She was out walking along the Merri Creek path with the baby in the pram when her father rang. She was near the electrical plant and the power lines overhead, huge, arcing, frighteningly close, interfered with her phone so his words came through drifts of fizzing static. ‘… had to happen I s’pose … told you I saw him last week … bloody mess, I mean he looks like a drug addict, eyes bulging, hands shaking …’ His voice lunged from the fuzz in angry bursts.

Along the banks of the creek the low shrubs were festooned with rubbish—faded beer cans and ribbons of torn plastic bags, brown with silt. Yellow foam collected near the banks and in the places where groups of rocks trapped pools of water from the rest of the flow. Miranda’s baby looked up at her from the pram, and his eyes were big and dark.