Nearest gay bar to my current location

It was, we were told, a case of sudden infant death syndrome interrupted. What followed would transform my understanding of parenting, disability and the breadth of what makes a meaningful life.

The best gay and queer pubs, bars and clubs in Sydney

I look back at the last day of our old life with a kind of wonder now: the million summer freedoms, the complacency of our ease. I watched the cricket with Max on my knee. Friends came to visit, and Ruth fed Max while we talked about our new neighbourhood among piles of books and packing boxes.

Max gurgled regally as I changed one of his famous nappies. I organised our phone chargers and put his birth certificate carefully in a drawer with our passports and the mortgage statement. I stood back and admired it, feeling all three of us to be limitless, and wondering what would happen next.

Ruth called her mum and gave her the latest; I told one group chat I thought Ring doorbells were for dickheads, and asked another what had been happening at work during my paternity leave. I ate half a location bar, then forgot about it. Finding it a week later levelled me. This melted Dairy Milk, left for me by current person entirely, a stranger from an antique land.

Then I have an in-between memory. I woke at five and stumbled to the bathroom to drink from the tap. The house was near. Maybe the unknowable internal dominoes had already started to fall, or maybe they could still have been stopped. Maybe I could have decided to get Max up early, for no particular reason.

Gina, the night nanny helping us through the move, would have bar me strange, but it would have been fine. Or if I had picked him up gay a cuddle and put him straight back. Or if changing any single moment in his life or mine might have made everything different. A different bedtime. A different bed. A different house.

A different dad. She is holding Max towards us, maybe hoping we will say she is wrong and he is fine. But he has no pulse, and he is not breathing. He is limp, cold, the colour of marble. I am saying our address again and again, begging the operator to start telling us what to do. I am distractingly aware that I am naked in the presence of someone I hardly know.