Mary had a toe torn off by an escalator when she was eleven. For two months she was in and out of hospital with infections and recurring pains. The aches never really went away, but after a while she stopped going to the doctor.

When she was nine, Mary went to the beach with her parents and her cousins, fourteen and sixteen, and their parents. She made a sandcastle while her older cousin surfed and her younger cousin tried to surf. It had three towers, three walls and a triangular moat. In the middle was a dungeon where some criminals lived. At the end of the afternoon Mary and her parents and her cousins and their parents went home sunburnt while the water came in and washed over the castle and drowned the prisoners.

Mary's parents brought home a pet mouse when she was seven. Over the next month she gradually stopped talking to her imaginary friend, Henrietta, and never asked her for anything ever again.

A difficult math test almost consigned Mary to repeat a year of school when she was seventeen, but she was excused after a good word from her teacher.

Mary broke up with her boyfriend when she was fifteen. They had met at a party. For seven months they had gone out together once a week to kiss, until she grew tired of his lack of conversation and he became defensive and sullen. She cried for days and told her best friend at the time that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Later that year, her best friend moved to a school in a different suburb. They met up twice in the summer holidays, once for coffee and once to see a movie, then at increasingly long intervals for the rest of their lives. Each time they recognised each other a little less.

Mary's parents divorced when she was three. They got along better after the separation and she never knew any different anyhow.

While waiting at a pedestrian crossing when she was five, Mary loudly asked her mother why the man standing next to them looked like a big fat frog, which caused her mother to laugh so hard she dropped her mobile phone, which smashed.

When she was one, Mary was diagnosed with a wasting disease. Her doctor said the disease was caused by a recessive defective gene, passed down by them from both sides of the family tree. He said there was as yet little research into a cure. He said the normal life expectancy in such cases was thirteen years, and anything beyond that was lucky.