The house looked just like the one I grew up in, which didn't do me any favours. It had the same flat Queenslander style, slatted wood and chipped paint, overgrown yard, corrugated roof of sunburnt colourless steel. I guessed that behind the front screen door lived the same type of people as well. It was as if I could hear the lives behind that door before it even opened. I braced myself.

The man who opened the door at my knock looked at me with a lot of hard and angry years hidden behind his rocky eyes. He was on the bad side of middle-aged, squat and bulky, rough-skinned and with hostile eyes. 'A sign there,' he said in an immediate sandpaper voice, 'no bloody solicitors.'

With that, he shut the door. I took a moment and knocked again.

There was a long silence before he opened again. He stood back. 'Alright, what the hell is it you want, then?'

'I'm sorry for the interruption,' I said genially. 'Is this the Abbott residence?'

He didn't nod, but he narrowed his eyes. 'This about the fence?'

'No, it's...'

'You one of those council fucks, here to gimme more shit?'

'I'm here about your son, Sebastian. He ran away several years ago, is that right?'

The man in the doorway rolled his hard-set eyes in heavy provocation. 'Sebastian, that useless... What're'ya bothering with him for?'

'Could I I come in, Mr Abbott? I'd like to talk to you.'

He grumbled again and after a moment stepped away. I followed him inside, down the dark hallway and into a musty living den shut away against the bitter daylight.

A woman in a thin gingham house dress and silvery hair tied back hard from her broad head came in from the kitchen. Mr Abbott threw a lazy hand in her direction as he wandered across the den. 'He's a cop or something. Here about Sebastian,' he said to her.

The woman had the same guttural reaction he husband had.

I said, 'You're his mother?'

'Not anymore,' she said. 'I dunno what on earth he's doing, but it doesn't involve us anymore.'

Mr Abbott fell into an armchair in the corner. 'You gonna tell us if he's in prison or dead?'

I stood uncertainly at the head of the room. Neither of the two people in front of me were paying much attention.

'You reported him as a missing person four years ago, is that correct?' I said.

Mr Abbott waved it away again. 'Only cause they made us. That brat never had any time for us. My opinion is, if he wanted to fuck off so bad, then we're letting him.'

'I'm guessing you didn't have the warmest relationship with your son, then.'

Mrs Abbott scoffed. 'He was nothing but a troublemaker. A waste of breath. Nah, we didn't have a warm relationship.'

Her husband took up her bitterness: 'Always picking fights, always talking back, lashing out, staying out all night, getting involved with freaks, faggots, all manner of shit...'

I cleared my throat. 'What about the day he went missing?'

'Didn't go missing. He ran away.'

'Can you tell me about that day?'

Mr Abbott looked up at me peculiarly. 'Look, is he in trouble or not? That why you're looking for him?'

'He might be. Is there anything particular you might be able to tell me about his running away that might point to something strange now?'

Mrs Abbott dropped her face and wandered closer to me. 'Look,' she said, 'this is what happened: Sebastian was out all night and most of the next day, doing whatever it was he did to get back at us. All of a sudden he comes home and stomps into his room and starts packing his things. He tells us he's going off with someone. We don't know who. We fight. Then he just runs out anyway, leaves everything behind, and jumps into a big black car out on the street.'

'A car that was waiting for him?'

She nodded. 'Just got into the seat and it went away. That was four years ago, when he was seventeen—we made a report to the police, they made it a missing persons, and we haven't heard anything since you came in through that door.'

'And you don't seem to care much, either.'

The parents of Sebastian Abbott made the same sour face at me.

'If he chose to run out on us, what the hell can we do?' his father said. 'Probably met some rich freak and went off to live as his bitch. That's his choice. Can't say we didn't try to bring him up good, a house, a bed, food, rules, everything. But that kid was always trouble. Let him live with it, I say.'

There was an itch beginning to dig under my skin from just standing there in that toxic mustiness.

From the other end of the room, from his armchair, Mr Abbott said, 'So that help you, copper?'

'It does, very much. But it would also help if you had a picture of your son that I could take a look at.'

Mrs Abbott groaned and lumbered across the room. She removed a scrapbook from the shelf and fingered it open. She took a glossy photo print and shot it out to me with distasteful speed.

'His high school picture, the year he ran away,' she said. 'He was set to graduate that year. He was a shit student, anyway.'

I took it from her. The young man in the picture with the orderly school uniform seemed far and away from the horror story spun by his parents—there was still a faintness of life somewhere in his pale eyes, one that retrospectively seemed tragic. He had a shapely face, shallow, as well as chalky skin, high cheekbones, and thin, sandy hair the colour of dry straw. Not the full dark locks that had been described to me so lovingly by Cameron Zehringer Jr.

But, unlike a life, hair is probably the easiest thing a person can change about themselves.