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It was the first week of 1976 and she had just turned 17   The day school let out her parents packed the car with suitcases, a plastic tree, a big box of tinsel and a smaller box of gifts, and they drove the family north It was too hot in the new house in Strathfield, they said Better to have Christmas by the beach Which was her mother’s way of insinuating that Christmas lunch that year would not be roast pork and gravy but a supermarket ham and potato salad crunchy with sand   They hadn’t realised when they moved back to Sydney three years earlier that building a house on a block of land a few dozen kilometres into the Western suburbs – farther West than any of them had ever been before – also meant being out of reach of the sea breeze In the summer the days got hot and the house got hotter There was no afternoon reprieve Her brother and sister would lie in their underwear, next-to-naked on the golden filigree carpet, in the path of the wood-panelled air conditioner Their father periodically ducked his head through the roller door, addressing his offspring sprawled across the floor, and reminded them that cool air was a privilege That thing cost a fortune in energy bills   Christine did not lie on the carpet She didn’t appear in her underwear in front of anybody anymore She was, her mother said, ‘of that age’   Her parents bought the beach house in the early ’60s, when it was cheap They had held onto it after they sold the house in Brisbane and moved back to Sydney Each year when they came back for the summer the house was musty and sand had blown in under the door and mould dotted the spare set of sheets in the linen cabinet They wasted away the first day of the holidays in cleaning   Her birthday was Christmas Day, and they spent it eating pudding and brandy custard on a picnic blanket beneath the pines It was hot Her father brought out a thermometer and measured it, in Fahrenheit,