To this day I marvel at my older sister's determination to get the house into order, weekend after weekend, while our mother was out working and our father sat on his chair in the lounge room, drinking. The pressure on them to succeed was enormous, but they were the strong ones. She considers it an affront to have a father who calls her a tart. He did not want her to learn to drive for fear she would never stay at home. LAST NIGHT AT dinner after a day-long writing workshop, four women and one man, we talked of travels overseas, and one woman, the youngest among us, talked of how she had been groped six times in India in less than five weeks when she finally saw red. My youngest brother sat in the high chair. There was a smell to the room, of stale perfume, my father's cigarettes and of bodies.
