cleaned till midnight, and often much later, because she couldn't go to bed until she was completely exhausted. If she wasn't completely exhausted she'd just lie there, staring at David's pillow, still in the same pillowcase because she couldn't bring herself to change it, her mind drifting to an image of him, stepping off that kerb, probably daydreaming so he didn't see the bus coming, didn't even look. It made her so angry that if he were here she'd want to shake him and tell him what his momentary lapse of concentration had done to their lives.

And then she hated herself for being angry with him, and hugged his pillow and cried herself to sleep.

It was better to stay up late cleaning.

She couldn't explain it to Jim and Noreen. They had trouble enough understanding why she couldn't go back to work, yet it was obviously untenable. Nursing meant shifts around the clock, and she had no intention of leaving Noah for whole nights and days with his grandparents. She had no intention of leaving Noah, full stop. Except for preschool, where she hovered long after the other parents had left, and was first back in the afternoon to
collect him. She couldn't help it: she was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread that something was going to happen to him. After all, it was becoming increasingly evident that something bad seemed to happen to everyone Helen cared about. She woke some nights with her heart pounding in her chest, the image of a bus still vivid in her mind's eye, bearing down on Noah, standing alone, his eyes huge and wide and terrified. Sometimes David was holding him, sometimes Helen was running towards them, but she never made it to them in time. Sometimes Noah was sitting beside her as she drove the bus straight at David, which made her break into a sweat, jumping out of bed and pacing, breathing hard, till there was nothing she could do but go and find the bottle of Spray'n'Wipe and get to work.

She wasn't going mad, and despite Jim's constant nagging she didn't need a counsellor to tell her that this was not perhaps the most constructive expression of grief and that she had to learn to trust that nothing bad was going to happen to Noah. No. She just needed to be with him at all times to make sure. What harm was there in that? She would get over it in time, and then she could think about going back to work. Not before.

‘And how are you going to live?' Jim wanted to know, as though he had a perfect right.

‘I'll manage,' Helen replied, which was close to the truth. There had been a modest payout from David's superannuation fund, and she was eligible for some government benefits. If she only had herself and Noah to worry about . . .

‘And what about your mother?' Jim insisted.

There was the rub. David and Helen paid Marion's fees in the nursing home in lieu of board for living in her house. It was David who had originally encouraged Helen to place her mother in care, out of nothing less than concern and regard for the both of them. Their courtship had been floundering; David was persistent, but Helen was always making excuses not to go out with him. She didn't know how to tell him about her mother, and it was becoming more and more difficult to leave her alone. Helen had fought for the maximum respite care, but even that was paltry, and so she'd cut her hours at the hospital. But it wasn't enough. Marion could no longer be trusted near
the stove, having burned the base out of nearly every pot they owned, as well as the electric kettle after she'd put it to boil on the gas element. She had let the bath overflow twice, and another time Helen had come home from a late shift to find the hose on full bore in the backyard, thrashing about like an angry snake. And lately she had taken to wandering. It was not like the old days in Balmain, when everyone knew one another, the shopkeepers called you by name and neighbours looked out for the kids playing on the streets. A time when roaming Alzheimer's sufferers would have been safe.

Marion was becoming a danger to herself and potentially to others, and Helen was out of ideas and overwhelmed. David had eventually wheedled the truth out of her and insisted on meeting Marion. They hit it off immediately. Helen wondered if he reminded her somehow of Tony, or if it was simply that she enjoyed the novelty of male company. There had certainly been a dearth of that for some time. Helen had lost most of her twenties looking after her mother, and she would have spent the next decade in much the same way if David had not come along. He said he didn't mind whether they went out or not, he just wanted to be with her. He even sat with Marion some nights when Helen had to work. And gradually, respectfully, David began to point out the hopelessness of the situation. Marion needed round-the-clock supervision; sooner or later, she would have to go into care. And it was getting sooner by the day.

Helen had finally been persuaded by common sense, but insisted that if it had to be done, she was going to do it right. With David's help, she set about thoroughly researching every facility within a reasonable distance: staffing, accommodation, programs, standard of care. They fronted up for inspections armed with checklists, grilled the staff, requested references. Helen would not allow her mother to languish in a substandard anteroom for people waiting to die. She was finally won over by the warmth of the staff at Brookhaven, the location, and the pretty aspect from most of the rooms. Marion would like that.

She just had to persuade Tony.

‘Are you absolutely sure she needs to be in a home?' he asked on the phone from London.

Helen groaned inwardly. ‘No, maybe not, Tony, if you want to come out and look after her –'

‘Oh, and how do you propose I do that?'

‘Go to the airport and get on a plane to Australia. I hear Qantas is good.'

‘Very funny.'

Helen wasn't trying to be funny. The unpalatable truth was that Tony seemed more worried about his inheritance than the plight of his mother. And finally that was enough to get him on a plane home in an attempt to sort it out. The issue was how they were going to pay for a facility of this standard. Helen was disinclined to sell the house, holding onto a vague, she knew irrational, hope that her mother might get better and be able to come home. At least it would be nice to be able to bring her home for special occasions. Whatever, it didn't seem right to dispose of her mother's property while she was alive. David proposed the solution that he and Helen remain in the house, which was mortgage-free, and in return cover the fees at the home. But Tony had argued that possession was nine-tenths of the law, and if they occupied the house till Marion's eventual death, the legalities of the situation might become clouded. Although Helen tried to reassure him till she was blue in the face that neither she nor David had any intention of ripping him off, Tony remained unconvinced. Helen would never have expected this from her brother. They used to be close; she couldn't understand why he was making things so difficult.

‘Then I guess we'll have to sell up,' Helen said, hurt and frustrated by the whole saga. Tony seemed particularly touchy about any input David had to offer, and Helen was tired of adjudicating between them. ‘We'll put the money into a trust account to cover Mum's costs.'

But Tony didn't like that idea either. ‘The house is worth a small bloody fortune, Hel. You don't just hand it over to a solicitor – it'll all be gobbled up by management fees.'

Helen sighed. ‘Then what do you want me to do, Tony?'

He finally relented and agreed to have them stay in the house, though that didn't stop him from having complex legal papers drawn up, clearly detailing right of succession and God only
knew what else, and presenting them to Helen for her signature. David thought she should have her own solicitor look them over, but Helen was heartily sick of the whole business by then. Besides, it didn't seem right to turn around and distrust her brother when she had been so upset that he had not trusted her. In the end Helen was just anxious to get her mother settled and make sure she was going to be all right in her new surroundings. She signed the papers, Tony went back to London, and Marion was finally moved to Brookhaven.

At first Helen didn't know what to do with herself. She spent so much time at Brookhaven that the staff joked they were going to have to give her her own parking space. Caring for her mother had been the focus of her life for so long, she'd forgotten what else there was to do. Her father had died when Helen was a teenager, and though clearly grief-stricken by her loss, Marion had seemed all right for a while, slowly coming to terms with living without her beloved Anthony. But when Tony left for overseas, things began to go awry. Helen had to be with her more and more. She had had no other life till David came along. And then the two of them had cocooned themselves snugly against the world. Helen wasn't sure why. David did find socialising a bit frivolous; he wasn't into sport or popular culture, he said he preferred to spend his time with intelligent people discussing important, or at the very least interesting, issues. But they didn't really do much of that either. Between work and Marion, and eventually Noah, there had been little time for socialising anyway. And no need, it had seemed. They had each other.

But now he was gone, and Helen had never felt so alone. She had no one to talk to, no old friends, no work colleagues, no one, it seemed. She felt isolated and adrift in the world. David had been her compass, and without him she'd lost direction.

Helen blinked back tears. She had to stop feeling sorry for herself. It didn't achieve anything; it certainly wouldn't solve her problems.

What would David do? What would he advise her to do?

He would assess the facts of the situation in a calm, rational manner, because that's how David did things, calmly and rationally. And the facts were that Helen could not afford to pay the
fees at Brookhaven indefinitely, but neither could she give up the house. Not now, not right now. David would definitely have felt it was important for Noah to have continuity and to feel secure; but that was only the half of it. Helen had no idea where to go to from here, so staying put was the safest option.