“I don’t suppose that you could string all three together?” suggested Juchster.

“Don’t you think it’s asking a bit much, for anybody to believe that I’ve forgotten the name of my institute and can’t find either my certificate or my birth certificate, as well as my past employer having suddenly closed down?” asked Jack.

“Yeah, that could be asking a lot,” conceded Juchster.

“Do you think dad will have finished with the paper yet?” asked Chris.

“Oh I doubt if he could have even read it, with the state that his eyes were in,” said Norma, “but if you want another look through the situations vacant, I’ve got them here,” she said, taking the three newspaper pages from the top of the refrigerator.

“No I wanted the theatre section,” said Chris.   “I’m taking Rita to the 9:30 showing after school tonight, if I can get home and change in time, so I wanted to check the address of the cinema.”

“Rita?” asked Norma.

“She’s a girl I used to work with,” explained Chris.   “I’ve sort of been seeing her on a semi-steady basis for the last couple of months.”

“I thought that you were going steady with this girl Sondra?” said Norma.

“Sonja,” corrected Chris.   “I more or less am.”

“How can you be more or less going steady with them both?”

“I have to arrange my timetable very carefully, so that I never invite them both out on the same night.”

“Doesn’t that put a strain on your budget, now that you’re back on the dole?”

“No worries, I usually don’t take them to the pictures, only for a walk through Footscray Park, or wherever.   I’ve invited Sonja, to Footscray Park for Melbourne Cup days so that we can stand on the rise and peer down into Flemington to watch the cup live, You save the entrance fee into Flemington that way, but it means you only get to see the cup live, you can’t hear anything from that distance.   Also you have to get there very early to get a good spot, because there are always at least 150,000 people in Footscray Park on Melbourne Cup day.”