The apple.

When they get this old, they no longer curate their recollections. They just spark up out of nowhere, touched off by the most tangential of references. No faraway looks or dramatic pauses; that tape just plays right out of yesteryear.

We were sitting at a table in early summer sunshine outside a cafe in the street where she took me shopping every Saturday morning of my life, Silman's the grocer; Gilbertson's the butcher, until I refused to go at 12 or 13. She was pecking birdishly at a muffin; I was stirring sugar into a chocolate-dusted cappuccino. Botoxed women carried lurid cord-handled shopping bags to the automatic tailgates of their black Audis; high schoolers sauntered past with takeaway food packs and phones, bags slung over their shoulders; mothers steered prams holding babies somewhere down below under the shopping like ship passengers in a hold.

It was in the Depression, she said. She was about six. Flemington was not the hipster suburb it is now but a poor grimy inner suburb of saleyards and abattoirs. One day at school she was eating an apple. Waiting until she finished, a girl said, ‘Please can I have your core?’

It was the ‘please’ that got me. I turned away a little, gazing down the street.

She continued. That night, she told her mother (my grandmother). Next day, she was given two apples. She said she still remembers the glow of the girl’s face when she gave her the apple.