Early Saturday morning was an odd time for dad to be mopping the porch. Stranger still was the fact he had the front door closed. I was scratching sleep from my eyes when I opened the door to see the yellow sponge swipe through a thick pool of blood. I remember it as a perfect circle, the radius of a hula hoop. Initially the blood looked like an acrylic red disc – hard, like you could pick it up and use it as a painter’s palette. Then Dad carved through the centre with the mop and the edges of the pool descended into madness, desperately wanting to fall back into order, to that perfect circle, expanding and contracting like an exposed human heart.

‘Don’t come out ‘ere,’ Dad said. ‘Go back inside.’