It was week two of the COVID-19 lockdown and my family had followed all the rules and decided to go further and wear face masks at home. My father gathered us all together and with a slowness and solemness that seemed a bit unnecessary, he explained the new rules and the importance of remaining solid as a family.

My husband’s pallor had turned an unpleasant green. Even though the temperature was only about five degrees, a sheen of perspiration glistened across his forehead. The body of his father, Nonno Giovanni, was being exhumed and Paolo was not handling it well.

I was the prettiest corpse in the room, even if I say so myself. Well, to be fair, I was the only corpse in the room. At my explicit wish, and there had been several, I was dressed in my red tweed Chanel. I also wore the pearl necklace and my green alligator flats.

Sneaking down the 12 rickety stairs, he skipped the second step from the bottom. It’d been broken for as long as he could remember.

Still in stealth mode, he entered the grimy kitchen, pungent with the smell of this evening’s leftovers. Boiled cabbage.

‘I thought you liked dogs.’

‘I don’t, Will.’

Simon was the one who walked up to complete strangers and told them their dog was gorgeous, not me. I held the warm bundle of fur close to my chest.

There is the strangest sensation of amnesia I feel when I wake. The world comes into focus slow — a computer taking too long to process new data.

‘Hey, you okay? You look a bit pale.’ Grey hair, tan skin. Silver linings and sunshine. Blue, blue eyes. The ocean from outer space.

Kate put on her glasses and looked in the bathroom mirror to check out a pimple that was trying to make a break for freedom. She looked closer. My God! She thought. Two tiny chin hairs! Not one, two. How long have they been there? As if it wasn’t bad enough getting older. Now I have chin hairs and I can’t even see them? Shit. She thought about her younger friends at work. Had they noticed?

As the ship moved closer to the stone, he could hear his blood beat inside. The sound was deafening and muffled all else except the inevitable crunch of the stern. The rope was squeezed through the iron loop in time. The vessel rebounded, the thumping in his head subsided, large gulls plummeted from the sky.

When my grandmother died, I thought she would stop stirring. I thought she would shrink to a manageable size and let herself be packed away into the cold storage of history. But I still haven’t managed to wrap her up, even though she died decades ago. My grandmother resists like one of those odd shapes that paper doesn’t fold around neatly. She is still unmanageable, defiant, and just too big to contain.

- Ssh. I can hear him. Can you?

He’s not tucked up in his bed. I don’t have to check. I knew this would happen. Eventually.

- You go. Go quickly.

The new maid was too rough. Rosaline raised her hand to the girl’s cold bony one and slowed the movement of the comb. 

‘Softly, like this Maria,’ she said. She could feel the girl tremble as she guided her. For the thousandth time in the past week Rosaline wished her former maid had not left. But she had gone and got herself married. 

As I sit eating a hot-cross bun in January, I think of how quickly we are thrown from one calendar event to the next. The Back to School signs bordering highways, brandishing shopping centres, clogging mailboxes have been preparing me for weeks for the return of a new school year – a cosmic sign grounding parents everywhere (especially the stay-at-homes) in the promise of an easier load between the hours of nine and three-thirty.

I’ve read some wonderful books in 2019, some for research others for pleasure, some not published this year, some from my ‘to be read’ pile that keeps growing like Jack’s beanstalk. Like most writer’s I have many books but some are so special I reread them, treasured books found over the years in second-hand bookshops, op-shops, bookstores, and some gifts from family or friends.

‘Great writer,’ he said to her, but her fluoro-green marker pen had been almost dry. Preoccupied with her favourite task of the day – creating the menu – it had taken her a while to digest the compliment and look up. 

Each day was much like another up here – warm with a gentle sea breeze, enough sunshine for everyone and set after set of perfect waves, enticing surfers from all over the world.

On September 19th, 2019, I was in Napoli, Italy.

I had travelled via Roma with my sister, Jenny, and my good mate, John. We had spent the day walking the dead streets of Pompeii.

Of all the places to die, you would have preferred somewhere slightly cooler than a tanning salon in Liverpool.

From the time my mum moved into a nursing home, I used to take my kids there regularly – to play their half-size violins for my mum and her nursing-home friends. And that was the inspiration for my career as a song-and-dance man.

My uncle died at the weekend. He had emphysema and pulmonary oedema and for the last three years had been kept alive by an oxygen cylinder which stood in the corner of his bedroom. He was seventy-four. Although I had seen him rarely since I moved to Sydney, I remember him as a good-humoured man who loved cricket and tennis, and wore sports shirts and navy blazers. In every photograph I’ve seen of him he is tanned with a cigarette burning between his fingers.

It’s not hard to clone leprechauns. Getting the cell samples, that’s a different story. They’re nippy little bastards.

But you know, mate, we always knew they were out there. They reckon they came to Australia during the gold rush, 1850s, right? Lot of Irish came out then and the little blokes came with ’em.

One day you’re being splashed with champagne at your literary launch, and the next you find yourself wedged between a Lionel Shriver and a Dan Brown on the bottom shelf of a small-town street library, wondering how you got there, and why.