He’d only been gone an hour, kicking a ball in the park with their four-year-old son. The Ford’s motor was still running, its doors locked, and even before he knew it for certain, before he put the sledge-hammer through the window, before the ambulance crew confirmed it, he was grateful to her for sparing the boy. He held himself together until the funeral and then for a few weeks he lost his mind. His mates avoided him, but their wives rallied to save him. He drank alone until he blacked out. When he bothered to eat he forked up food straight from the casserole dishes his friends’ wives left him when they dropped Ricky back in the evenings. One morning he woke beside one of those wives and she was weeping. Thereafter Dyson endeavoured, for the sake of his son, to lead a decent, stable, predictable existence, something as close to normal as a ruined man could manage. Though he hated the house now and the city around it, he was determined to stay on in Fremantle for Ricky’s sake, so that his year of kindergarten might proceed uninterrupted.
