In the morning the news was good, or as good as possible: the Brisbane flood hadn't reached the peaks many had been fearing it would, the water was starting to go down, and though when Sacha switched on the morning news, having been unable to sleep much, and saw pictures of roads cut off, of houses destroyed, of Anna Bligh almost in tears as she recounted the number of deaths, she couldn't help feeling cautiously relieved when she realised that her relatives were out of harms way.

She saw on the news the rows and rows of empty supermarket shelves and she remembered the exact same thing in Canberra, after the fires there. Eight years earlier, almost to the day. The scale of the damage in Brisbane put even that in the shade, though: thousands of houses lost, not hundreds.

But it was all Kate could talk about, as well, when Sacha rang her. She rang her because she had to ring someone.

"You know I can barely even remember it sometimes" Kate said. "But then I do, and it's like, it was in another life or something."

"Too big for the mind to handle" Sacha said.

"Yeah, maybe."

"But it was your twenty-first birthday" Sacha reminded her. "Just afterwards."

"That was a long time ago" Kate said, and Sacha was struck by the sudden extraordinary realisation that her little sister was almost thirty. Her own thirtieth birthday had passed just recently, unmarked and unannounced, just how she liked it. Not even her family had called, they knew her well enough by now; just a couple of text messages.

"Have you called Auntie Barbara yet?" Kate asked Sacha.

"Not yet."

"Sacha . . ."

"I figured she had enough on her plate" Sacha said. "I figured all of them do. I didn't want to use up the 'phone line."

"Call them" Kate said. "They're family." Kate didn't have to add: They all called us.

"I will" Sacha promised. "I just didn't want to hassle them when they've got so much to deal with."