Anger quivered up through his body, liquid rising to the boil. He raged at his mother in an undertone. ‘We’ve got to get

out. I can’t stand it any longer. She’s such a bitch.’

‘Don’t use that language, child.’

‘It’s Audrey’s language you should worry about. Calling me a liar. Sneaking around, checking up on me. I don’t know why those T-shirts were five dollars today. I paid four. I’ve had it with her. I’m going to bloody tell her so.’

‘Don’t upset her, Tommy. What will happen if she gets angry with us?’

‘We’ll be rid of her and this dump for good.’

It ended the usual way, with Iris in tears.

Now and then Tom would stand before his aunt, his voice rising in denunciation. There would follow a period of intricate punishment for Iris. Before giving herself over to those slower pleasures,Audrey would observe, with mingled triumph and righteousness, that if, after everything she had done, matters were not to the Loxleys’ satisfaction, they were always free to leave. It was, she assured them, no skin off her nose.

But who voluntarily relinquishes a victim? In the wake of an argument, Audrey related stories of perverts who preyed on widows; circled reports of inflationary rents and extortionate landlords in the newspaper she passed on to the Loxleys.

After Iris was made redundant at the department store, Bill found her a job cleaning offices. She rose in black dawns and dressed before a single-bar radiator in a series of muffl ed clicks and taps, so as not to wake Tommy, a presence sensed rather than seen in musty darkness traversed on her way to the door. At the corner of the street it might occur to her to doubt whether she had switched off the radiator; there followed agonising indecision over returning to check or missing her tram.

There was fear, and its twin, safety; their relationship was mirrored, fluid. Iris looked out of the window of the tram and saw the compartment in which she sat hovering golden and unfinished in the dark street, inhabited briefly by towers or trees. She shifted on her seat, giving a little expert kick at a nylon or trousered shin in the process. The ensuing interlude of apology and forgiveness confirmed her anchorage in the world.

Her knees held up until the day after Tom was awarded a university scholarship. At least now he was off her hands, as Audrey said, reducing Tom to a stubborn stain.

Iris had been taught to darn by French nuns, but that was scarcely a marketable asset in an economy where the notion of mending rather than replacing was already as quaint as madrigals.

In India, finding herself in need, she would have had recourse to a web of human relationships. Here goodwill, or at least obligation, was impersonal and administrative, though no less grudged. She was grateful for sickness benefits; later, for the pension. A savings account hoarded every spare cent. She did not wish to be a burden. It was one of Audrey’s mantras: I wouldn’t want to be a burden. Love was represented as a load; one saw tiny figures broken-backed under monstrous cargos.

Iris took comfort in having a roof over her head. It was a phrase she liked; it brought to mind the plump-thighed cherubim on her father’s vaulted ceilings. Beyond it lay Australia: boundless, open to the sky. ‘As long as we stay with Audrey, we have a roof over our heads.’ ‘What can go wrong if you have a roof over your head?’

‘It can fall in and crush you,’ said Tom.

Towards the end of her son’s last year at school, Iris spoke now and then of renting a flat with him after his exams. The idea was vague and constituted nothing like a plan; it was also what Tom had urged on her in the past, seeing in his mind a bare space that was his alone. A compact, neat teenager, he had blundered, again and again, into the clutter of the annexe, his shins encountering varnished wood, his knuckles grazing a long-necked, stoppered bottle of warty yellow glass, an object both ugly and useless. At night, when he lay swaddled before the TV’s grey eye with the metal underpinnings of his sofa bed ridging his spine, a room-lofty, pale-walled, fl oored with grooved boards-formed in his mind.

In those years all his unadulterated energy was spent on the captive’s instinctive lunge towards light and air. Books furnished him with a daily, spacious refuge. Later, looking back, he would see swift water widening; his mother a diminished figure on the shore.

By the time Tom’s university offer came through, Iris had become part of what he was intent on leaving. Of this small, cataclysmic shift in his thinking he was unaware. All the same, a lie slid polished from his tongue. He told Iris that his scholarship was conditional on his moving into student housing; ‘a university regulation’. When he had lifted the last carton of books into a friend’s car and kissed his mother-‘So long, Ma!’-he was light-headed with the sense of having got away with something.

On the day before he moved out, Tom waited until he was alone in the annexe. Then he carried the hated yellow bottle into the kitchen. There he broke its neck. When Iris returned, he told her he had accidentally smashed the bottle when packing. The pieces of thick glass, wrapped in newspaper, were already in the pedal bin. But he had removed the leaf-shaped stopper before hitting the bottle against the sink, and had somehow failed to dispose of it. Thereafter, whenever he opened a certain drawer in his mother’s kitchen he would see a malicious amber eye lolling among place mats and paper napkins.

In the last weeks of their shared life, Iris suddenly said, ‘When you were small you used to follow me everywhere. In and out of rooms all day.’ She must have been to the hairdresser that morning because Tom could still remember the brownish smears of dye on the tops of her ears. He had refrained from remarking on them, pleased with this proof of his restraint.

Informed at last that the dog was lost, Iris said,‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ She spoke formally; the calamity might have befallen an Australian.

Tom, having dreaded a storm, was goaded by calm.

The contrary arithmetic of his relations with Iris converted it at once into lack of feeling, and added up to the need for brutishness. So that he paused, in the act of serving out his mother’s lunch, and said, ‘He’s probably dead, you realise. Choked to death on his lead. Or run over.’

‘Ah,’ said Iris. And with quickened interest, ‘Don’t serve so much.’

‘Christ! Can’t you think of anything but yourself for a minute? And what does it matter if there’s too much? Just leave what you don’t want.’

Her filmy eyes rose to his face. She had the familiar sensation of striving to decipher a riddle in a foreign language; failure meant Tommy would be angry. The small hillock of saffron rice surmounted by curries and surrounded by pickles had brought to mind a white-haired skull protruding from mud-coloured rags on a pavement, an image glimpsed and only half understood in childhood. It had floated to the surface of her thoughts buoyed by the word waste.

Tom found his tongue stuck to his palate. Lowering it unclenched his jaw. He set his mother’s laden plate before her, having thwarted the impulse to do so with force. ‘I’m just worried about what might have happened,’ he said. He was accustomed to knowing better than his mother, so apology was not a coin readily available to their commerce.

Iris picked up her spoon and fork and began to eat. Some minutes later, halfway through a mouthful, ‘I have my unfailing prayer to Saint Anthony,’ she said.

The Meg Ryan video in front of which his mother was dozing after lunch penetrated Tom’s study in irritating little swells. He opened and shut drawers, at last finding the earplugs in a hollow glass cube that held paperclips and stamps.

The familiar contention that modernity is concerned with the differentiation and autonomisation of the aesthetic sphere … Tom switched on a lamp, as the afternoon darkened. Light lay obliquely on a page, highlighting dull prose with gold.