“It’s perfectly fine. It’s good, in fact. Patrick had something he wanted me to do.”

“Excellent!” said her mother. “Oh, by the way, I thought you’d be interested to hear that I’ve had not one but three patients tell me they’ve lost weight through hypnosis over the last week.”

“Is that right,” said Ellen, not especially interested.

“Yes, apparently they’ve been going to these ‘hypno-parties.’ They’re all the rage in Sydney at the moment. They’re like Tupperware parties but instead of handing around plastic containers they all get hypnotized. Then they drink champagne and eat carrot sticks, I guess. Ladies of a certain age and income bracket are going crazy for them.”

“Fancy that,” said Ellen. Well, good for Danny.

Although it gave her an obscurely depressed feeling. What was the point of stock-standard hypnotherapists like her when there were dynamic young guys like Danny shaking up the industry?

“Well, I have to run,” said her mother. “We’re off to the theater.”

“OK. Say hi to Pip and Mel.”

“I’m going with David, actually.”

“Oh,” said Ellen. “What are Pip and Mel doing?”

“I don’t know, but David and I are seeing the new David Williamson play. It’s opening night. We’ve got front-row tickets.”

“Of course you have,” said Ellen.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. Say hi to Dad!”

“Ellen?”

“Sorry. I’m in an extremely peculiar mood. I’m fine. Have fun.”

She hung up the phone and looked at the tiny pieces of broken plate glinting on the floor.

Everything she had ever believed would make her happy was happening. She had a father and a mother going to the theater together tonight. She had a fiancé and a stepson and a baby on the way. Why wasn’t she in seventh heaven? Why was she feeling so skittish and irritable? It couldn’t just be pregnancy hormones combined with a simple fear of change, could it?

She couldn’t be so ordinary, could she?

Aha! So you think you’re extraordinary then, do you, Ellen?

There was an enormous crash in the hallway and Ellen jumped. She ran out of the kitchen and saw that two of Patrick’s boxes that had been piled on top of each other had toppled over and split open, spilling their contents in a great jumbled mess across the hallway floor.

She could see an old dirty sneaker, CDs that had fallen out of their cases, tangled extension cords, a travel hair dryer, Christmas decorations, a fry pan, a Matchbox car, a bulging photo album that had fallen facedown, an old dustpan, coins, receipts … stuff.

As she went to pick up one of the fallen boxes, she saw that Patrick had carefully written “Miscellaneous” on the side. She laughed. It was meant to be a gentle, loving laugh at her imperfect but adorable husband-to-be, but it came out an unpleasant, bitter-sounding bark, as if she’d been unhappily married to him for years and this was the last straw.

Then she said, “Oh, please don’t” as the bottom of the box broke and another flood of “miscellaneous” items crashed to the floor.

She dropped the soft dusty sheets of cardboard and stamped her foot. Her home would never be hers again. It was going to disappear under a mountain of rubbish. She scratched viciously at her wrist as an itchy feeling of rage enveloped her, as though tiny bugs were crawling all over her body.

This is an inappropriate reaction. You need to breathe. In and out. Imagine a white light is filling—

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” she screamed in the empty hallway.

She looked about for something, anything, to distract her.

She bent down and picked up the photo album.

The first photo she saw was of an impossibly young-looking Patrick wearing a puffy-sleeved white shirt with a blond girl sitting on his lap. She had on white jeans tucked into her boots, padded shoulders, earrings with dangling orange feathers. Patrick and Colleen. Young love in the late eighties.

She flipped the pages.

Photo after photo of Colleen posing for the camera, presumably held by Patrick. Hands on her hips, pouting her lips, opening her eyes wide, smiling seductively.

Ellen’s seventeen-year-old self, the one who had worn a very similar pair of earrings when she was a schoolgirl but would never have had the confidence to model like that for a boyfriend, responded bitchily. “Yes, you’re pretty hot stuff.”

Her better self spoke up: Ellen! What’s wrong with you? She’s a little girl! Seventeen and she’s going to die young. Give the poor girl a break.

She turned the page.

“Oh, lordie me,” she said, this time in her grandmother’s voice.

She was looking at naked photos of Colleen. Her blond hair slick against her head like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Without the dated clothes and hairstyle, she’d lost that faintly silly look that people have in old photos. Now she wasn’t just a pretty eighties girl, she was a classic beauty, with high cheekbones and big eyes. Ellen studied each photo, feeling both weirdly excited and slightly sick. Colleen had a perfectly proportioned body, slim and curved in all the right places. She could have been a model.

There wasn’t anything  p**n ographic about the photos. They were innocently sensual; Ellen could feel the raw intensity of first love.

There was one beautiful photo of Colleen lying completely naked on a single bed with her eyes closed, sunlight across her face. Ellen imagined how Patrick must have felt as a horny teenage boy looking at this gorgeous girl. Ellen had been perfectly attractive as a teenager, a “pretty” girl—but she’d never had a body like this, and now her skin was aging and her body was thickening with pregnancy and she was filled with a feeling of pure envy. She wanted to be that young girl, lying naked on a bed with the sunlight on her face, and the truth was she never had been and she never would be.

Stop looking, she told herself. This is highly personal, private stuff! You have no right! It’s disrespectful. Your reaction is emotionally immature. Everyone has photos of their high school sweethearts tucked away in old boxes, it’s no big deal! Shut the photo album, put it somewhere safe where Jack can’t find inappropriate photos of his dead mother, and go and research prams for the baby on the Internet, or do your taxes or something.

She sat down cross-legged on the floor among all the miscellaneous junk and kept looking, and as she did, she felt a strange longing to have a girl-to-girl talk with Saskia.