Photograph by Josh Raymond

Poet, screenwriter and novelist Emily Ballou was born in the United States in 1968 and moved to Australia in 1991. In 1996, she was a recipient of the Australian Film Commission’s New Screenwriters Scheme for her feature film script Sadie X-Ray. In 1997, she was awarded the Judith Wright Prize for Poetry for her poem ‘Enter’. Emily’s first novel, Father Lands, was published by Picador in 2002. She was chosen as one of The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of 2003. She has recently adapted Father Lands for the screen. Her first children’s picture book, One Blue Sock, was published in 2007.

Reading Group Notes are available for this title on the Picador website: www.picador.com.au

Also by Emily Ballou

Father Lands

aphelion

A Novel

Emily Ballou

Extract from ‘Bums’ Rush’ by Michael Dransfield reproduced courtesy of the University of Queensland Press.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

First published 2007 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright © Emily Ballou 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations) in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Ballou, Emily.
Aphelion.

ISBN 978 0330 42312 0.

1. Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme – Fiction. 2. Archivists – Fiction. 3. Exhibitions – Fiction. 4. Man-woman relationships – Fiction. 5. Triangles (Interpersonal relations) – Fiction. 6. Old Adaminaby (N.S.W.) – Fiction. I. Title.

A823.4

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

These electronic editions published in 2008 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

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All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Aphelion
Emily Ballou

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To Miss Jean Powell, 1911–2006

In the early winter mornings
sometimes you will hear the snow winds blowing in on you
soon then you will become impatient as lost souls do
you will think you hear someone calling.

MICHAEL DRANSFIELD, ‘BUMS’ RUSH’

Contents

EPIGRAPH

FIRE 1939

GRAVITY 2002

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

FLOOD 1957

ARC 2002

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

SUN

RETURN

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FIRE
1939

ESME RISES BEFORE DAWN, carefully unpeels herself from the cat caught beneath her sleep-flung arm, fur rising and falling beneath her, the glowing warmth against her chest. She dresses quietly so as not to wake her sister, carries her boots through the house. In the cold kitchen she hauls a log onto the coals, leaves the stove door open for a moment and watches as the feathery bark catches, illuminating a tableau of table: the open Grace Brothers winter catalogue; the jar of honey, unstrained, that her father brought down from his high mountain plot, the bodies of bees still stuck in the comb; her mother’s camp oven, a cast-iron cauldron of magic from which emerged a perfect damper, a hot oily chicken, golden syrup dumplings – though this morning there’s only bits of last night’s lamb stew stuck to the blackened sides.

She steps out into the dawn which is barely moonlit, sits on the damp boards of the back verandah, can feel but not yet see the fog of her breath forming shapes in the air before her, lets her fingers thread the laces through the last eyelets and loves the firm grip of the leather around her ankles when she pulls the laces tight. Beyond her mother’s garden is the dark field where her father’s horse waits at the fence line, munching the new grass. She can hear the cracking of his heavy jaws working at the fresh green. Beyond the field and the horse, the distant hills, stitched with lines of pine, give off flecks of first pink light.

Esme wheels her pushbike from the shed, hooks the lantern over the handlebar and slowly pedals up the gravel driveway to the road, the lamplight swinging in arcs and illuminating the muddy ruts from last night’s hooves and rain. The lantern’s flame grows and, though she likes the warmth seeping through the wide knit of her mittens, soon her left fingertips feel as if they are smoking. She lifts her hand momentarily. Her leg muscles wake with the exertions of turning. Her mind thrums. The dare of one-armed steering and the squelch of mud, the sink of sudden puddles, the gravel shooting off into the wet breath of dawn, excites her; her plans for the day a rug unrolling in her mind on which she has sewn in gold thread the moments she hopes to make happen. She is eager for it all, at once. Yet, she imagines, how much better to savour each second separately, because even this moment on her bicycle will soon be an unreal filament of a cloud that has passed.

Wind cuts through to her skin. The pine tree breaks do nothing. When she is happy she can take any degree of darkness or chill, to make up for those occasional mornings when she can’t bear the day’s sad air.

She reaches the small glade of pine and gum trees at the edge of a paddock a quarter-mile from the river. The town lies a mile behind her to the south, spread across the valley, farms continuing up the far hill, where now a few windows sputter kerosene and candlelight. She drops her bicycle into the ditch, crouches down and slides through the barbed wire fence into the grassy field. She steps over cow pats, feels the vibrations of the roos scattering nearby, the twigs cracking under their paws. Bits of leaf and wet grass stick to the toes of her boots. She dangles the lamp, scouring the paddock for the flesh and cream caps that sprout after a bout of wet weather.

Last night’s film stays with her, like a dream. The flickering images, the violence of things, something she feels she has witnessed for the first time, about the world, about love. Something stays with her. An excitement. Bette Davis’s wide, wild eyes.

She gathers the mushrooms quickly, filling a cotton bag, touching the wet spongy heads, inhales a lungful of them, already mixed with butter. Remembers the time she and her mother filled an open umbrella with fat fungi; carrying home as much as the paddock offered.

Esme, in her eighteenth year, wears none of the disguises of youth; she appears neither older nor younger than she is – perhaps younger when barefoot, or when her unpowdered skin reveals a splattering of freckles and the birthmark, which nobody fails to comment on, pressed into her left cheek. ‘Marked by a cupid, eh?’ Her unique insignia, a pale milk chocolate heart, precise as if painted. And although she has not been perfectly formed – her pelvis is flatter and broader than she would like, with cello hips beneath small breasts – she feels she’s been marked for something special, and that is more than most can say. She has a sense that if she fossicked inside the white bone cage of her ribs, her excavations would turn up rubies. As now, riding home, full bag jouncing against her hip, in a mist of rain, she sees in the road’s mud puddles the shine and shape of opals.

Her house is still sleeping – letting off a cloud of steam, it seems – like damp clothes hanging by a fire. It is weatherboard clad with a hipped roof of corrugated iron, five rooms and a verandah, enclosed on one side for the laundry and bathroom, the loo down the back garden. Inside, one long corridor makes a spine for the house, then two bedrooms, one of which Esme shares with her younger sister Pictoria, and a living room, often unlived in, for it is this warm, yellow kitchen the family inhabits. Esme checks the fire in the fuel stove, puts the kettle on, and gets to work, slicing through the mushrooms’ feathery gills, melting a pat of butter until it browns, adding the mushrooms to cuts of fat-edged bacon.

Lets the kettle scream.

Pictoria – Grandma Victoria altered just enough to reflect the infant’s supposed beauty, though the family call her Sook – too antsy to sleep through anything that resembles excitement, or tragedy, or even just the high-pitched keening of a copper kettle crying for tea, is up first. As she should be.

‘I’ve already done it all,’ Esme announces crossly, when secretly she is pleased to be seen as the most dedicated, the most loving daughter of the two.

Pictoria shrugs, sucks her front teeth. She picks a sweet, shrunken cap from the pan and manages to slip it between her lips before Esme slaps her hand.

‘I see in addition to your other charms you have that insolence generated by an inferior upbringing,’ Esme says, playing Hepburn, if rather badly.

‘Evidently you’re a very amusing person,’ Pictoria replies, playing Hepburn back, only much more convincingly. She counts out four silver-plated knives and forks in need of a polish. ‘Bread?’

‘You said you’d make scones. It’s too late now. There’s a bit of that damper.’

Pictoria seizes her sister around the waist, leans her back across the table with a flourish, and plants a kiss on Esme’s small, dry lips, then puts on a voice breathy with unexpected rapture. ‘Oh, Pres! In a lady’s bedroom! Now you’ll have to marry me.’

Esme pushes her off. ‘C’mon, help.’

But Pictoria squints her eyes, puckers her lips as if it will better bring on some approximation of masculinity and Henry Fonda’s Southern lilt. ‘Whaddya think I aim to do?’ She blocks Esme’s passage from the stove to the table. The hot black pan clasped between Esme’s hands sputters bacon fat. Pictoria’s lids flutter shut, now black-browed Bette once more. ‘Then kiss me again.’

Pictoria, at fourteen, already taller by a head, is handsome, femininely handsome, and aims to wear exactly what all the other girls do, though with her socks occasionally rolled down to give off pink glimpses of her knees. She laughs with her mouth open, likes to yell just to listen to the echo of her own voice across the valley. Esme can often hear her hurling herself down Denison Street with her friends after school; even with a wet mouthful of dumbbells and sherbets there’s no mistaking her, clattering and chattering the length of the shops on foot rather than riding her light blue Austral, so that her effect on the town is felt longer.

Pictoria leaves an after-burn on the street, a sharp sun halo.

When she’s angry she breaks things, favourite things, then brings Esme small tokens of appeasement: a bird’s nest, a half-used lipstick, a sulphur-crested cockatoo feather, a chocolate tied up in waxed paper with red-lipped kisses planted across the folds.

She wrestles Esme onto the bed when she wants to hug her, her breath warm and chocolatey, threatening one perfect drop of her Cadbury spittle, bubbling at the tip of the top lip. She dares Esme to beg her off or feel it drop, fingers the heart on her cheek. Esme’s stomach turns when her wrists are in the vice of her sister’s fast grip.

They lie laughing on the eiderdown, hearts pounding, heads bent back over the edge, and describe how the world through the window looks upside down. Pictoria sees things simply, in perfect reverse, sky where ground should be, while Esme embellishes these shifting configurations of the familiar, rooms with green rolling ceilings and ducks waddling like waiters, while finches swim backstroke across deep oceans of pillowed cloud.

Except for the cinema, they share little – though even there Pictoria prefers the wit of the comedies, the gum-chewing screwballs, Stage Door, to the tales of redemption that Esme loves, like last night’s Jezebel. What Esme longs for isn’t the bird-footed lankiness of Fred Astaire, but Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, the brooding of Henry Fonda or, though she finds his smile too Cheshire Cat-like, even Clark Gable, moving so close to Carole Lombard between the library shelves in No Man of Her Own that Esme held her breath.

She has recently taken a part-time job at Yen’s Picture Palace in Cooma. Last night, after the last strip of celluloid had clicked through the gate and the loose tab of the reel spun in the dark, Esme stepped out into the cold, windy air and watched the trees blowing, collecting and dispensing all the film’s flickering frames in some kind of sympathetic collaboration, and Henry Fonda’s face burned through her like night itself. Like longing.

Later, back at home, she wrapped his arms around her in sleep, clasping herself, right palm pressed over her left breast, and felt her heart talking in eccentric beats, until Pictoria climbed into the bed beside her.

The four that make a family huddle around the table. Their mother Hortense and dad Jack, spoon up the buttery mushroom gravy, soaking the bread, draining pots of tea. Esme has her back to the fire, is content in the watery morning light.

Jack presses a moistened finger to the tabletop, picking up crumbs, sucking them off, on account of it being his birthday.

‘Dad, you always love a plate,’ Pictoria jokes, referring to his habit of licking his clean when he thinks nobody’s looking.

‘That I do, Sook.’ Jack makes a show of licking his knife now, winking at his youngest daughter. Hortense picks the last crispy rind of bacon from the pan and one of her long brown plaits, not yet fastened to the crown of her head, swings into the congealing fat.

‘Holy smoke, woman, that was mine!’ Jack laughs and attempts to pry the piece of bacon from her fingers.

‘You’d think this man was still trudging through the Depression,’ Hortense remarks.

‘Oh, there’s been a Depression all my life, Hort. Can’t remember a time I haven’t been forced into all sorts of tricks to get by.’

‘Including snatching food out of your poor wife’s mouth.’ Hortense lets the dark rind go. She has a weakness for Esme’s father and his appetites, which are large, despite him being so much older than the rest of them.

Hortense licks her thumb and sighs, satisfied.

‘Girls, you did a fine job.’ She leans back, pats the place where a belly would be if she were round. But she’s lean and strong.

‘You are most welcome,’ Pictoria says and drifts with cuppa to the window; after food, her wild mouth goes quiet.

‘I was up before dawn to get the mushies,’ Esme tells them, reminding everybody it was she, and not Pictoria, who had made the effort. She glances at her mother, who looks over just in time to catch her eye.

‘Ah, you’re always good on the cranky shift,’ Hortense says, pouring herself more tea. The leaves float through milk. She glances to the window. ‘I hope it clears up a bit.’

‘The calves need castrating,’ Jack reminds her.

‘It’s way too muddy, Jack. They’ll get infected.’

He shrugs.

‘I reckon we go fishing instead.’ She slurps her tea. ‘It’s been ages. I can practically hear the worms begging me to save them from this rain.’

‘Didya see the rainbow out the window this mornin’?’ Jack turns to Esme, changing the subject. He likes to point things out. He lives most of the week in a hut in the high country, tending rich men’s stock, and hates to think he might not be the strongest thread in his girls’ tapestry. Esme’s heard people call her father a hermit, but she knows he talks more than most.

‘No, I must’ve missed it.’ Esme turns to the window, in case it is still there. Pictoria’s back blocks the world. And cold rain. ‘Means we won’t be flooded, anyway.’

‘Well, let’s hope there’s no more fires,’ Hortense says.

Outside, the rain has picked up. The bumpy window glass is smeared with it.

‘Mum, there’s no way I’m going fishing.’ Pictoria turns from the window and their mother sighs but says nothing, for she rarely tempers her daughter’s talent for obstinacy.

‘Yes you are,’ Jack says. ‘We’ll have a hot drink by the river, all together.’

‘And build a bonfire,’ Esme adds. Already, she can taste the smoked skin of the trout on her tongue.

Her mother insists on driving the Ford to the river. She’s a clever horsewoman, but prefers speed. Esme watches her mother’s face in profile as she hurtles along, in order better to learn the shape of her love. A mother is like this for some people.

‘I was the first lady in the district with an automobile,’ Hortense likes to tell them, hoping to see her own quick blood break through to the surface of her daughters. ‘They thought me a maniac, and a danger – out to scare the horses and ladies. “I’m a lady meself,” I said to ’em, “though not in a parasol and gloves, mind you.” Anyway, I gave the horses and parasols a wide berth. Think I want the dog licking blood off my fenders? It’s the chooks I was always worried about – they got such a fright when I tore into the yard. You’d think I was a German patrol storming a trench the way they flew at me . . . I don’t know why folks bother with horse-drawn vans anymore. But some people like that old clip-clop so their thoughts can keep up with them. God forbid they might have to think faster.’

They drive over the dusty mud-caked ruts the day’s sun has finally baked, past the mottled gum trees with bruised bark up the shins to the silver strap of river. The truck idles under the weeping tree.

Jack sets his beer in the shadowed water’s edge, ties the necks with string left fastened under a rock, and lets them bob.

‘You can’t buy this buzz,’ he says, and casts his line across the flashing water.

Hort’s a better fisher. Knows how to find the best worms under the leaf litter on the south side of trees and hook their heads rather than their tails; she claims the deepest, shadiest pools quickly upon arrival and Jack curses her cunning. ‘A man’s wife should share the pools. A good wife would give ’er husband first pick.’

‘Ah, crap,’ she says, laughing. ‘It’s nothin’ to do with pools. It’s to do with flair.’ She stands with her line in deep, knows the art of stillness, while Jack fusses with beer and bait, adjusting his rod and line and trying out new spots after just five minutes.

Esme walks the river’s edge. She loves to go off of an afternoon, with the muted light sifting down through the creamy gold cloud. Lizards scatter behind rocks. Birds wing into the tangles of bush. Though, even once alone, Esme feels her mother’s heavy, focused silence trailing her. She turns often, as if followed. Engulfed by sky. The circling, cascading, ribboned gums.

Her father and sister are two bird voices in the world’s distant banter.

After Hort pulls in a trout big enough for their feast, and Esme returns with an armful of kindling, the dry, broken bones of trees, mud-tipped, Jack gives up his line and builds a fire inside a circle of cracked sandstones. Stands back as the flames lick the blue air, admiring – ‘I’ve done a good fire, see’ – and pointing out his knack for stacking branches, and the way he blows just enough oxygen into it to make it bloom; a red gauze.

‘Did I ever tell ya ’bout the time I went to the tooth-thief?’ he asks, cracking gum branches over his knee and stacking them by the fire.

Esme guts the trout while Pictoria secretly fills her father’s matchbox with beetles so he’ll get a sweet fright later. ‘Nah, Dad.’

‘Well, I had a terrible toothache, and me da gave me two shillings to get my tooth out. So I go to the dentist, see, and he’s as pissed as a newt. “Okay,” he says. “Pop up on the chair.” He gives me a swig of his brandy or somethin’, then pulls my mouth open and takes his pliers and starts yankin’ – but he’s pullin’ the wrong bloody tooth out!’

‘Ha, ha!’ Pictoria laughs open-mouthed, suddenly Ginger Rogers.

‘I tried to tell him, but I couldn’t, on account of my mouth being open and his big, dirty fingers in it. After, he made me rinse out all the blood with more of his brandy, and when I told him he pulled the wrong tooth out, he said, “Well, guess you’ll have to go and get two more shillings.”’ Jack slaps his forehead in disbelief. ‘That’s why you’ll never get me back to the tooththief, girls.’

Her father winks. Esme grins, her hands silver with scales.

Then the late afternoon light is inked again with distant, indigo curtains of rain. Jack and Pictoria sneak off to pinch an apple from a nearby orchard. ‘It’s not stealing,’ Jack explains, ‘if you eat it on the spot.’

‘Don’t fill up or this fish’ll waste,’ Hort calls after them.

Jack turns with a shushing finger by the fence – ‘You fish mouth ladies gunna blow our cover’ – and he and Pictoria sly off, giggling.

‘Mum and I’ll scoff this on our own!’ Esme calls to them. She watches her mother’s face as she says it. Hortense frowns in the direction of her own hands, not listening.

‘The thing about being myself . . .’ Her mother diverts back to something long formed in her mind but, until this moment, unspoken. She flips the sizzling, curled-up body of the trout in the black pan. ‘Well, I never was the type to like being tied up in pig string . . . There are things you like to do – most husbands can coax it out of you, your ideas, then talk them down. Not Jack . . .’

They hear a gunshot in the distance and Hort nearly jumps off her log mid-sentence. Mother and daughter look up simultaneously; scan past the fire to where the sky has laid down its dark-blue coat. A lantern flickers out there but shows them nothing.

‘What the hell was that?’

‘Maybe a farmer shooting a fox?’

They are silent, listening.

‘I’m sure we’d hear something straight away, Mum,’ Esme offers.

Then a shape is coming fast at them through the darkening, crunching over leaves: a dog with its tongue out, running forward, circling back, disappearing into the dark with each advance into the light. The dog is soon followed by a man’s wide stride, breaking twigs. ‘Con! Don’t you dare!’

Hort and Esme exhale audibly as the blue cattle dog halts, waiting, tail beating against Hortense’s log, low and nervous.

The man appears: Owen Swan with a rabbit in his fist, swung by its back legs. ‘’lo, Mrs Windle, Miss Esme.’ He squats down by the fire. Owen’s only a few months older than Esme, but his mother – who, despite her politics, is considered an impressive woman in her hat – educated him at home. Owen is known throughout Adaminaby to ‘speak beautifully’.

‘I could roast this for you, ladies, if you’d like.’ He holds up the rabbit.

‘We’ve got fish, thanks, Owen.’

He peers into the pan. ‘I see you’ve outdone me, Mrs Windle.’

She laughs. ‘Oh, Owen, don’t be ridiculous!’

‘We do like rabbit, though,’ Esme says shyly. ‘We dip it in egg and milk and flour and fry it.’

Hort offers him one of Jack’s beers. Owen wipes his hands carefully on his trousers before taking it, then tips back a long but silent sip. He sighs. ‘The cold down your throat and the fire on your front – that’s what I call a delicious contradiction,’ he says, smiling at them.

Esme watches his eyes dart to the darkness and back to the fire as he drinks. A few curly black hairs escape from the collar of his shirt. The bulge in his throat bobs with swallowing, as if in spite of his good manners.

‘Well, I’d best get this home to Mum,’ he says, standing. ‘Thank you, Mrs Windle, for the drink.’

‘We should have you to supper, Owen. Make you a rabbit Windle-style.’

‘I’d love that.’ He tips his hat to Esme, nods to the dog and strolls off. Esme can hear him whistling into the dark.

‘His mum says he paints and plays the violin, but he aims to be a saddler,’ Hort says once he’s gone. ‘He’s got a spunk to him, that’s for certain. Reminds me of what Jack woulda been at his age.’

Esme doesn’t reply. She can still see a trace of him etched, as if onto her eyelids: a golden man, lifting his hat.

Somewhere she hears her mother say, ‘He’d be perfect for you, Ez.’

Esme steps away from the fire; holds up the lantern to her face. The gum moths soon gather around her. Their wings tickle her skin like eyelashes. They’ve only recently hatched, and have but three days to live.

Now she imagines Owen turning back once and finding, among the shifting silhouettes of fire and family, a single girl, standing apart, glowing, winged. She resists the urge to call out; to force him to look back, to see her.

Her cheek has been marked by a cupid. She has time.

GRAVITY
2002

CHAPTER 1

HAZEL DROVE WITH ONE elbow resting on the open window, hand waving in the hot January wind, sun on right arm, pinking. The road she travelled pulled her through the recently burned bush along the sloped seaside towns that prick the curved edge of the continent. Cafe latte rocks sculpted near choppy sea. She stopped for a pee at some beachside toilets and Josie slid right in, barking at the curled meringues of waves. There was still smoke lacing the air.

In the back of her station wagon was a folding chair, a coil of rope and a dozen wooden clothes pegs, a sleeping bag, a doona, a thin pillow, an old futon mattress, a mosquito net, a couple of large plastic bins with lids. Inside one of the bins, random clothes, both winter and summer; a second bin was full of food: cans of chickpeas, dried lentils and beans, rice, pasta, capers, tinned fish. A dozen apples, bananas, black tea. A frying pan, a small silver pot. Her favourite boots and three books, rain gear. A special bag of paraphernalia for taking care of her teeth. Her old Underwood Portable typewriter with the two stuck keys. A hot-water bottle, a jug with a blue plastic tap. A tape recorder with tape. One plate, one fork, one knife, one cup, one spoon.

She thought she gave the impression of purpose, of skilled spontaneity, rather than escape, though even escape can seem purposeful when you are running fast.

She ate fish and chips on the gusty headland overlooking Kiama’s boat-filled bay. Watched throats of pelicans in flight, the dog bounding through the high grass. She slept the night in the caravan park; saw the famous green-lit geyser beyond the lace-curtained square of window.

The next day, Saturday, on her way out of town, she saw a young man and a small blue heeler puppy on the edge of the coast road. He was tall and broad, Driza-Bone flung over his pack, arm outstretched, finger out, face worn down by waiting. The puppy sat patiently on its haunches, blinking cutely. The young man grinned as she drove by. She looked the other way, heading into the smoke, the distant bushfires down the coast, beyond Batemans Bay.

It got hotter.

After lunch by the sea, she turned inland, west along roads stretched with barbed wire. The dry fields. A small stone singleroomed hut covered in ivy, a potential home. Then bare hills with only the spindles of tree trunks dotted over the crest in a diminishing horizon to the fence posts along the road.

That afternoon, she drove into a light wall of humid rain. She’d always marvelled that there were mappable borders where rain began. That you could enter it like a room. She stopped to stand there on the road, feet spread on either side of the rain’s frontier. Her left side in the dry, her right in the rain, and the drops bisecting her face perfectly, as if drawing a line down her centre, dripping onto her gold-rimmed glasses.

Two minutes later, back in the car, under looming clouds and a light splattering on the windscreen, she passed him again, collar up against the windy drizzle, dog shivering as if on command, for effect.

Never, ever stop.

It had been drilled into her since birth. A childhood mantra no more easily dismissed for being an adult in a different country. She wasn’t going to end up dead on the side of the road just because a cute guy had a cute, shivering-on-command dog. She knew her decision was entirely sensible, a woman alone . . . He was hatted and weathered up anyway, it wasn’t pouring, and it was a cattle dog, for god’s sake, skinny as it was. Somebody else had picked him up once; he’d get another ride. She would not feel guilty.

This time, he not only grinned, he waved.

She stopped an hour later. Found a little camping spot along the Shoalhaven River, near the Big Hole. There, the flat leaves hung like beans and the still air smelled of the river and the flies kept close. The trees twisted, some were burnt black and hollow from past fires; yet the new lime sheets of leaves continued unfolding. The banksias stiff with their little mouths, sucking.

She parked her car near a circle of rocks, old ash. She wished she’d brought some sort of cooking stove, as it was way too dangerous for a fire. She was paranoid about burning down the rest of the state.

She and Josie hiked up a pale, sandy path, out of the trees, through the tangled tussock, the ripped, distant horizon of hills contrasting. Enough blue sky to paint a world. Josie kept looking back down into the dried-up fields, nervy, as the trees creaked in the high reaches of wind.

They descended into a sunset as huge and flat as a clock on which was measured and printed one perfect half-hour.

Found a plume of smoke rising from the old campfire; the guy from the roadside on his knees, blowing the flame. A severed twisted trunk in the centre burning; a burnt pot in the kicked-down coals, on the boil. The grey and black dog, fur rising along its spine, shot out from behind a tree, tail out, high-pitched barking. Josie met it tentatively, ready to drop to her back in the dirt.

‘Scout! Get over here!’ The dog turned, wriggled back to him, as if she were in trouble. ‘C’mon.’ He tapped his chest and she leapt, ecstatic, front paws stretched towards his neck.

‘Don’t mind if I share your site?’ he asked. His short, dark hair was flat from his hat, though wayward twists sprouted at his neck. His coat hung over a tree branch.

‘There’s a fire ban. Don’t you know?’

‘I know what I’m doing. Anyway, there’s no wind down here.’

‘Right.’

‘Come sit. It’s going to get cold,’ he said. His brown-green eyes, the rough scratch of stubble and, beneath, the fullest, pouting lips.

She was slightly annoyed. She had imagined herself and her solitude, a pointed speck of light in a field of black, and was even more annoyed at how happy Josie seemed to be now that there was a man around. She was pressing her brown head between his legs, eyes darting around at the noises the night made when it sifted down to meet the bush.

‘Did you walk all this way?’

‘Yep. Thanks to you.’ He smiled.

She smiled, guilty, then shrugged. ‘Man on side of the road. Girl alone, driving. With a kelpie who is scared of the bush and not scared of strangers. I was responsibly wary. Still am.’

‘Fair enough too. Bloke just outa jail. Pretty little foreigner all on her own. No phone for kilometres . . .’

Hazel blinked. Went cold.

He raised a single eyebrow. Played menacing, watched her reaction. Then laughed. Pretended to be stirring a big pot in the air. ‘Joke,’ he said.

‘That wasn’t funny.’ The blood crashed back through her limbs. Twelve years on and she still couldn’t tell when Australians were taking the piss.

The water boiled, steam shooting out the sides of the pot. He grabbed the outermost handle, dragged the pot out of the coals. The sound died. He tilted his head up, listened.

‘What is it?’ She looked around, still shaken.

‘Now the wind’s coming.’

Then she could hear it too, a moment later, coming through the trees, and soon the sparks started dancing. She stood by with her bucket of water, ready.

His name was Rhett.

‘As in Gone with the Wind?’

‘Apparently. My mother had a thing for Clark Gable. Since she was little she always knew she’d name a boy “Rhett”.’

He looked off to the river, and his face seemed to float too. Even in the drought, the Shoalhaven River flowed rapidly, in sound at least, below them.

‘But you’ve seen it? Seen Clark –’

‘Giving a damn?’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

He laughed. ‘I’ve tried, from time to time, to cultivate this,’ he said.

She smiled and her cheeks stretched into what felt like a longforgotten look.

He shared his boiled potatoes sprinkled with salt and pepper and covered in butter which had managed to survive the heat. She made lentil stew with rice and ginger and they scooped it hot from the pan, taking turns. He ate from one side, she from the other and their spoons never touched.

The fire was smaller now; orange heat, dim light. Josie sat in the distance, away from the flames, ears pricked, all eyes, growling at the slightest snap of a twig.

He had spent the past five years overseas as a vagabond of sorts. Lived and slept on beaches and in doorways, hitchhiking, camping in orchards so he could have breakfast in bed. Worked a little. Just back from Greece, unexpectedly. He was meant to be in Spain now. He’d received a letter that stopped him. ‘My mother died,’ he said and was quiet. He squinted towards the river and seemed old then, lines radiating around his eyes.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ How sweet humans could be, she thought, to apologise to people they hardly knew about things they had nothing to do with.

He either had to take care of his family’s land or sell it. He wasn’t sure which he was going to do.

‘Drought’s been bad. I’m worried my horse is starving up in the neighbour’s paddock. Billy, that’s my horse, I got him from a mob gone near wild. Old riding place closed down, the horses just ran loose up our hills. I’d go up at dawn, build a fire and the horses would just come out of the fog like ghosts out of the frozen trees. Only Billy would come close to me, stick his head in the ute window. He missed having somebody riding him.’ Rhett poked the fire. ‘Gone wild again now, probably . . . But this girl here,’ he nodded towards Scout, ‘I just picked up in Ulladulla. Followed me down the highway. No collar. Wouldn’t leave me be.’ He shrugged. ‘Animals like me.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘The Snowy, mainly.’

‘That’s where I’m going! Whereabouts?’

‘Old Adaminaby.’

‘I thought Old Adaminaby was gone.’

‘Not everything.’

‘I’m going to New Adaminaby, actually.’

‘Nothing much there.’

‘I’ve got a job.’

‘You’d be one of the few.’

The river ran green through the stones. She listened to its pouring, the gums widely spaced around it, their bark hanging like strands of hair, baring clean, new bones beneath.

She could feel her mind slowing down.

They boiled river water to do the dishes. Afterwards, they drank hot tea. She from her cup; he from a leftover tuna tin she found in the car.

That night, in the flickering of fire, with a slice of moon and rising smoke oiling the view, Hazel could sense how old the landscape was. She felt as if she were sitting inside history, rather than inside a landscape, travelling through time without moving, perched up on the riverbank, among scatterings of rocks, a curve of sand ground down from other rocks, and low bushes in which so much lichen-laden stone and life was hidden. There was something that haunted her, a memory of the past held by the trees. It reminded her of paintings she had seen, lonely, early European paintings that seemed to clutch and swallow her as she stared. She could never tell if their melancholy was the land’s, the painter’s, or her own.

There was modern life beyond the bush, but all human invention was framed by this land; this view, surrounded. It was always there, that which we tried so hard to escape, waving its dried up arms for attention. We could ignore it, bulldoze it, chop it up, build cafes and factories, but we would never erase it all.

We’d never erase completely what we are.

She explained all this to Rhett in the last light of the fire, the old trunk reduced to charred pieces and ash that the night absorbed.

He shrugged. ‘Two things. One: only an American could come out here and say all that, romanticise everything.’

‘I’m Australian. I’m Australian by way of America. There’s a difference. And anyway, you’re allowed to romanticise your chosen country. That’s the whole point of choosing a place to live. So that you can romanticise it endlessly and then, down the track, after you’ve been here long enough, become completely disillusioned by it.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘No, but that’s what happens.’

‘Two.’ He lifted a second finger. She hadn’t noticed a first finger, but now there were two, hovering in the spark-light. ‘Those painters got it wrong. A lot of those old European painters. Their leaves are wrong, they’re erect like elm leaves, but gum leaves mostly aren’t.’

‘Aren’t erect?’ She smiled.

‘No, gum leaves are limp, they hang down.’

‘Well, maybe those painters were homesick. Maybe it was just a case of melancholy competing with hope.’

He shrugged. ‘Well, you can tell that’s a whole other kind of person from a whole other kind of place painting like that. Australians would never paint in that romantic way. We would never think like that.’

‘Australians aren’t romantics, then?’ she teased.

‘Dunno. All I’m saying is we wouldn’t paint our leaves like that.’

She nodded. ‘Maybe. But I think Australians are romantic, they just don’t like to admit it. Instead, they just focus on this bush lore. So you get the wandering poets, the men from Snowy River, the drovers. They’re our bards. They’re tough and slightly scary, but if you get them drunk around a fire and ask them about their fathers, they’ll cry. Of course, in the city, they have no fires, only drunkenness, and they hate their fathers, so if there’s crying, nobody’s going to know about it. The only way you know they’re romantic is if they try to hide their misty eyes during the movies. Or if you fall in love with one.’

She paused, could feel her tongue shifting around the words she wanted to say. ‘Then you know,’ she added instead.

It was either smoke or wind in her eyes.

‘Australian men are totally, utterly, romantic one on one,’ she resumed, regaining strength, swallowing down the lump in her throat, ‘once you get past all that bravado. And you of all people should know that, coming from the Snowys, with a name like Rhett.’

He looked at her, then turned away, his mouth twisted into a half-smile, a twitch he was trying to hide.

He poked at the fire. ‘Well, I’m Snowy born and bred, Hazel, and the only person I’ve cried for is my mother.’

*

Hazel woke at dawn with dreams of crashes. She nearly hit her head on the car roof.

She saw Rhett down by the river, in the first sun, building a bridge out of rocks. She watched him from the shade of the shore as he hauled stones up, throwing down a pathway, stone by stone, balancing on the last stone, half submerged, as if on the river itself, reaching before him to create a path over water and light.

‘Just so you know, I fall asleep at the wheel.’ They were loading up her car later that morning, making room for his pack and dog, climbing in.

‘Comforting,’ he said.

It felt strange to have a man who was not Danny beside her, watching her drive. She’d seen young men like Rhett on the train in Sydney, late twenties, sleeping, their Akubras over their eyes, their ears sticking out. Handsome, but shy, their green backpacks on the floor.

For a second, she tried to imagine herself and Rhett as a couple, another man’s influence, the slightly sweaty, crumpled smell of him next to her, as if he hadn’t been dusted for years. She imagined this not because it was probable, or even desirable, but in order to trick herself into holding the possibility of some future love in the palm of her hand.

Rhett was watching her strangely. ‘You okay there?’

Hazel nodded, wiping her eyes, then her cheeks, as if their wetness were merely sweat. ‘Driving’s good. Driving helps,’ she said, turning the key.

From her father, a clockmaker, Hazel had learned early that time went only in one direction: if the hands on the grandfather clock at home were clicked backwards, the mechanism would crack. It was a complex machinery of no return, but often, in the last two months, Hazel had found herself forcefully wrenching time backwards, then letting it pool beneath her feet in stale puddles. She had not yet resigned herself to the fact that she must go forward or end up tracing circles, like a planet orbiting her own life.

The road took them through high, hot patches of bush, newly burnt, sharp shots of electric green and the orange of termite mounds; past the sloughed circle of a truck tyre in the shape of a giant snail, feelers out, about to slide onto the road and be crushed. Valleys with falling-down barns and sheds, patches of rust alternating with newer tin, pitched roofs like tents with nothing beneath them.

They bumped past farms in a glaze of sun, illuminated dust and insects smashing against the windscreen, humped over cattle crossings, Hazel hitting them too fast at first, then too slowly the next time.

He sighed as she slowed right down, the car delicately bumping across. Taking the curves easily.

‘Please don’t tell me to drive faster,’ she said, eyeing him. ‘It’d be quicker if we just pushed the car.’

‘I saw a sign on a church back there that said Pray for road safety. What are church billboards for? They’re meant to be a last chance to sway tentative agnostics and atheists into the fold. Jesus loves you. Hell is a cold place. They do not say Pray for road safety unless there’s some serious accidents happening around here.’

He nodded, was staring out the window. He cracked the knuckles on both hands.

She didn’t say that PRAY FOR ROAD SAFETY had seemed like a sign directed at her. She didn’t say that every time she got into a car, she feared she would crash. Danny had insisted it wasn’t normal. People didn’t get in a car and try not to crash. They just drove the car. Hazel said she wasn’t like other people, but Danny had always driven.

‘I think people think they’re, you know, that nothing can happen to them,’ Rhett said.

‘Egotistical magical thinking,’ she added.

‘I knew somebody once,’ Rhett said to the window. ‘Out doing doughnuts in his truck with a couple of friends in a paddock, they spun out, car flipped.’

‘Was he okay?’

‘No. Dead.

‘All of them?’

‘Him, some guy he didn’t even really know in the front seat, the third guy was okay.’

She sighed. ‘Oh.’

‘It’s not an unusual kind of accident.’ He seemed defensive in the face of her compassion. ‘Doing doughnuts is a regular kind of Saturday night occurrence. Doing doughnuts is part of a young man’s job description out here. Like driving fast over cattle grids.’

‘So people just accept it? Kids dying? Just part of the job description?’

He shrugged. ‘Everybody gets a turn.’

Soon they were passing the humped bare plains of the Monaro. Blue-green, brown, undulating.

Hazel could only stare.

‘Four hundred million years ago this was a marine basin,’ Rhett told her. ‘Thirty million years ago, a rainforest. Seventeen million years ago, the continent’s drift north brought showers of volcanic basalt, layers and layers. Trees won’t grow here. Then thirty thousand years ago came the last Ice Age. The first giant kangaroos appeared. Twenty thousand years of Aboriginal presence. Maneroo, they called it, for high plain. Eight thousand years of post-Ice Age summer moth feasts.

‘In all the mountain caves, thousands of moths side by side trying to keep cool, not moving, living off their own fat. The men swept them into their nets, and the women roasted them on rocks in the fire. Or sometimes they’d pound them to paste and fry them. Right here, the world’s first hamburgers.

‘Then white men arrived two hundred years ago with their maps and stakes, their measles. Well . . .’ he shrugged. ‘That was the end of that.

‘Then, in 1968, one of the blokes who worked for Holden was driving through here. He saw the sign for Monaro Country. It made him think of Marlboro Country and Camaro cars and he thought, Let’s name our new sports car after it . . . Cool, eh?’

They passed through Cooma and then out again, turned onto the Snowy Mountains Highway. The hills wide, treeless, though tracked by a hundred years of stock use. The green and brown checked paddocks marked boundaries, or the occasional line of pines.

The fences along the road were invisible, but for the sulphur-crested cockatoos sitting on the posts, one after another, dotted like decorations. As they drove past, the birds took off in unison, wings slicing the light.

A shadow of cloud passed slowly over. It was a shadow to match the shape inside her, now suddenly given voice.

Moving headlong into something.

The field beyond the edge of the road shifted sideways and the tussock waved hello, waved like hair. The silver fish of the upturned gum leaves flashed in wind, in sun.

CHAPTER 2

10 April 2001

My darling boy,

It was lovely but sad to hear your message the other night: sad because I thought I might never hear your voice again, as I seem to drift irrevocably from everybody I have known, so that I have the distinct feeling that I have lived two lives through two different people, until the only memories I have of the past are recovered through stories somebody else has told me. Or perhaps that is how all people experience their lives as they age: as a series of disconnected events, not stitched through time by the circles and trajectories of our soul (for lack of a better word).

Later, I imagined what I would have said to you if you’d reached me. I had only gone next door for a moment, you know – bad timing has always been my lot! In the days since, I have been reluctant to leave the house for fear of missing your next call. They have been the longest, coldest days. And the quietest. How I miss you.

It is a curious thing, writing to somebody who I know will probably not write back. (Correspondence – or lack thereof – has always been a fault of yours!) It is almost not like writing a letter at all, but like sending a time capsule to the future; to a very specific somebody in the future that you know (you hope) will understand you. So you can say everything. I know you have been angry, are probably still angry with me. Maybe I should have protected you better. Your father’s sadness was furious. I realised that most clearly only once he was gone. The air in the house shifted; I no longer got a static shock when I touched the chairs and the walls. Sometimes I can see you all, around me, though it’s rare now. I expect you still have the same laugh. As for the business of a face, I cannot picture it really, not the older face anyway, that you must have: not the changed face of your new homes and habits, but only the face I once knew but have forgotten outside of the photos I keep close. Greece has always been a blur to me, which is perhaps why you have become faceless there. Nevertheless, I understand how Penelope must have felt! Send me another postcard or, even better, a recent picture of you that I can keep by my bed. Otherwise, sooner than I know, you will be as unfamiliar and old as I am, without me ever seeing all your different shades of faces in between.

I love you very much. You know that, don’t you?

Mum

Alesandra put the pen down, looked over her letter and stood up slowly. She placed the kettle on the blue flame and picked up her book from where it rested on the arm of the chair, face down, like a bird with wings open, her son’s postcard a bookmark beside it.

She could hear the youngest neighbour girl outside, ripping down old weedy vines from the yellow stone walls of her house, making room to plant a ‘native yellow thing’, as she put it. Her axe chipped against the ground, both slicing and thugging the dirt. It was an eerie sound. The girl herself was gentle as leaves; she talked to the cat as she chipped earth.

‘A little tree,’ Alesandra heard her say. Then something about roots.

She could hear her moving stones, just barely, above the kettle coming to a boil. Outside it was unusually warm, but inside, the sandstone walls breathed a river-rock thickness that kept the heat out and so she could sit drinking tea.

She picked up the white china teapot, removed the lid, dumped clumps of old tea-leaves out the window.

Alesandra didn’t need much. Shelves of books to return to. A pot of tea. The soft, insistent creaking of tin as the skeleton of her mother’s old house next door swayed in the wind. The silent thoughts of one mind, ticking in the yellow light.

Oh, you are the gardens
oh, I looked on them with such
hope. An open window
in a cottage home –, and you close all but approached
me, pensively. Lanes I found, –
you had just left them . . .

She always said that if she were trapped on a desert island she’d only need her poetry.

Only that.

Her worst fear was not dying. Her worst fear was going blind.

. . . and the mirrors of the town merchants
were still dizzy with you and threw, amazed,
my own too sudden face . . .

‘Caroline Jessamine,’ the girl said to the cat as she lowered the plant into the dirt, her voice swimming through the window, and with it, the remembered smell of earth after new rain. Because it hadn’t rained in so long.

Only the simplest things distracted her. A cup of tea. And today, Rilke.

She lifted the blue cup, blew across the surface, put it down again, too hot.

. . . Who is to say the same
bird did not resound through us,
yesterday, separately, in the evening?

This was all that Rhett instinctively knew, imagined and was told about his mother’s last moments when he had returned to Athens from an eight-month stint on the Greek island of Anafi and received the two letters, carefully folded together: one was the last-ever letter from his mother, and the other, more of a scrawled note, was from his mother’s neighbour, Byrne, expressing her sympathy and hoping her words would find him safe across the sea. By the time he’d opened them, however, eight months late, his mother had been long buried at the top of the hill next to his father and his two brothers, close to the rest of the extended family in the town’s old cemetery.

It was inconceivable to him that he, Rhett Davys, just twenty-six, had become the last living member of his family.

That night, Rhett had wandered through the Plaka, stunned-drunk on ouzo, his mother’s letter a heavy stone in his shirt pocket. Walked electric, anonymous, through the spinning, twisting roads, the glowing columns of the Acropolis on the hill visible from every street, though the roads would always pull him in the wrong direction, away. At every turn, glimpses of faceless girls, black hair swinging down their backs. He followed them until he was lost in the hum of nocturnal souls, his shoes echoing against the cobblestones like marbles, doubling the count.

CHAPTER 3

SUNDAY AFTERNOON WAS DEEPENING across the valley; the slanting, piercing light through a pale blue window trimmed in a deeper blue, revealed a small worn kitchen. There was space for the old dining table, four chairs, an electric stove beside a wood-burning one. Under the kitchen window a new Formica bench held an aluminium sink whose tap ran with bore water. A plastic jug of tank water for drinking sat on the bench.

A mother and her daughter sat across the width of the table, facing each other. A second mother and her daughter sat across the length of the table, facing each other.

Two white heads. Two mousy brown heads. Four generations, combined age two hundred and fifty-five years. Two pensions, one carer’s allowance and a part-time wage. Each bent over separate tasks, cups of tea.

A bowl of apples, an orange and a banana between them.

The youngest, at twenty-four, Lucetta leaned over the table, rearranging broken pieces of blue teacup like a puzzle, the tube of Tarzan’s Grip in her left fist. Made a clear line across the pottery shard, then pressed another piece to it, two notes of jazz. Her hair fell forward over the glazed pieces like wet sand over a blue towel.

Lucetta’s mother, Byrne, read from the back of the package. ‘“Press surfaces firmly together and allow a few minutes for the adhesive to grab.”’ She lifted a foot, worked a toe beneath the cuff of her jeans, scratched at her ankle.

Lucetta was studying the shards of teacup on the table while the glue did its stinking work. ‘I think there’s a piece missing, Mum.’

Byrne slipped her glasses back on, still scratching. ‘It doesn’t matter, bub. Nobody’s going to drink out of it anyway. We’ll just put it on a shelf, so we can stare at it now and then and feel at peace.’

‘No, I’m putting it back in Alesandra’s kitchen – on her own shelf,’ Lucetta announced.

After the body was carried away by ambulance last April, Lucetta and her mother faced Alesandra’s kitchen. Lucetta wanted to keep everything exactly as it was – the teacup shattered on the floor, the letter on the table, the tea moulding in the pot – nothing tidied, no aspect of death washed away. She wanted to honour Alesandra by leaving her kitchen as untouched as she had left her husband’s work shed, the bedrooms of her sons. Anyway, somebody from the family would show up eventually. It would be their job to sort it out.

But Byrne said no, a woman would want her kitchen clean.

So they pushed the button on the CD player and listened to the last disc left in, a bespectacled, round-headed Pablo Casals playing J.S. Bach, 6 Cello Suites, according to the CD cover. Then they tidied the dishes, emptied the teapot, folded the laundry on the line, swept the floors, fluffed pillows, but left Alesandra’s toothbrush by the bathroom sink, her dressing gown on the bed, the book of poems on the chair by the fire.

‘There’s spirit in the configurations of objects,’ Alesandra had once explained to Lucetta. ‘Andy’s desk, for instance – look at it, all piled up with stuff. I didn’t touch it. Accounts scribbled on ripped envelopes, girls’ photos, bits of whips he was braiding, a plug of tobacco, a horseshoe, an undeveloped film that probably rolled around on the floor of his car for months before he finally plunked it here. It’s all the half-finished bits of his life. Follow the stuff and a finished story will tell itself, just nicely.’

Alesandra’s letter to her son they avoided until last. Byrne finally took it home, stuffed it into an envelope, and muddled for days for the right words to accompany it. In the end, she decided that in matters of death, as in most matters, direct was best.

Now Lucetta attempted to glue Alesandra’s favourite teacup back together, while her own family’s pieces revolved around her.

The lights in the room flickered.

‘It’s the shortest thing and the longest thing,’ announced Byrne’s old aunt Esme suddenly. The others looked up. Esme was hunched over, hands in her lap, massive hands that Lucetta might have just glued to two frail, snapped-off wrists.

‘What’s the shortest and longest thing, Auntie?’ Byrne asked.

‘Life, of course.’ Esme lifted one hand to the table and laced her swollen first finger through the bone china handle on her teacup. Earl Grey with several dashes of brandy. ‘Life,’ Esme repeated. ‘Of course I mean life, Byrne.’ She took a long, noisy sip and let the cup drop back on the table with a clatter.

‘Seems trucks are the thing again.’ Esme’s mother Hortense, ancient at a hundred and one, was squinting into her motoring magazine. Her face was like dough recently melted in the heat, puffed yet sinking. Her long snowy plaits had been fastened on either side of the stripe of her pale pink part. ‘Remember that ’26 Ford truck I had, Ez?’ Her shaking fingers left the magazine and began to peel the orange, delighted by the unwinding scrolls of thick skin. Let them fall into the hammock of her lap.

‘I couldn’t possibly keep track, Mum,’ Esme sighed, ‘of all your vehicles.’

‘It had no brakes,’ Hortense explained hoarsely, lifting a bit of peel to her nose. ‘I mean, it had only these external brakes, on the rear drums. Hopeless when they got wet. So I took ’em off eventually. It was fine, driving around like that, if you knew. Then the army took it off me for the war effort. I laughed myself stupid thinking of them coasting down their first hill.’ Hortense chuckled and her throat rasped. She put a moon of orange into her mouth. Let it rest whole in her cheek.

Esme folded and unfolded her hands. ‘Anyway . . . now I wonder who’ll go to Birdsville with me,’ she said.

‘What’s this about Birdsville?’ Lucetta asked.

‘I’m going to Birdsville, as soon as I pull myself out of this rut.’ Esme took another long sip of tea.

‘I thought we were going to the movies,’ Lucetta asked, confused.

‘There’s been a rut since Alesandra died. I’m in it. People die, I don’t die – why is this?’

‘Alesandra had a good life, Auntie,’ Lucetta said to comfort her, though she knew it was more than halfway to a lie.

‘Oh, leave her to her ruts.’ Hortense rolled her eyes, spit a pip into her cupped palm. ‘There’s always some rut.’

Byrne placed a hand on Lucetta’s shoulder. Rubbed it with her thumb as if she were trying to wear away the fabric between their two sides of skin.

Lucetta shimmied away. ‘Mum . . .’ Trying to focus.

‘It says to ensure the surface is clean. I don’t think it was very clean, Luce. Lying on that floor for days,’ Byrne remarked.

‘So what’s in Birdsville, Auntie?’ Lucetta asked.

‘I don’t know what’s there. I’ve never been.’

‘It’s the arsehole of the earth. It’s a shit-box, Auntie,’ Byrne laughed.

‘You think I’ll never get there. I’d like to go there, send you a postcard.’

‘Who sends postcards anymore?’ Hortense wondered out loud.

‘I have a friend in Canada who emails me photos of the weather,’ Lucetta said. ‘Like snow. Like a picture of snow.’

‘Imagine that,’ Hortense said. ‘You’d love that, Ez.’

‘You could start a chat room just dedicated to the weather,’ Lucetta added.

‘There’s enough weather here to do me,’ Esme grumbled, rubbing her knee.

‘Auntie, where did you get that bruise?’ Byrne lifted Esme’s skirt. The bone leapt up into a round plum at the joint.

‘I fell over, didn’t I?’ Esme snatched at her dress, yanked it back down.

‘Let me see.’ Byrne knelt down. ‘Can someone grab the arnica cream from the kitchen bench?’

‘She says “grab”. You try leaping and grabbing at my age, Byrne.’ Hortense didn’t move.

‘It doesn’t hurt, Byrne,’ Esme insisted.

‘Jesus wept.’ Byrne went for the cream herself.

The phone rang.

‘I could’ve wept myself,’ Esme said over the ringing.

Byrne snatched up the receiver. ‘Byrne speaking!’ Her voice turned cold. ‘I’ll just get her.’ She dropped the handset to the bench.

Lucetta lifted two fused shards of her puzzle, two-handed, like a priest presenting the host. ‘There’s definitely a piece missing. ‘Can somebody please hold this while I go next door?’

Esme reached out. ‘Give it here, love.’

‘Auntie, your sister is on the phone,’ Byrne announced.

Lucetta carefully handed the half-glued cup to her great-aunt, watched as Esme pulled the cup closer to herself slowly, focused. Woman and cup settled into a position of repose.

‘I said it’s Pictoria. On the phone.’

‘Can’t you talk to her for a minute? I’m holding this.’

‘I have nothing to say to her. I’m not speaking to her anymore.’ Byrne knelt and began rubbing the thick white cream into Esme’s bulge.

‘Well, she obviously doesn’t want to speak to me.’ Hortense looked put out but, forearms shaking, managed to lift herself up from her chair. She shuffled across the lino, breathing heavily, and picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Sook, it’s your mother here . . . I know, we all sound prehistoric nowadays . . . Yes, Byrne’s a naughty girl,’ she croaked. ‘Well, it’s a bit frenzied around here just at the moment. We’re off to the pictures in a bit. How’s the Italian?’

Lucetta grabbed the torch, needing fresh air, escape. Talk went in circles in her house. Often she felt like she was in the tumble-dryer, going around and around with the same clothes.

Lucetta ran past the falling-down shack that had half sunk into the ground next to her family’s weatherboard cottage to the two-storey stone house where Alesandra had lived. An old mud and gravel driveway near the doorway of the shack bisected the small hill the three buildings shared, lined up along its crest and snaked down a hundred metres, disappearing into the shallow black lake.

Even after the sandstone house was emptied of life, Lucetta continued to visit. Last time she’d come by, she’d left Bach’s fat notes on repeat, let them turn until the music elongated, flooded the rooms with sound. They seemed almost as alive as she once knew them, being chased around the damp floorboards as a child, barefoot; her heart on fire.

Even though it was blowy, with that January bushfire heat, the dark house, empty of person, was twice as cold as any place fit for human habitation.

Lucetta shivered, searched the room with the torch, then quickly got down on her hands and knees, scanning the floor for the missing blue triangle. Her fingers flickered under the bottom lip of the bookshelf, and slid out a dusty postcard.

On the front, a picture of a bell-domed white chapel towering over a floor of silver ocean: Our Lady Kalamiótissa Monastery, Anafi.

On the back, scrawled in black:

Dear Mum, I am in a ghost town full of cats. Only cats and the occasional woman hanging laundry or man carrying bags of lemons, his bread. At 60 cents a loaf it’s cheap here and the people eat heaps of it, feed it to their chickens, their donkeys. A man walks by we exchange greetings, Yá sas. Most everybody here is old, as you would expect. There’s a mountain of rock that rises out of the sea with this little white church on top that I’ve been looking at. This is the one. Looks like she’ll be my lady. Going there tomorrow. I feel the need to move, walk, be everywhere at once. Rhett.

Lucetta read it twice; her stomach went tight, corseted like a band across her chest. She paused with the postcard in her hand, nudging up things long swallowed.

‘Luce!’ Her mother’s voice carried across on the wind from their front verandah. ‘Where’s the nail polish remover? Auntie’s glued her fingers together!’

Lucetta slid the postcard back under the bookshelf, left the edge of it sticking out. Saw a shimmer of blue, a lost piece of teacup, next to the far leg of the table.

She squeezed it in her palm; let it indent her skin, left the room, left the old, inky music ringing out from the piano’s shadow.

CHAPTER 4

AFTER THEIR EARLIER, BRIEF conversation, Hazel hadn’t made much of a dent in Rhett’s distance, nor he in hers. He’d sat with his head turned for the last hour, his hat on his lap, looking out the window.

She looked straight ahead, her right foot on the accelerator; attempted to push away the dread, the off-handed diminishment, that she had been hoping, by means of all these kilometres stacked up between her and Sydney, to give the slip.

Rhett shifted in his seat as they got closer to their destination, and she imagined that he’d wound his talking down now that it was no longer necessary; now that the huge, flapping trout of his town and his past was in sight. Knew he would take leave of her in a hurry as soon as she parked the car.

Hazel needed to find a hotel to check into, or a caravan park. Introduce herself to her new boss, the curator of the museum of drowning, which was how she thought of it.

Drowning suited her mood.

A woman and lover washed away in the rain.

Except it hadn’t rained in months around here, perhaps years, that much was obvious.

Instead, what she realised as they pulled into Adaminaby’s main street – desolate even for a Sunday, shadows lengthening and negating the distances beyond, distances of hills and grass flattened by a breeze that a moment ago she had loved – was that she had no idea what she was doing in this town. It seemed as if it had been kicked in the ribs. She suddenly wished she could just keep driving through.

Hazel got out, stretched, her heart thumping. Rhett sat in the passenger seat, now staring straight ahead, as if he couldn’t bear to look around.

The curtains of houses were shut, doors barred, gardens were empty. It was as if nobody lived in the town with the trout flipping at its front door. Only two black alpacas and a fat ram, pressed up against an ordinary garden fence nearby, peered out.

Many of the shops had FOR LEASE signs in their windows. The remnants of takeaways and butchers. There was a post office. A real estate agent. A pub. A bakery. And one grocery shop, still open.

Hazel went in.

It sold hats, gloves, long underwear, frozen meat, dog food, licorice, canned goods, fishing rods and tackle, bait, matches, torches, tents, chairs, kerosene, charcoal, bread, eggs, salmon pâté, axes, hammers, plates, nails, light bulbs, books, postcards (drovers, trout fishing, roaring rivers, dammed lakes, skiing, wildflowers), milk, smoked trout, cigarettes, maps.

There were two women, obviously a mother and daughter, behind the register. They watched as Hazel inspected a wilted head of iceberg lettuce.

‘Can I help you, love?’ the older woman asked.

‘I don’t suppose you sell anything organic?’

The women stared at her.

‘It’s okay, never mind,’ Hazel said.

She collected a bottle of water, a box of crackers, one container of salmon pâté and a postcard of Lake Eucumbene and placed them on the counter.

‘You want to bag while I scan?’ the older woman said to the younger.

‘I hate bagging.’

‘Well, you scan and I’ll bag then.’

The daughter moved the mother aside, dragged the box of crackers over the blinking light.

‘We just got our scanner,’ the woman said proudly. ‘We’re very excited about it.’

The daughter turned to Hazel. ‘You could try Owen – he used to have a roadside stand just out of town. He sold onions and stuff from his garden. Played his violin sometimes. I haven’t seen him in a while, though.’

By the time Hazel got back to the car, she was sure Rhett would be gone, but he was still sitting in the passenger seat listening to the car’s cassette player and Hazel could hear her own voice coming back at her like a forgotten echo.

‘It’s easy to think that the things you’ve lost you’ll get back . . . I don’t know, there’s this idea of yourself, one that fixed at twenty-one or twenty-five . . . that idea of who you are – and as you change, move into your thirties, you think it’s slipping away . . . and one day you realise, if you ever have any hopes of changing anything, it’s going to have to be now . . .’

Hazel leapt for the door, cranked it open.

‘It’s talking to your mother that’s making you think like this. This happens every time,’ a man’s voice interjected.

‘My mother has nothing to do with this. My mother thinks she’s a Buddhist –’

Hazel ejected the tape. She looked at him.

‘Sorry about that.’ He reddened. ‘I thought it’d be some music.’

She shrugged. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Who was that man?’

‘Danny. My partner. Well, not so much anymore – he dumped me.’ She tried to sound as if it didn’t matter. ‘He had this habit –’

‘Of dumping?’

‘Of recording my conversations when I was drunk. So I’d know the next day exactly what I had ranted about. That was our last night together . . . I guess I was too drunk . . . I don’t know why I brought it, actually.’

She threw the tape into the back seat. But couldn’t stop herself now that his name had formed in her mouth.

‘Of course Danny always knows where he is and how he got there, drunk or not. I talk things up to the point I sometimes don’t know what I’m saying, you know? Danny always could talk things down. Situations, people, himself . . . He has this ability to defuse panic, paranoia and mindless aggression. He talked me right out of the relationship, actually, to the point where I practically gave him my blessing.’

She realised this. Right now, she understood his sly work.

Rhett leaned back in his seat, his hat pulled down over his eyes.

She had said too much already. This was how she pushed people away, she reminded herself. Now that she was in a new place, she’d try not to be so self-indulgent. Yet Rhett looked like he had no intention of going anywhere.

‘This is Adaminaby, isn’t it?’ she asked, half hoping they’d come to the wrong town.

‘Oh, yep,’ he answered warily.

‘Well, is there any reason you’re still, ah, sitting there?’

‘I’m not quite ready to be here,’ he said. ‘If that’s okay.’

She nodded.

‘Here’s a deal,’ Rhett said. ‘You drive me home, and I’ll give you some place to stay for a little while. Provided, of course, you talk only some of the time and you don’t record me or anything if you catch me drunk.’

She was relieved that she didn’t have to face that deserted town; and that he hadn’t run away. ‘Deal.’

They pulled out, and he directed her through the back streets, passing the old Anglican Church. Sandstone blocks of many shades and white stone buttresses and a witch’s peaked black cap.

‘That was moved from Old Adaminaby,’ he said, pointing to it. ‘Stone by stone.’

The late, gold planet Hazel and Rhett looked down on was mostly made of lake; a low indigo lake, edged by a wide band of red mud and patches of moss. A cemetery of hacked, blackened tree stumps were stuck into the mud and moss. Further off, lines of gum trees had waded out to their death in the shallow water, branches stiff with despair. All of it – earth and tree – seemed made of the same raw and bleached stuff, as if the colours had bled into each other. The lake was surrounded by bare, cloud-struck hills and, beyond, the snow-capped peak of Mount Kosciuszko.

Rhett whistled once, low, when he looked down.

‘Damn. Drought’s been bad.’

Rhett directed Hazel down a dirt road that bore a crooked sign, FROST LANE, onto a small, hilled peninsula at the edge of the wind-roughed lake. The road continued into the red mud, down into the water itself, and disappeared beneath it.

They got out on the shore and stretched. The mud was tiled with thin square sheets of white and pink shale. Hazel noticed a single boat in the far distance, heard the buzz of somebody waterskiing.

‘So that’s where the old town used to be?’

‘Welcome.’ His arm swept out to present the long, stretched shape of the lake. The waterskier moved like an insect over the surface.

A hundred metres behind them on the peninsula sat three houses in close proximity, backed by a patch of pine and poplar trees and brown hills, painted by late sunlight, shadowed by clouds.

Hazel and Rhett walked up from the mud to a dead lawn in front of an old sandstone house that gave the impression of a face whose shuttered eyes were closed against the light, a chimney on each end of the roof lifted like rabbit ears.

‘I don’t think it’s been opened since Mum – I mean, I haven’t been here, so I’ve no idea what state it’s gunna be in. But there are plenty of rooms.’ He pinched at the skin on his chin, several times. Hazel noticed a pink scar in the cleft.

‘And who lives there?’ Hazel pointed to a dilapidated red shack next door. The dirt around its periphery orbited in slow gusts.

Rhett’s glance skated over the shack to a small pale-blue weatherboard cottage with a lopsided extension on one side, fully enclosed by a verandah.

‘That would be your new neighbours,’ he answered, distracted momentarily as Scout took off across the mud after a small rabbit.

A couple of paddocks behind the blue cottage held a white horse, a few Herefords and calves and an array of old auto mobiles. A ute sat out front. ‘I’ll introduce you tomorrow,’ he said.

‘No, I meant this one.’ Hazel gestured towards the red shack.

‘That? Well, nobody for about the last fifteen years. It’s half burnt for one thing. Squatter came one night, nearly barbecued the lot of us. But before that, way back, it belonged to my gran. Mum’s mum.’

‘Can I see it?’ Hazel was already getting ideas. It was closer than she would have liked to the other two houses, but Rhett had set her straight about the local rental market on the way from town. Some little wood cabin by a creek set in the valley of the aching brown hills wasn’t going to happen. ‘They rent those out to skiers and fishermen from Sydney for a thousand dollars a week at least,’ he had said.

She was either going to have to lower her standards or rent in town.

‘I just thought,’ she started to explain tentatively, not wanting to further bruise the untouched parts of him, ‘well, that you’d want your house to yourself for a little while. You know . . .’

He shrugged as if the thought had never occurred to him. Then looked to his front door apprehensively.

‘You can’t live over here, but.’ And he stepped five steps along the stone verandah of his house to the crooked white door of the shack. ‘This is the back, actually. Gran wanted her privacy, so she had the house turned around when she moved it up here. Didn’t matter. There’s no privacy here, in case you were wondering.’ He pushed the door open. It swung on its bottom hinge, angled out from the charcoaled jamb, which crumbled a little against Hazel’s hand.

Inside, a tiny entranceway led to an old washroom, partly tiled. The floorboards were worn and covered in pine needles, gaps between them through which Hazel imagined a lifetime of buttons had fallen, kernels of corn, beads, coins. The plaster around the old kitchen lay in pieces on the floor, big holes in the walls, revealing the slab boards beneath, as if the bones of the house had at last asserted themselves. Leaks of pale light shone through the walls. Dances of dust. In places, layers of paint and wallpaper over the plaster were chipped back, a fragile map of colour: mint green, cornflower blue, peach, a kind of sunlight yellow. Ornate lengths of rose-entwined ceiling dangled or lay across the floor in dusty shatters. The fireplace was charred black. The dust irritated her nose and under the dry, musty air was the tang of old mould.

‘First fire, then winter’s damp and mice got in, now it seems even a major drought can’t dry this place out.’

But there was an old wood-burning oven with range top and a window that let the azalea in, its pink arms reaching.

‘Does that work?’ Hazel asked, pointing to the wood stove.

‘Last told.’

Above the fireplace, a little alcove.

He tipped his head back. ‘My mum slept up there as a child. Used to be a set of stairs in there.’ He pointed to what was once the dining or lounge room, now almost totally burnt. The floor was just an occasional plank over a black abyss. Tree branches grew through the windows.

Hazel craned her head through the once wide doorway and was littered with a shower of pine cone chips. She tilted her head up. A flock of black cockatoos, pine cones in their claws, took off from the rafters, screaming. The sky poked through what was once the roof in deep blue and cumulus patches.

For all its bareness, the room had the feeling of a little rippling cave, enclosed by leaf and branch. It was brimfulness and brewing. And it was cooler than she would have expected with all of the windows and walls half-open.

‘It’s worse since I last saw it. I’ll have to pull it down soon. Shame,’ he said, kicking at the plaster near his foot and watching it shatter.

She had fully intended to rent a room or a small flat in town, if not a cottage close by in the hills. She’d considered a caravan in the Shady View Caravan Park, whose details she’d perused on the net before she left Sydney. She’d pictured quiet reading, for which she’d pictured lights. She’d pictured a fridge for her vodka and perhaps a bathtub for her bubbles. She’d pictured a bed that stayed clean and a shining toilet.

But this house, when she stepped into it, was cool, dim and flickering, a nest she could retreat to. She realised she wanted a bower. She wanted to live in the whorl of a shell, with pink walls turning in, smaller smaller into the very tight heart of the thing, until she was forced to accept her absolute aloneness. A shell was so much more than a house, of course; it was an armour and organism, it was a live thing, ticking.

‘I’d like to live here,’ Hazel said.

‘Unless you’re a carpenter with an advanced degree in bulldozing, this place is fit for birds only.’

‘I’ll live in it like it is.’

‘Well, you can’t.’

‘Okay, I’ll just live in this bit and the alcove.’

‘Look, Miss Romantic, I can’t be legally responsible.’

‘That’s fine. I mean, you don’t have to be.’

He looked at her warily.

‘I know it sounds strange, but this way, we each get the space we need, and there’s still company close by.’ She looked around. ‘I guess there’s no toilet?’

‘There’s an outhouse around the back; I don’t know if it works. We’ll take a look. Or I can always lend you a shovel . . . You’re serious?’

Hazel looked around, excited. Nodded. ‘It’ll give me something to do, not fix it up, you know, but just make it liveable.’

‘You don’t think you’ll have enough to do here, with a job and all?’

She glanced out the window onto an oblong of shifting lake, red mud, the trunk of a dead tree in a twisted grimace. ‘I am suddenly slightly worried.’

Rhett shrugged. ‘Your life. Least I won’t have to hear you talk, talk, talking at me.’

‘I’ll be cobbling together new rooms in the moonlight.’

He looked around, rubbed the pink scar on his chin. ‘There’s this area in Athens, below the Acropolis, where some of the islanders of Anafi came to in the 1800s,’ he said. ‘They built a little settlement, I guess you’d call it. Anafiotika. Little Anafi.’

‘You speak Greek?’ She was surprised.

‘I know about three words. Anafiotika is one of them. I only know useless things. I didn’t finish school. No skills here . . . Anyway, there were laws against building too close to the Acropolis. There were people already living there, of course, right under it. The lawmakers wanted them out. But there was also a law that said any fully built house belonged to the owner of that house and could not be torn down. The people of Anafi were builders, good builders, and it’s said they waited until night and then quickly erected a house. A whole gang of them would start and finish a house from scratch within the space of a night. The next morning, the police would pass by and find a house where no house had been the day before, but couldn’t do anything about it.’ His mouth curved into a grin. He liked that story, she could tell.

‘Stories are useful,’ she said. ‘That’s a skill.’

He looked away, as if thinking about it.

‘So what’ll you charge me, teller of stories?’

‘For the story?’

‘For the house.’

He laughed. ‘My gran will be happy for the company. I’ll even give you a starter kit: box of candles and a match, on the house. Just don’t burn us all down. I mean that seriously.’

Hazel smiled, nodded and sneezed all at once, and a twirled vine fell from the ceiling, shattering over the floor in a puff of powder.

After parking the car in Rhett’s yard, Hazel unloaded her stuff into a wheelbarrow she had found.

Rhett carried over an aluminium ladder, a chair, a broom and a box of chipped crockery.

‘We’ve – I’ve got a dining table for twelve and only one bum to plonk there, and I come from a family of potters, so no worries about dishes, though some of these have had several lives already,’ he said, lifting a chipped ocean blue mug, mapped with glue.

Inside, there was a kitchen table, wobbly, a couple of chairs missing seats, a cupboard and, from what she could tell, one dresser and one mirror upstairs in the loft.

Hazel swept out the living space and washed the cupboard of dried splattered mud and unpacked the dishes: mugs with shattered glazes, raw slabs of coloured plates and bowls with cracks across the bottom.

She leaned the ladder against the edge of the loft and swept dried leaves and pine needles and plaster dust and cobwebs and bits of dirt, shingles of cone, from the alcove. Dragged her futon up. She felt like a pioneer, saying, With a little bit of work, we could make a home here.

Then she explored the backyard, Josie at her heels. The garden itself was small but enclosed by a sandstone wall with a small door opening into Rhett’s side, the means by which Rhett’s grandmother and Rhett’s mother had visited each other. The wall was high enough on both sides to offer her some privacy. She peeked through the door in the wall and found Rhett’s mother’s neglected garden beds, the stalks of chives and daisies still growing. Meadow-high tussock led from Hazel’s garden out to a patch of Monterey pines, the lowest branches high enough to create a dark cave of wind, the ground beneath soft with dried red needles, resounding with the thunk of falling cones.

The evening light shifted and sifted through the branches, heavy with insects. When she walked back across the garden, a dry wind blew from the lake. The cicadas were deafening.

First the pink came and then the forever summer twilight. She watched the waxing moon rise over the lake and ate her salmon pâté with crackers.

She lit three of Rhett’s candles, one on the windowsill, two on the dresser with the chipped mirror, lighting one from each other, tipping them over so the wax spilled and puddled and thickened enough to grip the candle.

Her room, a nest of yellow light.

Hazel undressed, her skin yellow too; she felt like a young girl again, certainly not thirty-five, and for a second she was somebody still with promise. Seeing herself in the dust-ghosted mirror, it wasn’t too late.

In the first moments of darkness after she blew the candles out she had moments of not quite fear, but anxiety. The windows full of vine and leaves and birds settling in for the night. The wind had not died down; it scorched over the lake, lifting it into small, moonlit peaks, moaned through the pines and shook the bones of the house itself. The tin roof groaned above her and the exposed beams of her ceiling rained dust. She could hear Josie pacing down below, unsettled by the strange sounds and separation.

Hazel realised that nobody knew where she was. No email. No mobile phone (there was no coverage anyway, Rhett had informed her). No phone line. But there was a strange peace in that too, a freedom.

Then she heard the clean, loud thrum of a hotted-up car engine and headlights were bright sparks in the room. There was a banging next door, car doors, a screen door, and a clattering of footsteps on the porch of the blue cottage, followed by a slow shuffling through the dirt.

‘You need help, Gran?’ a young woman shouted.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine . . .’ A more ancient croak.

The front door closed, but a moment later it opened again.

Her new neighbours.

‘– rounded diet?’ Hazel heard a woman say. There was a thump and then the squeak squeak, squeak squeak of a porch swing. ‘She’s telling me about a well-rounded diet?! I had cheese and tomato toast for dinner, a bowl of cereal, a glass of juice and twelve Jaffas – I don’t know how much more well-rounded you can get than that.’

‘She tells me all the time, Byrne,’ interrupted the older woman. ‘Don’t think yourself special on that count.’

‘Well, I think I’m old enough to know what I want and what I don’t want to eat,’ the one called Byrne said.

The squeak squeak continued, rhythmic. They might as well have been in bed with Hazel, so loud were their voices.

‘As I was saying, now don’t get me wrong,’ said the old woman, ‘it wasn’t that I minded the film. It was more that I couldn’t see it.’

‘It’s your prescription, Auntie.’

‘I looked and looked, my lenses were perfectly clean. I couldn’t see it –’ the woman emphasised the word see, ‘because of the speed of it.’

‘Oh, you mean the cuts.’

‘Is that what they’re called? I thought there was something wrong with the projector.’

‘Edits, cuts, I think.’

‘We called them splices in my day. Anyway, the speed of it. I couldn’t track it – the whole thing was like a wild blur of colour and noise.’

‘I liked it, Auntie. I liked that Ewan McGregor. He was kind of kinky. I found it rather kinky when he sang.’

‘I don’t know about that. Don’t talk to me about that word. I don’t even know what that word means . . . I just couldn’t see it. Just a blur. Not like in my day . . .’

‘A kinky blur.’ The woman laughed.

Hazel got out of bed and crawled over to the first of three side windows. Now that the front light was on, Hazel could see through the screen of leaves to the neighbour’s front verandah.

On it two women, the one called Byrne, about fifty, on a porch swing, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt, her short, sandy hair framing her face, her arm across the back of the swing as if around an invisible partner, swaying slightly, her toes struggling to reach the ground, pushing her along. She had a book open in her lap, but she was staring instead of reading, tweaking a secret smile, jumpy with mischief.

A bright orange and black striped Holden was parked right up close to the verandah steps.

‘I’d have been happy to be whisked away by him,’ Byrne said.

‘Once upon a time you could see what you were watching,’ said the older woman, her back hunched over, shoulders curled inward as if growing around hot treasure. She sat on a chair with her thin legs encased in loose hose, her dress dipping where she held her legs apart. A red hat sat on her head. Pills of red wool and the fluffs of thick white hair beneath it. A black cat purred on her lap. The woman’s eyes were small and dark behind her big round glasses, tired but quick. ‘Like Bette Davis waltzing around the room with Henry Fonda and you could see every bit.’

‘You need to be whisked, Auntie. You need to be whisked hard.’

‘Oh, I was whisked, all right. Came out like an egg at the end.’

Hazel dropped her head back to the pillow. So much for quiet. But she had had to pull herself away from staring as well.

‘Do you need help, Auntie?’

‘I’m fine, Byrne.’

The door opened and banged shut again as the old woman went inside.

A third voice, low and hoarse, called from a distant room. ‘If you leave that food out, you’ll bring out the ghosts!’

‘There’s nothing new,’ Byrne muttered to herself between squeals of the rusted chain, pulling hard against the ceiling.

Hazel heard a page turn and a small, satisfied grunt.

Just as she was drifting to sleep, she was startled by Byrne’s voice again. ‘Well, I’ll be . . . Will you look at that.’

As there was nobody else around to look, nobody that she was apparently talking to, or at least no other voices responding, Hazel took it upon herself to do so.

For the second time she crawled to the window and peered between glaring, dozing birds and leaves to the lit porch. Byrne was sitting up, turned to the lake, her book open on the swing.

Wild beams of torchlight were being scattered across the trunks of dead trees, across the water. The moon soon illuminated a moving figure at mud’s edge and only the leap and frisk of that ribbed, roo-like dog that cried like a songbird with a stutter gave Rhett away.

He was wielding the torch over the shore, attracting a flutter of moths to the light, a delicate snowstorm of wings, like the Greek tragedies lit by flame and firefly; he was hauling something up out of the dried mud and he was looking at it closely.

Later, when Hazel thought about it, much later, after so much had passed in that place, she thought of him, his fist hot and closed around the light, searching for his mother among the trees; she thought of him turning inward around that private grief. She thought of an entire town lying drowned under the lake.

CHAPTER 5

THAT FIRST THICK, STICKY night, Rhett walked to the edge of the lake, his old friend, Scout jumping around beside him with no respect for the dead.

The water was so low, maybe less than fifty per cent capacity, revealing the foundation walls from the old houses, the outlines of rooms, ancient ruins the same colour as the mud now – only the shapes allowed him to detect the difference. It was rising up to meet him. The earth smell of decaying matter, rock, sludge resurfacing.

Rhett bent to the dried shore with his torch, found a shard of painted kitchen china, and an old pocket-knife like one he’d had as a kid, its fake mother-of-pearl sheath built around the blade; the kind of knife his father had given him, hoping he’d turn out to be a decent, blade-bearing man.

This blade was so badly rusted it was crumbling. He closed his hand around its form. It would leave a rust mark on his palm, but this knife could cut no skin, no flesh, had no man’s supposed strength about it, and Rhett felt himself more like this knife than his father ever could have dreamed, and just as useless.

Instead, it was the shard of china he found that cut him most deeply. The thin-lipped edge of a cup once kept, he was certain, in a glass cabinet for special occasions, bursts of painted flower like blood marks above the jagged break.

He wanted these pieces of the past to be his evidence, what his family had become. A knife blade that left no score and a bit of cup marked ‘mother’ that still scratched out angrily at the domestic entrapment of her life. While his father’s fury burned them like acid, Alesandra regularly burst the crockery against the walls.

The bits of rust, the dirt in the cut that newly traced the lifeline across his palm. He and his family mixed together in his hand. Yet they were all dead, his mum, his dad, his brothers, and he was alive. So who now was the weak one? Still, there was a heart stab when he said it. He’d been avoiding remembering it all day, my mum’s dead, but now, at her lake’s edge, could not help but let it surface. Mum’s dead. He hadn’t seen her in so long.

He brought the shard of china to his lips; let his tongue wash it clean. Orange dust, grit in his teeth from biting off the paint of mud. Swallowing it all. All this land was his now. Thousands of acres; the lonely hills around him as far as he could see. All his. And he didn’t care one bit, for any of it, suddenly.

Rhett had returned home without a plan. But he saw now that before he did anything he’d have to clean up the past like floodwaters from a house, throwing down the lime.

To make order in the old rooms and then leave them behind.

The smell was the same. That’s what struck him most when he first stepped inside. It almost scared him, how forcefully the invisible air floating past his nostrils could deliver their slap. Mothballs, his mother’s perfume (how could it still smell like that?), the old dusty tang of her clay. It got into his nose and hummed there, no matter how much he wiped it away. Even the water was familiar in its minerally, icy sweetness. But the house made him so cold inside, he had escaped into the last of the day’s sun. Lay on the still-warm back of a granite boulder, while Hazel carted her things inside.

He was home and nothing had changed. Because even the emptiness, the loneliness felt the same. Only, new emptiness had been added.

The rooms left in postures of waiting. The furniture was heavy with dust. A fly hung, dangling by a leg from a complicated cloud of web, behind a photo of his mother taken long before he knew her. In it, her eyes were dark with shadow; she lifted one gloved hand to her mouth, cigarette gripped in the curl of her first finger, in her leather gloves, bumpy with rings. His brothers’ pictures on the living room walls seemed already faded, as if they were grasping even the last of their images from the grave. And his father’s stare never failed to reproach him.

He took their photos down, until the walls were patched with four vacant, white squares.

Rhett wandered, opened drawers, found broken pens, ticket stubs, lists of things to do with only half the tasks crossed out, dusty figurines in the shape of opera singers, lamp shades, sticks of glue long dried up, bent snapshots, melted candles, receipts and bills and manila folders full of bank statements, drawings he and his brothers had done as children, alongside the headline strips carefully cut from the newspapers on the days they each were born.

Rhett felt dry with them. The rasping of paper rubbing against paper, old skin, his mother’s words and her voice barrelling out at him. In the kitchen, he found cupboards bursting with coupons, his grandmother’s recipes and hand-copied poems on his mother’s stationery, awaiting use, awaiting recitation. Only poetry made cooking bearable, she’d often told him as a child.

He closed the doors quickly. Felt the need to scrub himself. Was prepared to drain the tank just for a rusty hot trickle of a shower. He almost retched when he used the toilet. Noticed the yellowed gunk high up on the wall at eye level, from unseen drips off the ceiling. He thought he caught a whiff of old urine, the decay of bodies. He told himself they were his bodies, his family’s bodies, but it didn’t help the nausea any. He went outside in order to breathe and vomited into the overgrown spinach.

That night, he slept not in his old room, nor in his parents’ bedroom, nor his brothers’, but in the tiny space that had been his mother’s day room, her study under the stairs, two steps down, hidden behind a velvet curtain, dark wood panels inside and lined with books he’d never read.

He carted a mattress down from upstairs and set it up under the leaded windows, pushed open on levers so he could look out on the lake, so that each night the lake might blow over his bare skin, so that each morning the lake might lure him out of the house altogether before he caught its old, dust-laden chill.

Rhett believed that loneliness was curable; through daily doses of it over the past five years, like a vaccination, he had developed a precious immunity. He would have to continue the dosage now that he was home, even double it, because he soon learned that although his mother was nearly a year dead, she still firmly inhabited her house. He heard her music down the corridor all night; a piano’s solitary keys, or vowels of her poems tapped out through the bathroom pipes.

He could see silhouetted through the window the black bulk of her outside piano on the exposed verandah, long left to snow and drift, then warped by wet, cracked by sun. If he pressed the keys it would croak from within.

Inside, her good piano was still hidden under a white sheet.

Though he had visited her grave that evening, climbing the pink hill back up to the road near the old school, she did not rest inside him, but spun like her potter’s wheel, throwing out specks of clay that stuck to his skin and dried there. He thought how appropriate that she now lay in a bed of clay.

He was awake for a long time. Wished he had stopped at the pub to buy a bottle of something when he and Hazel were in town, to help him sleep. It all seemed so far away, his childhood, his childhood home, that the strange car ride with Hazel felt more real to the person he was now than walls of cold stone ever could.

He felt like talking to her, Hazel, or rather, letting her talk at him, in order to remind himself that he existed. To feel the warmth of a person nearby; not all of these damp rooms. It wasn’t that he was particularly attracted to her, but he wasn’t unattracted to her, if that was a category that counted. Her skin smelled like sun, at least.

Rhett usually slept naked, but tonight he felt as if he was being watched by a thousand eyes and pulled a doona over himself despite the heat. He tried to wank but quickly found it too much effort. It made him sad. Instead, he curled into a ball of arms and legs, hoping to wake in one piece by morning.

Did he finally sleep? His thoughts ran hot. He thought or dreamed a story his mum used to tell him, but when he turned over he couldn’t remember it. Or was it Hazel in his dream who had told him the story? There was a horse by the river. She called it ‘the colt from old Regret’ and wrapped her arms around him.

Even once dawn came, he wasn’t quite sure what had taken place in the darkness.

He fled the room.

Outside, the dawn light was a dusty pulse, straight as a trunk. It travelled up the knotty bark to the distant tops of the trees. He sealed up in his old wetsuit. Its thick rubbery skin – slightly worn at the elbows and knees but tight over his bum – was clammy and rank. It held the smell of years of water and clutched coldly at his groin. It took several minutes for the suit and his body to adjust to each other again. He padded thickly over the broken tiles of shale down to the lake, the vast shore of mud his mother would have found a way to mould into something useful.

He found the water clear, with trout close by.

He had never needed oxygen, nor flippers to make his feet platypalian, but only this wetsuit, like a second skin in summer, or a dry suit, hood, gloves and boots, come winter, a full diaphragm of air, a torch, and some dark courage.

He swam the lake as a child, when his world was more full of people than ghosts. He fished the lake when he got older, floated a boat around mornings and evenings in summer, just drifting with the line outstretched, a barely visible barrier to keep others away, drifted in thought, came home burnt and drunk on sun and warm beer, a rainbow flipping at the bottom of the bucket if he was lucky. It occurred to him that the focus on surfaces, our ability to float on top, was no great feat; a membrane had formed between the underneath and us, a firm prophylactic that kept the virus of memory at bay. On top was what counted, having the upper hand, everybody clambering over the bodies to reach the summit, climax, scrambling over the landslide. If you were underneath: dead meat. Miner boys, friends of his father, going down the Snowy shafts, concreting tunnels to keep granite from crushing skulls, while up on top, the ‘man-a-mile’ Kaiser boys with their walkie-talkies, swaggering American-style, keeping time and tallies, egging them on. His father had explained that during the Snowy Scheme, to lose a man per mile was expected, was necessary in the interest of progress, of climbing upwards.

Bruce, Rhett’s father, had been peak searching too, his nose a steep scramble, high up on his horse, unreachable until the year he died, but Rhett had inherited his mother’s love of beneath, three generations of potters, hands in the clay.

His beautiful Alesandra, and he, oh so typical, in love with his mother.

For this Rhett paid.

Bruce believed all those expected things about boys who took after their mothers. Boys who’d been named after some character from a Yank film he’d never seen. While Alesandra’s dreams were her salvation they were also the cause of a melancholy that slowly leaked through the family. Bruce once thought it could be stamped out with practical work and limited piano playing, though Rhett imagined Bruce must once have loved that in her too, because of the way he occasionally, teasingly, called her Lady Davys.

Rhett had absorbed his mother entirely. More green-eyed cat than angel, more lickety-limbed, amber-skinned, basking in the sun on the back verandah; so tall, she hunched over her pots, caught inside a dried mask of clay he couldn’t get through on hot days. But tempers like snowstorms out of nowhere, with only the cockatoos’ screeching warning through the trees, she’s coming, she’s coming. He used to hide in the closet to escape her anger when Bruce and the boys returned expecting a dinner she’d long procrastinated over or refused to make; he would hear the plates smashing; his father and brothers and mother yelling; her quiet sobbing trailing past the closet door and down the two stairs to her enclosed room. Rhett would sneak down to the lake and find a flickering dream of another family beneath its folds of water.

He remembered afternoons when the surface of the lake was a chilled skin, ruffled as feathers by persistent, small-change winds – but no matter the weather on top, below was always cool composure, thick and still, and calmed him like nothing else could.

Now he lay on his stomach at the water’s edge. Leaned into it, his face reflected in the water, chin first he broke the surface and with it the reflection of his house, his lips just touching, and without hands, lapped the liquid like a cat, letting the wet spill down his throat, and knew his life was there, where the water pooled under his tongue.

He slid in; the cold captured him, his feet bulky as bruises in the murky water. When he dived under, the lake opened around him, a convergence of forces, a hug. Then the tug he couldn’t escape or ignore pulled him down, an anchor, umbilical.

Years ago Rhett had dived a bit at Jindy with mates. Everybody did that. It was smaller, more manageable, homesteads marked with yellow buoys. But not many dived Eucumbene. Visibility of about a metre, at eight metres down you lost sight altogether in the silty muck. It could be twenty degrees on the surface, a summer day; it’d be eight degrees at twenty metres down and dropping fast. A wetsuit was essential.

At its highest point, in the early seventies, the lake was eighty metres deep in places; you could trawl the bottom of Denison Street at about seventy. Then the water level of the lake dropped, which made diving easier, though still filthy with dark. He couldn’t go too far without oxygen, and oxygen seemed to defeat the purpose of floating. Instead he often swam just below the surface, shining his torch down, looking for places to drop. But now the lake was barely half as deep, if not less. There were plenty of places, remains of the town, close to shore; shallow places he could now reach with only one slightly superhuman breath. He liked the recklessness of it. The possibility that, one day, he might not store enough breath to return.

He descended through the water to the edge of sight, hovered there a moment until light and dark, up and down, had no independent meanings. He was weighted and weightless.

Below, the old town lay, waiting, breathing water.

He pointed his torch. Then he was gone. Down to the homesteads that might give way around him if he swam through; down to where the drowned beds were lit with voices, writhing with ghosted lovers; down to the memory of bodies through doors, floorboards and corridors, people calling to each other, laughing, weeping. Maybe, if he stayed down long enough this time, he could travel back along the anchor line of his mother’s voice, back to her own childhood, follow it through windows and squares of walls to find her, warm and whole, with hands that could actually touch him.

But there were only eels and a few fish. The occasional bottle and pan, old truck bodies, dead trees, fence posts and the steps that once took you to church. There was nothing there to hold onto but loose bricks. He switched off his torch for a second as he floated, wondered about the force created from things falling in a world unencumbered by gravity. A tin roof that collapsed, would it float or would it crush him? Could he stand there, holding his breath in the absolute black and let all that would settle, settle, drop to the floor?

He had seen it on some maps, the symbol of a ship tilted up out of the water, a cross, ‘Wreck Exposed’ – but what of that church steeple rising up out of the low tide of his mind from the centre of the lake, was that a wreck exposed? Would they mark the sunken remains of these obliterated towns? And whatever happened to the mouse-nibbled men and women, full of holes, who had fallen through the groves of gums to the silted bottom and were never seen again?

Rhett switched off the torch as he kicked up out of the shadows, just in time to see the new light of the world through the distant roof of water, his lungs about to burst with burning.

CHAPTER 6

ESME WOKE IN DAWN’S dark with the big black squashed-face Russian Blue she called Minnie Mueller kneading her legs with its claws through the blanket. She reached out to stroke her and Minnie Mueller hissed and leapt off the bed.

Her cat had been named after her now-dead best friend. Sometimes she spoke to the cat as if she were the real Minnie Mueller. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m mean, but when we went for a sandwich, you always let me go up to the till first, if you know what I’m getting at. I’m not mean, but you did always let me pay.’

Esme lay awake. She was too tired and sore to move. She tried to lie perfectly still so she didn’t trigger the cough that surely waited inside her, coiled like a spring. She pressed a white, embroidered hankie against her nose so the air wouldn’t get in and tickle the hairs of her nostrils and then tickle too the inside of her scalp, the part curving over her brain that she couldn’t reach, much less scratch.

Esme got up when she could no longer bear just lying there contemplating the inner workings of her body. She inched down the corridor, pulling her left leg after her, hip jutted out with spasms.

It took her ten minutes to reach the kitchen.

She could feel her leg withering. This scared her more than her troubled lungs did. The neurosurgeon had said as soon as you look down and find your leg bumping into things, or you walk in one direction while your leg stays put, or if you find your leg in a place you didn’t expect it to be, you’ll know it’s getting bad.

She managed to make a cup of tea, threw in a large dose of brandy, swallowed another quick shot, felt her buttocks aching beneath the painkillers. Two Nurofen a day generally gave her four hours to get things done. Two Nurofen and a few good lashings of brandy gave her five to six. A five-hour slice of life.

She sat in the dark. Dawn’s slow glow gave enough light to just make out the steam rising from the teacup. Perhaps she dozed, dozed in that bergamot bath, but in the rising of those curled wands of cloud (suddenly it seemed as if the steam had been drawn by a child, wavy lines travelling in different directions), time seemed to pass around her.

There she sat like a mountain while the day came into being.

How did she know that an hour hadn’t passed between the time she lifted her cup to the moment it touched her lips and the still-hot liquid washed over her tongue in perfumed waves?

That was one thing that stayed the same all these years: the taste of a good cup of tea.

She could sit there for hours, holding that cup, like a time-lapse film of a flower, cameras trained as it came into being. Like a vanilla orchid. She had read somewhere that it opened between nine and eleven am or eleven and one pm – she couldn’t remember which – and after that, if it hadn’t been pollinated, it died.

She could sit while day stormed past and Byrne and Lucetta zipped through, like bees pollinating, like water bugs dancing across the water, two skates and they were gone, and the sun was setting and the birds settling into their night calls and supper fixed and eaten and washed up, and still she would be left there after the lights had been clicked out; at the table with her tea and only a minute or two passed within her.

She thought about how years so thoroughly erased the lived moment; how irretrievable things were. She could pass the streets she’d once walked, if she squinted she could almost see herself, a faded outline, a ghost girl, all the tracks she had made now vanished beneath the lake.

Long gone were the years when the shops were just a step or two down the street, before the men in their suits came, and their town was drowned in a deliberate, leisurely, rising of snow-fed river water. No fast flood to escape, no survival drama to enact, just a slow secretion of water, the torturous creep over the toes, rising over the legs, up the thighs, over the groin, the ticklish belly, the fingers at the side, the chest submerged in cold bands of water, across the frozen heart, the neck, eyes crossed, watching, as the blue came up; as the compass points of water surrounding the body merged into a smooth, flawless skin over the crown of the head.

Around her, others had walked away, shifting their houses on the backs of trucks, packing horse and cart, leading livestock, waving goodbye.

But for some reason Esme had remained, for an exceptionally long moment of reflection. There was reflection everywhere as water captured in twin form all that was left of roof and sky, while the town and everybody in it disappeared.

Alone under the silent water, Esme blinked.

She could see just fine, she could move, though slowly, she could bob and stroll in boots of rock to the shop down the street, she would walk in, find it empty of life, of smallgoods. Only fish that darted between her fingers, nothing to catch or eat.

When she had come up for a breath she found her mother, and her sister’s young daughter Byrne, who was suddenly her daughter by default, waving at her from the steps of their house. It had been shifted sideways, up the road and onto the peninsula next to the houses of Bruce and Alesandra Davys, and Alesandra’s mother Sara Flood, just beyond the new water line, but far enough to make her check her bearings for months afterwards whenever she stepped outside the front garden.

Esme surfaced, coughing, found herself at a Monday breakfast table with her mother and her great-niece, Lucetta. Her mother seemed to be addressing her and Lucetta was staring in that way she had been lately, as if thinking, poor dear.

‘You wanna clear out those lymph nodes, get your system going,’ Hortense was saying. ‘That’s the only way to clear out, Ez. Go on a brisk, fresh walk, that’ll bring it up. Or you could do jumping jacks . . .’

‘Her legs would pop off, Gran,’ Lucetta protested.

‘I used to love it,’ Hortense sighed. ‘Fifteen minutes in and I was hacking up great globs of yellow gunk – a great feeling, I can tell you. You can’t just sit here, dear, the lymph system doesn’t work like that . . .’

Esme sighed. She was eighty years old; didn’t she deserve some mother-free years? All her friends had theirs: the ‘golden years’, isn’t that what they called them? Those mother-free periods? It was practically unheard of to still have a mother at eighty. A mother-free period should be the minimal compensation for the indignity of watching those younger than you begin to stalk you like a hawk over a morsel of mouse. Of course she’d noticed her family exchanging those more and more regular glances they thought she couldn’t see, much less decipher, as she left the dinner table, shuffled down the hall to hook up to her ventilator, hand over mouth as if to push the lungs back down. Clearly, they were expecting her to expire any minute. Already they were giving her gifts they hoped they might get back when she departed.

The family didn’t pin their looks on Hortense; hadn’t started building her box, although Hortense was surely next in line.

It was a matter of principle, if not health, Esme thought. A person was not meant to die before their mother. It was meant to be a cruel blow to mothers everywhere, yet Hortense didn’t seem bothered. She acted as if death were a trip to the hairdresser they both had appointments for. ‘I’m still in the middle of my magazine,’ her mother seemed to be saying as the hairdresser called out her name. ‘You go on ahead, Aged Daughter.’ She had taken to calling Esme this, as if it were some kind of great joke.

Shoving her down the long dark tunnel headfirst.

Now her mother sat dozing contentedly at the table, her fingers still elegantly threaded through the handle on her bone china teacup as if about to lift it to her mouth.

Esme got up and cleared her cup and plate. What was it that Florence Nightingale had said?

Oh yes.

In almost every family one sees a keeper, or two or three keepers, and a lunatic.

She clattered her dishes down beside the sink. Lucetta stood with her gloved hands in the hot water, staring out the window.

Esme returned to the table, lowered herself into her chair, as Byrne came through the back door with the newspaper and the mail. Thumped them onto the table.

‘Did you see Mr Swan when you went to town?’ Esme asked Byrne.

Byrne nodded. ‘’Course.’ She flicked the button on the kettle. ‘One of the black cows had her calf. She’s out there right now, eating the afterbirth.’

Hortense startled awake. Lifted her teacup to her lips. ‘Oh, splendid.’

‘What did he say?’ Esme asked.

‘Thank you, Auntie. He said thank you. What do you think?’

Esme addressed Hortense, raising her voice. ‘You know Owen Swan? In that little shack between here and town, where we got the blue heeler?’

‘Of course I know Owen! Who wouldn’t marry you!’ Hortense shouted.

‘He tied a dog to a tree,’ Lucetta said, turning from the window, for there was nothing much to see. ‘For months.’

‘Paroxysms of grief,’ Esme pointed out, defending him.

‘That was before his wife died, Auntie. He’s refusing to live in his house, Luce,’ Byrne explained. ‘Poor bugger.’

‘He’s started living in his car,’ Esme added, worrying silently. ‘In the front seat at that. Not the back.’

‘It’s simple sadness, Auntie. The house reminds him.’

‘Who has sadness that is simple? I’ve never heard of a sadness that was simple,’ Esme replied sharply. ‘It was my idea,’ she continued, to Lucetta, ‘to bring him a daily newspaper.’ Esme reached across and slid the local paper closer. Opened it randomly. ‘I wonder what he’s reading –’ Esme stopped. Realised a familiar face was staring at her. Her heart leapt and fell. The grinning, dark-haired boy took up an entire A4 page: ‘JOSEPH BISCONTIN BENBOW: 2 August 1978–21 January 1997.’ The words cut like a biscuit press into her. ‘Not a day passes that we don’t think of you, our beautiful Joe. Love always, Nadia, Boyd, Antonio, Marco, Federico, Marcello, Della, Ivo and Sita.’

She glanced up at Lucetta, who continued with the dishes. Of course.

Esme quickly closed the newspaper and slowly pushed herself up. She teetered, shaking, hovered for a moment between rising and falling back into the chair. Then shuffled over to the sink. Wrapped one thin arm around Lucetta’s waist and pulled her into a bony squeeze. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, love. I forgot.’

‘Sorry for what?’ Lucetta looked at Esme, confused.

Esme glanced over at Byrne and Hortense. Byrne was now thumbing through the paper.

A tear made its way down a runnel on Esme’s cheek. ‘You know. Oh. Joe’s day . . .’

Lucetta took a step away. As if slapped. Dripped soap bubbles to the floor. Her eyes darted to the calendar.

‘Oh dear, oh dear, I thought . . .’ Esme started crying. ‘Oh, I’ve put my foot in it now.’

Lucetta’s forehead twitched. She pulled away from Esme. ‘I guess I forgot too.’

Byrne had finally reached Joe’s page in the paper. ‘Oh, Luce.’ She looked up, watched Lucetta’s face for signs of how to react, glanced at Hortense, who was squinting at the others, trying to work out what was happening.

‘I can’t believe I forgot,’ Lucetta said.

Byrne was agitated. ‘It’s all right, darling! You’re just living your life. You mustn’t get upset.’ She stood quickly and hugged her daughter. ‘I know it’s upsetting.’

‘I’m upset because I forgot. Not because I’m really upset.’ Lucetta wiped her eyes.

‘Forgot what?’ Hortense shouted.

‘The anniversary of Joe’s death, Gran.’ Byrne pushed the paper towards Hortense, who leaned closer, still squinting determinedly at the black and white photo.

Lucetta took a long look. ‘I took that photo.’

‘He’s spunky as ever,’ Hortense offered.

‘You don’t have to try to make me feel better, Gran. I’m fine.’ Lucetta was already halfway to the back door.

It banged shut.

‘They’re trying to make her upset. Not including her name. Her name isn’t there, is it Byrne?’ Esme asked.

‘It’s fine, Auntie. That’s how she wants it.’

‘As though she didn’t exist? As though she didn’t ever exist?’ They had just wiped her out.

‘Otherwise, how’s she meant to move on? It’s not the old days, Auntie. People shouldn’t have to mourn forever.’ Now Byrne was cross.

Esme dropped her hands into the hot water and continued the washing-up, looking out. Lucetta had already disappeared around the side of the house. Her mother and Byrne said nothing more, though Byrne kept sighing loudly.

‘Well, I’m sorry, Byrne,’ Esme sulked, as the cough waiting inside her rose up. And the tears. ‘It’s not right that the young ones pass on. I wish I were dead.’

‘Oh, Auntie, you can’t die now! I need the money!’ Byrne cried, because she knew it usually made Esme chuckle.

‘We outlive our men by thirty years at least in this family. It’s a family curse,’ Hortense said. ‘We get used to it.’

‘So where does that leave me?’ Esme asked bitterly.

Outside, the pig behind the lemon tree rolled in the tussock.

Of course Esme would never dream of scheduling a suicide, but she hoped, when the right time came, that her body would cooperate. Up until now, her body had seemed raring to go, but her mind had resisted. Esme was confident that, once the mind was convinced of the necessity of its own extinguishment, that her coalition of cells would naturally tidy itself, file its business and proceed to exhale.

Meanwhile, she had begun her preparations. There was, for instance, the pillow she was making. Duck feathers stuffed in white silk: a small square package that would fit perfectly under her casketed head. So that if there wasn’t a heaven, and she doubted there was, she could still soar up there, fly around, feathered, land from time to time in the branches of trees. She had already hand-sewn the two silk squares on three sides and was slowly collecting the whitest bits of down from the ducks in the yard. It was taking longer than expected.

There was also the matter of the paperwork.

Although Esme was allocating a half-hour per day to sorting through the various photographs and newspaper clippings and brochures and programs she’d collected during her long, protracted life (less for Byrne to tidy up in future), she was still pulling out the scissors and carefully slicing out interesting tidbits. She had years worth of clippings, all those articles and handy guidelines she had been sure would come to some good eventually, offer some gleaning that would finally make her life worthwhile.

She had kept them folded and stored, now yellowed in shoe boxes at the back of her wardrobe: evidence of a life; evidence of a heart that had been moved to clip, to sort, to momentarily ponder how somebody else’s words could be used to cultivate happiness.

Sometimes, revisiting these faded relics, she would read and reread, wondering what it was exactly that caused her to clip this particular snippet; there was nothing in it anymore that drew her. Other clippings seem to be chiding voices: reminding her of her own inadequacies, though still potentially useful. Perhaps, after all, it was never too late to become a good listener.

‘Take responsibility for the success of the conversation! Be an active participant . . . Avoid interrupting . . . Maintain constant eye contact . . . Effective listeners can escape loneliness and enter a circle of friendship.’

She didn’t know if she’d ever become an effective listener, though she suspected this was one area of life she had mastered, if only due to her own mother’s natural garrulousness. But she also knew she didn’t want this clipping left to reveal how lonely she might have been. So it was ripped into twelve pieces and put into the bin. In its place something she’d cut out only yesterday, spied on the back of one of the clippings she was throwing out. A dream without moorings for its context had been severed: ‘No. 6,650,243: Pet Affection Indicator;;’

After Lucetta left the kitchen, Esme had let the cough out as punishment for her mistake. Now, she sat at her respirator, the mask’s elastic snagging at what was left of her hair, with these words in her hand, her lungs full of air. Her leg throbbed. Her heart. The piece of paper lying in her palm was so small, it could barely be called a clipping, more like a trim of fringe across the forehead, a lost tooth, a key to a cupboard long discarded. The paper’s edge curled so that the word ‘Indicator’ tipped up as if to imply that what would be indicated, what would be measured, was joy, love, all things desired in the realm of affections. At the end, two semicolons, a typing mistake no doubt, but their double shape, their smile, their very suggestion that punctuation could bring joy, gave her the hope that these three words and their twin wiggles of pleasure promised nothing other than a confirmation of love.

Last night she had lain awake with the pain in her leg, with coughing spasms that shook the bed and wrenched her back and which even a quarter of a bottle of brandy couldn’t calm, and held in her hands an imaginary Pet Affection Indicator. She remembered that red plastic fish that Lucetta’s father once sent from Singapore when she was little and he was still in contact with them. If you placed it in the palm of your hand it would shake and coil, roll over or curl tight, head to tail. Each motion reflecting the nature of your emotions at that moment by the heat of your hand, she supposed: jealous, passionate, fickle, false, in love.

Esme had been scared to try it after she’d read on the back that a motionless fish meant ‘Dead One’. She feared her lifelessness would be laid bare. Or worse, she might find the fish curling up entirely, indicating Passion in one so clearly alone in the world, and she couldn’t bear for even an eleven-year-old girl to guess the untapped temperature of her heart.

She wondered if the Pet Affection Indicator was some version of this miracle fish? A sliver of plastic, like a rain sheath, which curled when your pet wore it and which you could decipher according to its accompanying legend? Perhaps there was some kind of measurement of the vibrations an animal gave off. Would all beings give off this electrical field if their needles, so to speak, crept into the red? She wasn’t sure, but knew she had stepped into rooms when she was younger where the pulse was electric, and had tried to remain oblivious to the wands of desire bisecting the air, whizzing past her, always past her, to pierce other chests.

Even Lucetta, who had once seemed a translucent thread that caught only silver beads of morning’s dew, was heavy with unshucked things. Stuck with a dust nobody could seem to wipe away completely. Her face, once delicate and bright and wide with abandonment, had closed. Though in the last year she’d shown signs of real recovery – sudden smiles for no particular reason, and a renewed interest in both her vet work and sucking the greasy bones of lamb chops – this morning guilt and bitterness, held up against the undeniable sad fact of Joe’s eyes staring back, had perhaps shut her down once more.

Even Esme could see this, though she had always been a daughter and never a mother herself, not properly a mother, not really; she never expected anything on Mother’s Day, though Byrne always took them to the river for a picnic. If Esme was Mother it was only by default, or hire, whichever it was, though she came out just as tired in the end, it was true. The photograph on Esme’s dresser of Byrne at five still caused her chest to bang. A child with Pictoria’s wayward hair and stubborn, stubborn eyes. How Byrne had glared at Esme for nearly a year with those eyes, defying affection.

Who’d have thought this Byrne was once that same child? Byrne radiating energy and warmth. Byrne needed no confirmation. Lost animals especially were magnetically drawn to her. She would find them outside the gate, pacing as though in a waiting room, waiting only for her.

Now: ‘Auntie! We’re going out to feed Bonnie!’ As if nothing had happened. Then the distant chug of the ute, the dogs barking alongside it. Esme switched off her respirator, and the house secreted an empty quiet.

Through the window, she could see Byrne, with Hortense in the passenger seat, bouncing down the dirt track back towards the hills behind the houses where Byrne agisted the cows. Lucetta was slouched, blade-beaten, on the concrete base of the windmill, cut up by its shuddering, shadowed orbits, staring out. The distant sound of the ute was soon absorbed by land; the metallic paint finish caught in a flash of light and was lost.

Esme threw the tiny clipping back into the shoebox. Attempted to resume her sorting work. But her heart was no longer in it. It was not right.

She lifted the receiver of the phone by her bed, and slowly dialled.

‘Hello, Meryl?’ her voice croaked at the sound of the operator’s buzz. ‘Can you please tell me where I might find Mr Benbow these days?’

CHAPTER 7

THE BREEZE WAS A CATCH on Hazel’s neck. It woke her. She had no idea where she was.

Hot sun through the open windows. The edge of the floor looming. Hazel’s room, connected to the world by a ladder. She remembered her mother telling her of a gadget to help spiders climb out of an empty bathtub. The empathy of that inventor. She imagined it unfurling, a cotton-thread ladder made of knots and compassion.

She heard humming, she heard birds, she heard, definitely, humming. She thought the breeze was a ghost note in her ear. Hmmmmmm . . . hmmmmmmm. Like a tuning fork.

She knew she had no electricity in this house, but this low buzzing, from some circuit or other, perhaps still coursed through the layers of wall here, old wires severed, still holding some vibrational frequency. Something was always turned on somewhere, even things you couldn’t see, signals were always being sent, ricocheting between the white concave smoothness of deep space outposts and antennaed earth, phone call voices sounding out continually across the vast distances of stars; I guess I couldn’t give him what he wanted, she could hear herself saying; and wondered where in space the reply lay.

A window at the front of her alcove looked through last night’s tangled vines onto the neighbours’ front verandah. Above her bed, a second window faced her wild garden, the collapsed tin chicken coop, the grove of pines. A third window gave a view over the high garden wall, into her blue-cottaged neighbour’s crowded backyard.

It was through this window that Hazel now looked and found vegetables in large chaotic patches, empires of spinach, the wide notched leaves of rhubarb, spirals of beans. But also: muddy boots on the back step, coats and hats hanging next to the kitchen door, a gas bottle, a saw, old gloves, a water tank, bits of ply, old roofing, bird feeders lined with seed, bird cages, chook and cockatoo, a silver-bladed windmill, the purple heads of agapanthus, a letterbox carved from a log, unused, vast piles and chambers of firewood to house snake and spider, hanging cacti, a straw broom leaning against the weatherboards, a potted gardenia with a chook nestled inside the ceramic pot, a painted plaster gnome.

Along the back fence where the long grass had taken over in places, sprouting brown geysers, heavy, bowed down, were pieces of old cars with running boards, car engines lying willy-nilly over the sweep of view, the rusted bodies stacked where they died, a doorless shell whose seat was now a chopping block for the wood pile, the split hearts of gums scattered in the nearby patches of dirt.

It was this haphazard arrangement of old car parts that shone the brightest, twisted metal shapes in sunlight, as if somebody had been experimenting with form. Half-finished works left for the grass to take over, after the artist had died.

Beneath it all, the low sweet hum of talk, voices in proximity, close in knowledgeable histories.

Hazel noticed a young, sandy-haired girl, mid-twenties, at the edge of the windmill. Next to her sat an old woman, the same woman Hazel had seen last night on the verandah.

‘“A man’s love is a thing apart; it’s a woman’s very existence,”’ the old woman was saying.

‘It’s not my very existence,’ the young woman sniffed, and stood up.

Amen to that, Hazel thought, and liked her instantly.

The battered ute pulled up in the yard, spinning dust.

‘There’s something wrong with one of the cow’s eyes, Luce,’ Byrne called, and the young woman walked over to the driver’s side and leaned in.

The old woman stood up. It looked like it hurt her to move. She left two wakes in the dirt behind her shambling feet, heading for the back steps and the verandah.

Hazel moved away from the window.

The toilet out back seemed to work. Just. Hazel decided to save it for other matters, found, aptly, a yellow bucket to squat over. She placed it in the centre of the tiled floor of the washroom, where the shower once had been. Her mother always said, one part pee to three parts water was good for the garden.

She told herself this as she lowered herself onto a bucket, as the hot jet hit the plastic bottom.

Rhett’s knuckles rapped the open frame. Hazel froze midstream, hardly begun. Josie bolted out, barking, as if she already owned the place. Gave Hazel away.

‘Hazel?’ Rhett called.

‘Yesssss?’ Her voice came out all high throaty.

‘Oh, you’re there. How’s it going?’

‘Okaaay. Be right out.’ She sat motionless, hoping he’d wait for her outside.

She could hear Josie in the garden tussling with Scout, could hear Rhett breathing, clearing his throat, as he just stood on the other side of the open bathroom wall. She could hear his voice moving as he looked around.

‘This cupboard’s come up good.’

She couldn’t finish this now. He’d hear every drop. ‘Yeah. Bit of elbow grease always helps . . .’ She shook a little, stood, pulled her pants up, emerged awkward, pelvic floor muscles clenching.

Rhett’s hair was wet, plastered down over his forehead in little waves, and there were beads of water still clinging to his brown skin. He wore a singlet with a small rip near the ribs and baggy shorts and no shoes. His feet were clean and smooth.

‘I found you a little aluminium sink. Thought you could hook it up in here to a hose. Tap works out there.’ Rhett pointed to a gleaming basin leaning up against the door.

‘A-lume-a-num. Al-u-min-i-um. Never could say that word right in this country. Thanks.’

‘I’m going to pop next door. Old friends of the family. Maybe you wanna meet them?’

‘Now?’

‘Soon as you’re ready.’

Her eyes flicked back to the bucket in the washroom. Then back to Rhett. How close they all were to each other, really, three boxes squished up on a tiny piece of land, with only a couple of fences and walls between them. She was embarrassed that her presence meant the end of her neighbours’ solitude on the peninsula; she didn’t want to get in anybody’s way.

‘If you don’t think it’s a bother,’ she said, clenching tighter.

She followed Rhett across the driveway, around a pile of boulders, then through the white picket gate.

Byrne, the middle-aged woman Hazel had watched on the verandah, came through the screen door, in jeans and boots and checked shirt. She was beaming, ruffling her short hair.

‘I was wondering what happened to you.’ Byrne grabbed Rhett in a hug, carefully studying his face, his ears. ‘Auntie was sure you came back without visiting us, then moved to the city and got a body piercing. I knew you hadn’t.’

‘Not one you can see, anyway.’

‘When I spied somebody down by the water last night, I hoped it was you.’ She hugged him again. Tightly. She assessed Hazel. ‘And brought a girl. About time.’

‘Byrne, this is Hazel; Hazel, Byrne.’

Hazel put out her hand and Byrne smiled, though she looked slightly disappointed as she examined her.

‘Ah, the intrigue,’ Rhett teased, laughing as if he were enjoying it.

‘And how long have you two . . . ?’ Byrne looked at Rhett, then Hazel.

Hazel shrunk inside. Felt some electrical current whose origins she was only half-aware of.

‘Oh, Byrne.’ Rhett touched her back affectionately. ‘You know me – I’ve never had luck with girls.’

‘I don’t know why. You’ve turned out simply gorgeous. Isn’t he, Hazel?’

Rhett turned to Hazel, cheeky grin, waiting.

Hazel smiled, but kept her thoughts to herself.

‘That’s the quietest I’ve seen her, Byrne, since I’ve known her. Which is about thirty-six hours, hey? We’ve only spent one night together, Hazel and I, though it was most special.’

Hazel glanced at him, expecting more cheek, but his mouth, slightly curved, held genuine warmth.

Hazel turned to Byrne, eager to change the subject. ‘I’ve actually come to help put together a memorial to the old town, Byrne. I’ll be working with a man named Burchill. Do you know him?’

Byrne nodded. ‘Of course.’ But her eyes shifted away.

‘Hort and Auntie still around?’ Rhett leaned against the porch railing and picked at the paint.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Wow. Seriously? How old is Hortense now?’ He brushed his sun-drying hair from his eyes.

‘A hundred and one. And still driving, if you can believe it. Though Esme refuses to ride with her. Says it’s not safe. Says we’re all still alive only by sheer luck.’

Rhett shook his head. His laugh was like a throat given licence to live. ‘Well, good on her.’

‘Yeah, except now I have to drive Esme everywhere. Sometimes I wonder, Rhett, when I’ll get to live my life.’

‘I hope you don’t mind me in the shack next door . . .’ Hazel started.

‘She fancies herself romantic,’ Rhett told Byrne. ‘Don’t let her infect you.’

Byrne ignored this, hugged him again. ‘Oh, Rhett, I wish you’d been here. I really do. It was a beautiful service.’

He looked away, shrugged. ‘I bet.’

Byrne shook her head. ‘This has been a day of strange returns. And it’s not yet ten o’clock.’

Hazel could feel her insides souring. ‘Excuse me, I should go. I have an appointment this morning, my new job. It was nice to meet you.’

‘Come and see us, Hazel, any time,’ Byrne called.

Hazel dashed back out the gate into her front yard and through her new door. She finished her wee with relief.

As she dressed for work up in her loft, she heard Rhett’s voice outside, a soft murmur in dalliance with Byrne’s, high, low, high, low. Byrne’s talk was a curled vine reaching its tendrils around a solid block of wood.

Their back door opened again. Through the side window Hazel watched the young woman come out again, barefoot, her hair now lifted into a tail, licking her long fingers. The young woman watched Rhett for a moment before he turned around, saw her.

‘It’s Rhett!’ Byrne called. ‘He’s come back . . .’

His face was wiped clean.

He turned back to Byrne as if he’d never seen the young woman at all, and soon he was crossing the yard in giant steps, Scout following, little dog hips cha-cha-ing, one two, one two.

The young woman never took her eyes off Rhett. Not for a second.

Later, as Hazel hurried to her car, she nearly collided with her coming around the side of the house.

‘Oh, hello,’ the young woman said, surprised, eyeing Hazel cautiously. She had changed into jeans and boots. Wore a baseball cap. She had natural pink-lipped brightness, clever eyes. ‘You’re the one that came with Rhett.’

‘Well, sort of. I just picked him up.’ She realised how that sounded. ‘On the side of the road, I mean.’ Even worse. ‘He was hitchhiking.’

‘You shouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, Hazel,’ she laughed.

So she already knew her name. ‘You know, I just gave him a lift.’ Hazel blushed. The girl’s eyes were boring holes into her. ‘So you must be . . . ?’

‘Lucetta.’

CHAPTER 8

LUCETTA HAD LOST HER first love, Joe, five summers ago, drowned in Lake Eucumbene. She was nineteen.

She had planned a rare night with her mother. After Byrne had gone to bed, she’d called him. The phone rang and rang. She pictured it on the wall vibrating into the empty room. A little voice inside her said, Don’t be ridiculous.

This had happened before, times he’d gone on the road for work, driving to Melbourne, and she’d lain awake thinking of him with white fever, lines racing past, willing him to stay awake, not to drift even a fraction over the line into sleep.

If she stayed awake she could save him, but her heavy eyes, that strain in the back of her head, falling into unconsciousness.

Sometimes she had even cried herself to sleep, thinking he was already dead and all the prayers in the world wouldn’t help him now. Couldn’t protect her from the inevitable. That absence.

In the morning he’d ring her from a truck stop after his enforced rest, buzzing; he could never sleep on the road. He’d wake her, she’d answer startled and then sink back into the pillows, into soft, sweet sleep-inducing waves of relief.

This time would be the same. But hours later, he still hadn’t answered.

She had driven to their flat in Jindabyne and, when he wasn’t there, driven back towards her family home at the edge of the peninsula at Adaminaby Bay. The Snowy Mountains Highway ran in the same direction as Lake Eucumbene. She cut down the back roads that led past Springwood Bay along the eastern shore of the lake until she reached White Rocks Inlet. Joe often went fishing here, especially at night, when the summer lake was most calm. She preferred him to go to sleep with her, but he was a night boy, with secret stashes of insomnia in his pockets. His mother, Nadia, said that as a baby he’d kept her up all night. It was like a dance party around here, she said; she’d be jiggling and swaying his hot little body around the house at three am. Only in motion was he calm, still.

It hadn’t been unusual for Lucetta to wake at four am to find him watching TV, tapping his foot, or to be woken by the smell of fish and find him crawling into bed, his hands still sticky with scales, his catch in the sink.

As she wove down the last crest to the edge of the lake and saw his car parked in the dark among the white boulders, her heart bird-fluttered, a slight squeeze, reassuring. She couldn’t wait to wrap her arms around him, smell his neck, to lure him back home with her. She pulled in, looked to the black puddle of lake; raised her hand to wave, because surely he’d be glancing over now, at the headlights pulling in, at the crunch under her tyres.

Big moon and he was already halfway to it, among the spongy clouds above her.

Later she’d remember this best, how she had waved, not goodbye, but hello; felt later, in anger, that she had mocked herself. Deluded anger, swift to guilt, to humiliation. Shame to have been so easily convinced, even momentarily, of the world’s essential benevolence.

How she must have looked to a casual observer, a witness to the express train ploughing through her. Standing on the edge of the lake, waving, her body split in half. No time to stop or comfort her, no time to take back what had happened. It was already too late.

Because Joe’s white wooden boat, her name painted in blue letters on the side, was racing around in jammed circles on the water in a scoop of moonlight, a mechanical planet tracing an elliptical orbit, headlamp spilling over the water, wakes crossing, slapping against the sides, illuminating sickly green lake water, a whirling, confused contraption that would roar until it drank itself clean. The flimsy skin of wood flailed about, panicked at the loss of its skipper, while two caught fish lay dead in a bucket of water at the bottom.

The boat traced the place where Joe had pierced the water, where he had been pulled down. Somewhere under that boatsketched path he lay in his new bed of cold bubbles.

How quiet it was to be all alone in the world.

For a second, under that moon, that night, inside Lucetta was peace. There was a shard of moment, big enough to fit in her hand, in which she was absolutely calm.

Then nothing.

His body didn’t surface for seven weeks. They couldn’t find him. The water that summer was unseasonably cold, the bacteria in his gut too slow to produce the gases that bloat the stomach and cause a body to rise, they speculated. One man drowned in Lake Jindabyne, they said, didn’t float for seven years.

His body wouldn’t rise and neither would Lucetta. For as long as he was under, she would be under too. She spent days back in her childhood bed with her head in her lap.

At night she slunk out of her immobility and grief, slid through her bedroom window and drove to the edge of the lake, thinking he might rise and sink again, like a glass buoy coated with barnacles, rise and sink when nobody was looking. It was her job to be looking.

He finally came up, as if for a breath, though his face stayed under, his hair washed so clean it was almost translucent. Lucetta put her hand through it, laced its long ends through her fingers. He had drowned in his waders, apparently fallen while hauling in his net, tangled in it, somehow pulled down. His waders would have been like lead, they said; no way he could have pulled himself out. He hadn’t been wearing a life vest, either, and though the autopsy didn’t need to say it, for there were only two cans out of six beers left in the bottom of the boat, he had a blood alcohol level higher than he should have for being alone on the water. Lucetta had wanted to know these things. She had read the autopsy report and discovered that the presence of water in his lungs suggested he had been alive during drowning, though the medical examiner had assured her that Joe would have been unconscious before his air tube relaxed, allowing the water to spill into his lungs. He would have lived only a couple of minutes, he said. The carbon dioxide would have quickly built up in his body, forcing him to take a breath and gulp water, causing vomiting and coughing. He would have lost consciousness shortly thereafter. He had been clutching a branch, which had broken off and was fixed in his hand by rigor when he died. ‘Are you sure you want to know this?’ the medical examiner asked, and Lucetta had nodded. The man had given the branch to Lucetta to look at and when he had turned his back as she was leaving, she had slipped it into her bag.

Joe’s mother hoped his watch would have stopped, because all she wanted to know was the time of his death. But there it had been under the water, all the while, ticking away. Lucetta imagined him in his coat of black, the green, glowing face of his watch keeping time in case he changed his mind.

Had she touched him enough when she’d had the chance? Had she loved every inch of his body, had she kissed the lines and grooves of his flesh, all the smooth, dotted skin of his sides, the goosed curves of his hips; could she recover that flesh in her memory, could she make it real somehow?

She couldn’t, it was just an idea of love that existed within her now. Just a feeling, ten parts ache. No longer what it once was, so entangled now was it with death.

For a while the photos were everywhere; she put up more and more. There were his bare arms as he hunched in the summer sun, her necklace around his neck, the sun striking the right side of his face, he’s smiling in that one, that sparkle in his eye as she had stood so close to him, his lips pressed into – what? Not quite a grin, not a smile – a bemused tolerance perhaps, an acceptance of this photo-taking – but it was her that he was looking at, no doubt about that, the eyes told. But soon, every time she looked at him, she saw only his blue-skinned face lying on the stretcher after they had pulled him from the water, and his clenched fist. She tried to match the marks on the bark of the branch with an idea of his fingers. She brushed it across her face, but it soon disintegrated into tiny pieces.

She kept his last message left on their voicemail, listening as he called, Hello, hello, are you there? Ring me . . . Love you . . . bye. She listened to it over and over, until one day it too was zapped from the ether without warning when Telstra changed the MessageBank setup and emptied her old bank of calls in the process. She tried to retrieve Joe’s message, sobbing, punching the buttons, abusing a computerised voice.

Byrne found her curled up on the floor, tear-drained and stained, the cord wound around her wrists, the harsh, insistent alarm of a phone off the hook wiping out all other sounds.

‘You’re young, you’ve got your whole life ahead. You’ve got to move on,’ Byrne had said, but brought her back home for good, to her life before Joe.

These days Lucetta slept, but she didn’t dream, which meant her nights were long and black and deep. Which meant she woke every day as if from a coma, from an eight-hour bout of amnesia, during which it seemed she never stirred or turned over, but slept on one side until her ear ached. Which meant she never knew one day from the next.

This is why she forgot his anniversary, she told herself.

But really, she forgot, she knew, because after several months she’d grown weary of the exhausted weep that kept her up at night and sleeping through most of the day, waking at lunch-time, groggy, hungover with silence, and she finally started to wake when others did. Aunt Esme and Grandma Hort, up at dawn, helped her into mornings with tea and toast and chatter.

Lucetta began to look forward to her first hot drink of the day. To check the window when she woke to see what the sun was doing. She loved when it cast dark spangles of leaf-shapes on her white curtains. Sun faded pain and curtains equally.

Gradually, she went back to university, switching her degree to vet science. Although much of vet work meant just more forms of death, she was determined to ride those last steps from the living alongside any creature that crossed her path. Plus, there were days when dogs lived and horses were cured and cows gave birth and a bird pecked her finger as if to say pay attention.

She had even flirted last week with a young man whose dog had a haematoma in its ear. He’d leaned near, watching her as she threaded the bright white stitches through the pink skin. The dog’s body lay still in anaesthetic sleep, so the young man shivered for him instead.

Some years in those to come she would remember Joe’s anniversary, others not until it had passed – or she might quietly realise halfway through the day when, at the bank, she had to check the date for her deposit slip. This was how time passed. It promised to be gentle but it never quite let her go. She was determined that this Monday would be like any other, only it had been lashed now with a gloom she wished to avoid by not looking at it. She would keep herself busy. Now, a piece of toast in hand, she was about to get dressed and head up the back paddock with her mother to see about the cow’s bad eye. Then she had a dog’s leg to set and, later that afternoon, an appointment with a sick cat near Bolaro.

Esme and Hortense sat arguing at the table over cups of tea.

‘It’s just that I have to go to the post office,’ Esme was saying. As nobody inquired further, she continued. ‘I’m sending away for a Pet Affection Indicator.’

‘I’ll drive you, Aged Daughter,’ Hortense offered.

‘I’d rather walk,’ Esme sniffed.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Auntie,’ Lucetta snapped. ‘If you need to go to town, you’ll have to take what you can get. Because I’m working this afternoon. I’m sorry.’

Lucetta noticed her mother outside the kitchen window, talking to a man in the back garden. He was squatting down, his back to her, barefoot, holding on to a little speckled blue puppy that bit at his heels.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean to be a burden, Lucetta.’

‘You’re not, Auntie! Somebody will drive you. It’s not like we’re going to hold you captive here! Maybe Mum can take you.’ The man was looking up from under the brim of his hat at her mother, and her mother was looking down at him, and moving her arms around as she did when she was excited.

‘Yes,’ Esme repeated. ‘A Pet Affection Indicator. It’s a new scientific development.’

Hortense chuckled, teasing. ‘That cat hates you and always has.’

Lucetta stepped onto the back verandah; she felt the soft, warm wood under her toes, licked the honey that had dripped from her toast to her thumb, and said hi.

The man who turned was familiar in a way; he had a warm and comforting face, one she hoped to see more often. Every day, if possible. She hadn’t gulped down her heart in years, it seemed, and wished she could hold on to it, this unexpected feeling, this swelling unlinked to anything tangible but a strange face, loaded with inaccessible stories.

‘It’s Rhett! . . . He’s come back . . .’ her mother said, and Lucetta blinked in shock. So the face was familiar for good reason, but god, he had changed.

Rhett looked up, squinted slightly, his mouth hooked sideways, almost a smile, then he turned away, messed the dog’s head. ‘Well, I’m going to get a move on,’ he said, rising, stretching, unfolding, all brown skin and rumpled hair, the dark curls on the backs of his legs damp with sweat. ‘Heaps to do over there. I’ve discovered a drawer with ten years’ worth of food shopping receipts . . .’

‘Don’t let Auntie get a look at it,’ Byrne said. ‘She can’t throw anything away. She’s like a paper-holic.’

‘I’m thinking of keeping it as is. It’s like some weird record of everything we’ve ever eaten. Maybe there’s a clue in there to what killed us.’ He laughed, but it sounded false.

‘I think it’s fascinating,’ Byrne continued. ‘The post office says that documents have no value, but most of the things people think precious are just scraps of paper – like in a fire, what would you save?’

‘My dog, probably. And you.’ He squeezed Byrne’s arm and strode off.

He never once looked back at Lucetta.

‘Well, now, he’s pretty special,’ Byrne said, watching him disappear around the corner, admiring his loose, easy form. ‘Eight years away and comes back with a face I’d give my legs for.’

‘Then, Mother, you’d be a stump,’ Lucetta observed tartly.

‘Too bad he’s brought a girl with him,’ Byrne sighed. ‘Of course.’

Lucetta’s heart felt stained and heavy and slippery all at once. And then, just when she thought it would split open like an expanding plum in the sun, it was pricked and filled with one last syringeful of his impossible beauty.

CHAPTER 9

ESME RELUCTANTLY FASTENED HERSELF into the passenger seat and tested the belt twice before Hortense revved the engine. She gripped her door handle, prepared to leap. She had packed a peeled boiled egg for the trip. It sat in her lap in its plastic wrap like a warm organ, ready for transplant.

Esme had stopped driving ten years ago, the day she turned seventy. She didn’t think it proper for a woman to be driving over that age. Of course it was a moot point, considering her own mother still zipped around, despite difficulty walking – ‘a car makes the best walker,’ Hortense insisted – a hoon trapped in a hundred-and-one-year-old woman’s body. She wore a special wooden three-centimetre wedge-soled shoe to give her accelerator foot the extra weight and strength it needed to speed, as they sped now down the back road to town. ‘Fewer police,’ her mother said. Hortense had been known to overtake roos, and took great pleasure in watching the needle creep up – one hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-five – over the cattle grids, through flocks of sheep, cackling with joy to see how far she could push it, as Esme clutched her headscarf, her seatbelt, her egg, pressed her knees together to stop from wetting herself.

After the age of eighty, the Roads and Traffic Authority had insisted Hortense take an annual driver’s test, and every year Esme secretly prayed her mother would fail it. She never did.

When Hortense turned one hundred she received a message from the Queen, and bought herself a new car to celebrate. It was a V8, which, until that point in time, Esme had always thought was tomato juice. A bright orange and black striped 1969 Holden HT GTS Monaro Coupe, Hortense proudly informed her.

Esme had made all sorts of pronouncements about people who thought the world their oyster; about the young men in town who threatened the lives of women and children with their racy, rude driving. But secretly, she had long felt a twisted admiration for her mother.

To be that kinetic, that brave.

Now the orange insect tore down the red, hilly road, the lake hidden by tracts of gum trees. The light was a dazzle of particles.

Hortense had the seat pushed up against the steering wheel. She leaned towards it, gripping the black vinyl in her knobbly hands. She seemed to speed up as she approached the corner but then was suddenly surprised to find the car already halfway through a turn.

‘Whoa!’ Hortense laughed, wrenching the wheel around. The boiled egg rolled onto the floor. They wobbled through it. Just missed a ditch.

‘Mum, slow down!’ Esme felt hysterical.

Esme shouldn’t have had that second shot of brandy before getting into any car her mother was driving. Her bowels were butter. Never again.

‘Oh, you loved it,’ Hortense chortled, nervously squinting over the wheel, knowing without looking what shape her daughter’s face was making.

‘Are you sure you can see?’ Esme suspected Hortense’s eyes were failing; she had noticed her straining a lot more in recent months, once even reading her magazine upside down. When Esme suggested a visit to the optometrist, Hortense had scoffed. She could still bait a hook, couldn’t she? And travelled in her mind back to the river where she and Esme’s father Jack had fished and swum when they were young and in love. There was a milky flush of dream in her eyes then, which resembled cataracts. Nothing Esme could say would counter this logic of memory. She didn’t mention to Hortense that she couldn’t thread a needle, because then again, neither could Esme anymore. It was the delicacy of life that went first, she had noticed. The taste of cinnamon in porridge.

Esme saw a flash of light out of the corner of her eye as her mother’s voice faded in and out behind the sound of a bell; her mother’s mouth just a jawbone opening and closing over her memories in a growing symphony of light and bells.

She tapped Hortense’s arm and said, ‘Mo-ther, you’ve got police.’

Hortense glanced in the mirror to see the cop car lights. She pushed too hard with her wedged shoe against the brakes and screeched to a stop in the middle of the road, the rear of the car sliding.

A car door opened and slammed shut; the crunch of grit under boots.

‘Officer Moses.’ Hortense smiled at the young policeman.

‘Mrs Windle, you can’t keep doing this.’

‘Ms; I’m Ms now. Thought I’d try that for a while. Gotta keep up with the times.’

‘I don’t care how long you’ve been on this planet. I’d pull you up if you were eighteen.’

‘That pleases me.’

He sighed. ‘Mate, I realise.’

‘Somebody tip you off?’ Here Hortense glanced at Esme. ‘That we were going to town?’

‘No, ma’am, but there’s only so many roads to take from your place.’

‘That’s true. But it’s not like there are cars – I mean, nobody to bother if I go a little fast.’

‘You were driving ninety around the bends, Ms Windle. And from the look on her face, I think Esme was rather more than bothered.’

Esme looked away, tried to make her face smooth as a stone.

‘I’ve always taught my daughter that freedom was a good thing.’

Esme studied the far side of Lake Eucumbene through the trees. The recent drought had sucked at it, leaving a large puddle at the bottom of the glass. Underneath that water lay her old life. Dead trees, dotted through the lake, petrified by years in postures of yearning, a contortion of bodies, clawing the air.

She remembered the week when the rising water had first enveloped the trees and how they’d stayed green for a time; then, one day, she noticed that each and every leaf had dried on the tree but did not fall in the wind. Instead, they stirred and sizzled like secrets.

Esme understood those trees, the creak-back feeling of them. Even released from prisons of water and mud, given back to the sky, their ultimate freedom was still denied by circumstance.

Officer Moses directed his gaze at Esme. ‘Can I see your licence, Ms Windle?’

Esme looked up, glanced at her mother in confusion. She pointed to herself. ‘You mean Miss Windle?’

He nodded.

‘My daughter’s a “Miss”. She doesn’t believe in “Ms”,’ Hortense explained.

‘I don’t drive, officer,’ Esme said.

‘You don’t have a licence, then?’

‘I do, but for identification purposes only, you understand.’ She extracted her card, pinched between two fingers and a thumb, handed it over like something gone rotten.

Officer Moses studied it.

Esme turned to her mother. ‘It’s my spine, you know,’ she said by way of explanation. She didn’t want to get into the Thou-Shalt-Not-Drive-After-Seventy discussion. ‘That’s why I can’t drive, Mum. Ever. You know that.’

‘That’s right,’ her mother answered. ‘You should travel everywhere by ambulance instead.’

Esme remembered going prawning with her mum until midnight, cooking prawns up in a kero tin over the fire, lying with her head on her mother’s hot belly. For how long now had aging got in the way of love? Once only twenty-one years apart, like friends. Now, two bag ladies with twenty-one years too many suddenly between them.

Officer Moses handed the licence back. ‘I’d be happy to give you ladies a lift home. You’ll have to get Byrne or Lucetta to pick the car up.’

‘Are you joking?’ Hortense looked up in disbelief.

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t let you drive again until you retake your annual driver’s test, Ms Windle. I understand you two ladies might need to get around, but it’s not going to be with you behind the wheel, I’m afraid.’

Hortense was still caught on the word ‘test’ like a hook through the cheek.

Esme shrivelled like her leg. ‘But we need to go to town today, officer,’ Esme choked out. ‘I have some business concerning the affairs of my niece, Lucetta. It’s the anniversary of Joe’s death today, you know. Five years.’

Officer Moses nodded. ‘I’m sorry, but I can take you home now,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll give you a minute to gather your things.’

Esme closed her eyes, took a deep, loud, rasping breath. A breath of strength, despite its clatter within.

She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out her licence. Handed it to Hortense. ‘I suppose I’ll be driving, then.’

For a long second, Esme was lulled by the two-toned click of the indicator light, tick tick, tick tick, before she pulled out, snail-slow, and continued crawling down the road.

The dusty light in shafts through the trees. The birds diving on waves of air across the road ahead and calling loudly.

‘Isn’t it a lovely day, Mother?’ she asked, taking the time to gaze about her in wonder. She hadn’t propelled herself anywhere for the last ten years. She was gliding, simply gliding, without limp or pain.

If Hortense desired speed, Esme wanted slowness. Slow was fine as long as she didn’t stop moving altogether, in which case she was afraid she would tip over. Even now, Esme still fed the chooks, still managed to make tea and lunch and wash up, still managed to feed the dogs.

Hortense was scowling at a pamphlet and an accompanying guidebook Officer Moses had given her: Worried about the driving ability of an older driver? He wanted her first to take a test that would enable her to evaluate her own performance, then come in for a proper driving test straight after.

‘“Do intersections bother you because there’s so much to watch for from all directions?” No, intersections bother me because I have to stop. Tick. “Do traffic situations make you angry or impatient?” Well, this one would certainly qualify.’

Hortense sighed loudly, threw the guidebook aside. ‘If you drive all the way to town at this speed, I’ll kill myself,’ she announced.

‘I’ll drive how I feel comfortable, Mum. Anyway, you’re stuck with me is how I see it.’

Hortense moaned again, for effect, and studied the world through the window. ‘I wonder if the bearings I ordered will be at the post office. Notice how the wheels’ve got a bit of play in them?’

‘Let’s just focus on my bearings for a minute, so we get there in one piece,’ Esme answered.

After a moment, Hortense began chanting. ‘A beautiful forest in India is found, wherein two birds together are bound . . .’

It was a rhyme from Esme’s childhood. Esme joined in. ‘One is snow-white, the other red. They bite each other until both are dead.’

‘Which one are you?’ Esme asked. For a moment she found she wasn’t studying her mother’s face for further signs of degeneration, but in an older, half-forgotten way, dreamy as the light through the car was gold, searching for traces of love.

‘I’m the snow-white one, of course!’ Hortense shrieked.

Esme parked the car outside the post office.

‘If I lose my bearings . . . well, come look for me.’ Hortense chuckled. She amused herself. Regularly. At least if Esme hadn’t managed to engineer her own escape from the world by the time she was a hundred and one, there was that to look forward to. Perhaps by then one was finally free to laugh.

Instead, Esme engineered an excuse and shuffled across the street to pay a short, secret visit to Joe’s paternal uncle. She pressed through the green haze of his garden. He answered the door on the third knock.

‘Mr Benbow.’ Esme was out of breath.

‘Oh, Miss Windle.’ Surprised to see her, she could tell. He was glistening.

‘Lucetta . . .’ She felt a cough rising. Took a moment to stifle it. ‘Forgive my intrusion, after so long. But I am worried. Lucetta . . . She has forgotten Joe.’

He absorbed the shape of her. ‘You’ve got old.’

‘I’m almost in my box, Mr Benbow. I say goodbye every night. I might not wake up in the morning. I might never see her again. You have to remember to say goodbye every night at our age.’

There were tears in her eyes.

She wiped them and her throat broke. ‘Excuse me.’

‘She doesn’t remember,’ she repeated, as if the repetition might take the truth away. ‘What if he was all she will ever have and she forgets him? I say goodbye every night. I don’t know what she does . . . I would like to help her.’

She was so small in the doorway.

CHAPTER 10

HAZEL ARRIVED AT THE gate, number 88, set into a row of green hedge, just before noon. Inside the fence, a garden in wayward rows of green: romaine, cos and iceberg lettuces, English spinach, cress, parsley, chives, basil, coriander, heavily watered cabbages. There was no path but a round turn of stepping stones that crossed through the garden and she had to step over two heads of cos, a bed of cress and a bush of parsley half gone to seed to reach the door.

The stone wall of the house was covered in a mosaic of brown tiles, a swirled glaze as luminescent and inviting as the unbroken lid of a crème brûlée. The door, however, seemed to be stuck with two hundred tiny coloured mounds of putty. She touched a finger to one and recoiled: chewing gum. Found a space between fossilised pieces wide enough for her fist and rapped hard.

There was no answer and Hazel thought perhaps he wasn’t home, but suddenly, although she’d heard no steps on the other side, he was there, opening the door.

Bald, pale, nearly translucent skin, white eyebrows. Barefoot. He was plump, as if he had pumped his skin full of water. He stood there, blinking.

‘Ah, Burchill? Mr Benbow?’

‘That’s me.’

Hazel couldn’t tell if he was frowning or smiling, so indistinct were his facial features.

An old woman was slowly making her way down the corridor behind him, hunched over, her face nearly pressed down into her neck. She lifted her head to catch Hazel’s eye. ‘I’ll get out of your way, Mr Benbow. But I’d appreciate your giving some thought to the matter.’

It was Hazel’s old neighbour.

‘Yes, Miss Windle. Some sort of resurrection. I know.’ He sounded dubious.

‘Oh, sorry.’ Hazel took a step back to let the old woman pass. ‘Am I early?’

‘Oh no, dear,’ the woman said. ‘Oh no. I’m just leaving.’ She laughed nervously. ‘Lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Hazel agreed, though she in fact hated the heat. ‘We haven’t met yet,’ she said, ‘but I’ve just moved in next door to you. I’m Hazel.’

The woman stared at her, clasped her hand. ‘Oh, hello, dear. You’re the one that came with Rhett, then?’

Hazel nodded apprehensively, for this information had seemed to cause something of a stir among her neighbours.

‘I’m dying to lay my eyes on him myself,’ the woman confessed. ‘Come visit me, won’t you? I’m Esme.’

Hazel put out a hand to help her down the step. ‘Oh no, I’ll be right, dear. Thank you. Good day.’

Esme inched away down the green path.

Hazel looked back to find Mr Benbow staring as if trying to place her.

‘I’m Hazel Rey?’ she said. ‘For the job?’

When he smiled, his lips didn’t move, only his eyebrows lifted, causing his eyes, his upper lip to raise simultaneously in response, as if attached by pulleys. ‘Strange accent for a Sydney girl.’

‘I’m originally from America.’

‘Doesn’t matter a hoot to me, as long as you can do the job.’

He led her into a small room, in which boxes and papers and books and old broken furniture were stacked in precarious, leaning towers. In the middle of the room, a chair and a convex screen TV on a wobbling stand, nearly hidden under a tarnished silver candelabra and a weight of melted wax that was splattered across the TV screen.

‘Don’t mind all of this,’ he said, waving his hand at the mess. ‘I don’t.’

They waded through the junk to a place where a thin path of emptiness parted the mess and Hazel was struck by the thought that by simply pushing aside all that normally surrounded you, a person could make space, suddenly, seemingly out of nothing. Her mother used to say that the path was always there, but until this moment, Hazel hadn’t understood her.

‘Come in here where it’s fresher,’ Burchill Benbow said, and led her around to the left, into an even smaller space.

She couldn’t see the difference, couldn’t tell in what way it was fresher, except there was a tiny window, which let in a perfect beam of yellow light, crowded with dust, though no air that she could actually feel. Instead, the mountains of books and papers seemed to give off a radiant heat of their own, like compost cooking in the sun. Burchill stood close. She could smell the old scent of him, rich, earthy, as if he’d spent all day gardening. His hands seemed to be made of wax. Hazel felt claustrophobic.

‘So,’ she asked nervously, ‘will we be going in to the museum?’

He looked at her, and his eyebrows lifted a second time and she glimpsed into the quick round O of his mouth, pink gums and few teeth, before it shut again.

‘We are here,’ he said. He waved his arm, welcoming, at the rubbish-piled room.

‘You want me to archive this? All of this?’ Hazel looked at him in horror.

He couldn’t seem to see the problem.

‘But I’ll need an office, and filing cabinets and a photocopier, for sure . . . not to mention lever arch folders, acid-free storage envelopes, shoe-box folders – these things matter.’

‘If you wear shoes.’

Hazel didn’t know which way to look. This was all a mistake. She could feel her mother, looking over her shoulder, saying, the man’s obviously a bit lou-lou. But also saying, Every single being you meet has been your mother . . .

Maybe he was in the business of luring young women into giving up cities and jobs, luring them into his museum of waste. A cornucopia of lost things, the shifted-off matter of lives. A room shaped like regret.

‘I thought I was going to be working in a museum.’

‘Nah,’ he said, and walked out.

Hazel heard him call from the next room. ‘Come for salad out back. We’ll talk.’

Burchill Benbow’s back garden was not much different from the front, only wilder, a half-acre of lettuces springing and singing leafily. In the centre of a small, round clearing of grass was a bottle of oil and vinegar, salt and pepper shakers.

Burchill gestured to Hazel to sit down in the clearing and then he hobbled around, picking leaves and fresh herbs, placing them in a big china bowl. He returned, sat down cross-legged, pulled a pair of scissors from his waistband, and began cutting the lettuce and parsley into bite-sized bits, which he dressed in oil and apple cider vinegar. He pinched some leaves between his thumb and two forefingers and scooped them into his mouth. Left a speck of oil on his chin.

‘My last wife kept everything from go to whoa. A bowerbird. Meself, I don’t care much for the past, don’t think much on it. You might say, if you don’t care about the past, why did you keep all this stuff? And that’s a good question. But it seems to me that to deal with it, even to throw it all away, means I have to trudge through it, and I don’t like trudging, don’t like sand, don’t like them beaches a bit. I’m more bird than crab, if you know what I mean, I like to glide, which is why I thought you and me’d get along all right, you being adrift and all.’ Here he handed the salad bowl to Hazel.

There was no fork, so she too picked up the wet leaves with her fingers.

Burchill chewed green. ‘The thing about stuff is you can look right through it if you have the knack; if you just poke around in different places nothing ever seems old. You hardly know nearly fifty years have passed. Whereas Miss Windle there, by the front door, she knows each day that has passed by, agonisingly. She tries to keep them . . .

‘Anyhow, in a few years we’ll hit the anniversary, fifty years from our first houses being moved, from the flooding, and all the old townspeople – because the young ones, well, all they’ve ever known is the lake – the oldies, they want some kind of tribute prepared, they want their grandkids to know what happened; me, I’ve never minded all that much. I reckon to be displaced you have to be placed first. Anyway, they all reckon since I’ve got the most stuff that I’m the one to do this museum and they’re all gunna bring their memorabilia. They’re gunna dump it all here – you know, photos and that, letters, mostly photos, I think. It’s all dead boring as far as I’m concerned. I lived it. Why do I want to look at it? Some of the ladies want to tell their stories, but we’ve all got some sort of story, don’t we, and I dunno why theirs is going to be any more interesting than somebody else’s, but as you can see, I’m not exactly fired up about this idea. Which is where you come in.’

‘So I’m just here to organise . . .’ Here Hazel faltered. ‘An archive, a museum, an exhibition? A memorial service? What exactly?’

‘Oh, whatever takes your fancy. Something inspired, I hope.’ He was picking at the soggy remains of the salad as if he couldn’t remember eating it in the first place, but one quick glance around the garden at his wealth of lettuce seemed to restore his spirits, because he laughed out loud.

‘But how do you know that that stuff in there is appropriate for this – whatever it’s going to be?’ Hazel ventured. ‘Perhaps you just want a cleaning lady?’ When he looked up, offended, she added hastily, ‘I mean, do you know where everything is or what it is?’

‘Hell, no!’

‘Then I don’t understand why they’ve chosen you to do this.’

‘Unfortunately, Miss Rey, for a man with no interest in the past tense, I have a whopper of a recollection. I’ve worked twenty-five years at the local paper, and I’ve got a memory to go with everything. Crowds me up with bad indigestion, I’ll tell you; it’s no fun bringing up two bobs worth of belch only to find it stinks distinctly of 1942.’

Hazel looked at him; saw lakes of life suddenly behind his wet eyes. Realised, then and there, how little she knew of anything.

In Sydney, Hazel had worked for three years at the Australian Museum, a sandstone temple of stuffed and jarred things; even at night it shone, floors and rooms and secret galleries where the living could visit the dead. There were men up in the tiny twists of the stone towers, in labs the size of Hazel’s bathroom, in love with a fly. ‘The most beautiful fly in the universe,’ one called his life’s work, and could pull out dozens of hand-drawn enlargements in pencil, the eyes bulbous, staring. The most beautiful fly in the universe from ten angles.

For weeks, when Hazel first worked there, she’d wander the maze of long halls, up stairs, across windy bits of roof, past a smoking worker, down more halls, circling. Her key opened most doors, which made the museum’s architecture all the more entrapping. She could travel its orbit for days, visiting rooms of masks and bones, while behind blank walls, more creatures waited in boxes to be exhumed. She imagined sneaking in at night, entering rooms off the back stairs where lizards and squid floated in formaldehyde, and jars of nudibranches and bivalves were pried open to expose their insides, past an entire annex of stuffed birds on stands, their stiff bodies still coated in soft feathers, staring down, while cassettes of bird songs were piped through the museum’s sound system, the trill of honeyeaters.

Still, the concept of the natural history museum had changed since she was a child. No longer a world of tableau and diorama, stuffed animals placed in painted settings; instead, the larger order had to be gleaned from the most microscopic components. A leaf stood for a tree, a bat wing for the evolution of flight. An invisible curator laid out the pieces and the visitor was expected to make the links. Hazel imagined this curator as a puppet master, backstage with a needle and thread, piercing the flesh of the world, stringing jarring assemblages of wing and flipper. Sometimes Hazel had walked the corridors and tried to discern in the twitching faces of the museum workers which one carried the spool of thread in their pocket.

Hazel’s job had been to catalogue rocks, minerals, insects and fossils for the Search & Discover room, to slide open wooden, greased drawers to reveal lines of moths and butterflies, pins holding the thorax, the outstretched shredding wings. Live spiders she fed. Cocoons she watched hatch. She helped the exhibition project teams by gathering various assets for display. She’d always been a gatherer – tiny things on large shelves gave the distance she felt they needed to be truly seen – but at the museum she’d become a kind of translator, a roving reporter, collecting strands from each scientific corner, weaving something that would appeal to the outside world. She shared with the rest of the staff the principle that the past must be preserved. Together they clung to lost things.

The last exhibition she had worked on was called ‘The Planets’.

Usually the details she collected echoed through her brain until the next exhibition’s minutiae replaced them, but Hazel had left the museum as ‘The Planets’ was being built and so now found herself stuck with a head full of random planetary facts. Each planet has a different weight and speed and takes more or less years to orbit the sun. The planets accelerate as they approach the sun then slow down after they pass it. Pluto’s orbit: two hundred and forty-eight years. Winter on Pluto lasts eighty years. The gas giants, Jupiter and Neptune, have no surface to stand on. Jupiter’s moon, Europa, bound in orbit to its giant parent, is believed to have a lake trapped beneath its icy crust. Jupiter rules its daily tides. All planets move in one direction, clockwise.

Hazel had found in the museum’s attic a gold antique astrolabe once used to determine the position of celestial bodies in orbit. It had been built by a clock maker and she had immediately understood that clocks were just another type of astrolabe, a mathematical portrait of our body’s trajectory through space. Hazel knew a person was born with only so many breaths in the body, each person contained within them an exact, unique number: heartbeats, inhalations, rounds of the blood. Seconds to live by. It was not a question of if, her mother always reminded her, but when. ‘You breathe in, you might not breathe out.’ There was always one more inhalation than exhalation in everybody’s mathematics.

On her way back home from Burchill’s, Hazel stopped at the payphone outside the post office. As if in sympathy with her temperament, life in Adaminaby’s main street had picked up a bit. It no longer felt entirely dead, especially in the buttery sunlight, though most of the people that passed her were hobbling old, and she imagined their trolleys and shopping bags packed with pieces of the past.

For a second, she wanted to call Danny and tell him everything. She had a place to live, not yet home. She had a job, not yet home. She had a boss, potential unknown. It was all unfurling like a kite string. Mostly, she wanted to pretend that they didn’t stand on either side of some nebulous gulf, some yawning, unexpected cavern that had crept up between all they had been. If it were so easy to become two separate lives without recourse to that place that held their two faces side by side, then what was it they had been? Her mother said all relationships were grasping, but what was the difference between love and grasping, between actual desire and plain old bad habit?

Hazel pushed into the musty-smelling booth, inserted her phonecard and dialled.

A deep sigh as the phone was picked up, across the twisted span of wires.

‘Hi, Mom.’

‘Oh, Hazel!’ She sounded groggy. She’d been sleeping. Of course. ‘What time is it?’

‘Tomorrow. Sorry, Mom.’

‘Where are you? I’ve tried calling but you’re never home.’

‘I’ve moved.’

‘What? Moved where? Nobody ever tells me anything. How’s Danny?’

‘Well, that’s a question.’

‘What does that mean? Of course it’s a question. Is something wrong?’

‘I’ve just got a new job, Mom. To do with this thing called the Snowy Mountains Scheme. For a small, drowned town. It was flooded. It’s in the country. I’ve moved to the country. It’s my own exhibition. The first one that’s my very own.’

‘Is Danny there too?’

‘That might not work out,’ was all Hazel could admit to. ‘Hey, I’ve gotta go,’ she lied. ‘Somebody’s waiting for the phone.’

‘They say those who move house a lot are the most lonely,’ her mother cried down the line.

‘Thanks, Mom.’ Hazel hung up.

Later that evening, Hazel and Josie walked the dried shore below the house, among the crumbling stone blocks of foundations the retreating water had left behind. The earth came closest to the sun every January and, appropriately, the day had been scorching. Still, she dreaded the darkness she could feel, minute by minute, creeping closer.

Her eyes trailed the ground, curious as to what Rhett had found here. She didn’t have to dig long to discover a horseshoe, a rusted candlestick, three shards of broken china, the curved handle of a teacup, a glass stopper and an old beer bottle with a dead yabby in it, its body just a dried shell.

She thought of long-gone families once sitting down to tea and hoarded the relics back in her arms, hugging the last of the day’s hot air.

The lake was soon belted by the rising, growing moon. She found herself reciting a poem assembled from the names of the smaller of the basaltic plains of the moon. They were also known as lakes.

Lake of Summer, Lake of Autumn, Lake of Goodness, Lake of Sorrow, Lake of Softness, Lake of Excellence, Lake of Happiness, Lake of Hatred, Lake of Joy, Lake of Luxury, Lake of Death, Lake of Dreams, Lake of Forgetfulness, Lake of Perseverance, Lake of Solitude, Lake of Time, Lake of Fear, Lake of Spring, Lake of Hope.

She wondered what this lake would turn out to be.

CHAPTER 11

THAT MONDAY AFTERNOON, RHETT saddled Billy and they slowly climbed the hill behind the house. The horse was still a bit thin, but not nearly as neglected as Rhett had expected. Somebody had been riding him, shoeing him, brushing him.

He raised a finger to each passing bird and tree, remembering his father at the wheel of the truck tipping his head to every car that blew by spitting stones, as if he alone approved their passing. Rhett’s shadow stalked him: outline of horse, late afternoon. He could see his shadow man cough as he coughed – it was no more substantial than a hieroglyph, than a phantom puppet on a wall, yet beneath it all, the entire tissue of a life coursed.

He had the unnerving sense that he was simply acting out something bigger than himself. Some path paved long before, some plan he had no power to alter. It was laid out, generation after generation, like a set of clothes on the bed in the morning, waiting for Rhett to climb in. When he had first returned home yesterday, he’d pushed open the door of his old bedroom; let it swing. The sun made a sword of light across the bed: boots, checked shirt, jeans, leather belt, gold buckle, hat. Rhett had closed the door.

He rode along the plateau of the hill into the debris of trees, Billy trotting, stumbling away from sticks and rocks, trees ripped from the earth, roots tangled in air, shed bark on the ground. Soft, meaty cores of hollow trunks baking all day in the heat. In the air, a sweet, rotting stench.

The magpie, its white bum, all hot light in the sun.

As they descended the far side of the hill towards the field of thigh-high tussock, Billy tightened beneath him, uneasy – pranced from foot to foot, and turned stubborn and freaky when Rhett tried to lead him down. You could feel his fright, the tight bulk of him, ready to spring.

Rhett had forgotten it was there; Billy hadn’t. Amazing how whole tracts of life just melted from your mind. Rhett could make out the bones now, scattered like branches: the horses’ graveyard. The bulky bodies left to decay under stacks of wood, the smooth-snouted skulls, eye sockets sucked clean, a bottom jaw thrown carelessly. In Greece, the islanders had just chucked everything they no longer wanted over the edge of the island, let it break across the rocks, and it reminded him of this graveyard of bones, or really, the horse bones reminded him of the vast, white spaces of that floating Greek mountain, seared by sea, by light.

He guided Billy around the bones. Horses liked death just about as much as people did, and were just as quick to bolt away from it. Scout, on the other hand, was making off with a severed hoof as if all her meals had come at once. She tugged at it with her teeth, pulling at strings of flesh.

Rhett leaned over and wrapped his arms around Billy’s neck, inhaled the rich, musty smell of him, then quickly leaned back again as Billy hurried down the hill until they were enveloped by the tussock.

He’d been amazed to find how similar in ways the two countries were, and how each country called up the other, in dreamscape spaces, unexpectedly. Standing on the cobblestones outside the Anafi bakery in the downpour and thinking that he was a child again, how surely the tank would be overflowing at last, and he could have a bath. Now the drought, in complicity with the imagined taste of that taunting rain, in complicity with his thirst – so strong now, he was aching again for the lake.

‘AIEEEE!’ Then the blare of a horn.

Rhett looked up. The long shiver of blue sky. He squinted and made out in the distance the swift black splotch that was a bull gone loose. It had broken through the fence, charged down the road that led to town, and was now veering into a far paddock. Byrne’s battered yellow ute was chasing it unsuccessfully, behind a couple of sprinting kelpies.

Rhett dug his heels into Billy’s ribs. Nothing.

‘C’mon, Bill! Get!’

Billy fought back but, after several misplaced kicks, he bolted across the tussock, bumping over the road towards the suede hill on the other side, nearly throwing Rhett into a ditch when he lost his footing in the galloping stirrup. For both, the ride was at first an instinct remembered, the body inhabiting old postures. But the speed soon felt good. Then Rhett wanted it despite himself, an excuse to disappear; the grip of his horse between his legs; the rub on the inner thigh when he dropped and lifted from the saddle; that rhythm of two bodies finally in the service of one purpose.

He slowed as he reached the bull, arm down. He had no rope, wasn’t prepared for a muster. Instead, he enclosed the animal with tight circles. At first the bull circled with him, staring, mesmerised by his eyes, but then Rhett was distracted by the dogs who, having shimmied under the barbed wire, arrived stalking and barking, and the bull took off again. Rhett gave chase, managed to turn him around, but lost ground to the dogs. The ute arrived moments after, having gone the long way, stopping to open the gates. It bumped across the dry, rutted ground to reach them and Lucetta jumped out in T-shirt and jeans, hair pulled back, baseball cap, eye firmly on the bull, stockwhip in hand. She cracked the whip, got the dogs around the wayward animal and quickly, expertly, got the animal going in the right direction.

‘Ta,’ she said, without looking at Rhett.

‘No worries . . . I’m a bit out of practice.’ He didn’t admit that he’d nearly slipped off.

She glanced up briefly, was struck with a full bolt of sun in her eyes and looked away. He could tell he annoyed her.

She jumped into the ute. ‘I’d stay and chat, but I’ve got to euthanase a cat.’

Then the ute crawled back across the paddock, the bull stumbling along ahead, nipped by the threat of dogs’ teeth.

Of course he had seen her. She had squinted into the sun to look at him earlier that morning, and just now again, and he figured maybe from now on he could just step away without her noticing, use the light blaring into her eyes for cover and distraction. Slip away as if she had never happened. But even the brown arch of Lucetta’s bare foot was breathtaking. Seeing her again he was suddenly oxygen-drained, using up reserves, like tank water behind the house. His blood kept trying to pump through the mud of his lungs.

He had loved her once, desperately, in that slow, burning way of childhood. Then, as a teenager, he used to watch the door of her house for hours from his attic window dreaming against the cool panes of glass, waiting for her to descend the six steps from verandah to car, his heart so worn out from thrumming at the sides of him it almost couldn’t muster the enthusiasm when she finally did appear. But she had stopped seeing him by then.

He would escape and make furious tracks into the hills around the lake while his dog dug rabbits from the rocks, and imagined mud spun from his tyres, grit slapping over her pale, round face. Only briefly, but still, the image flashed there.

Guilt’s bliss soon followed: laying her down on a large white stone, flat-topped, limb-wrapped, sky-flung, wiping her clean with his tongue. He fantasised her frozen with cold and perhaps locked out of her house too. Imagined taking her up to his bedroom, pressing her between his sheets to warm her. He would wash her feet first, drip hot water between her toes. He would undress her as she slept . . .

At this point daydream had always coiled quick and deep, into places he had no control over. Afterwards, aching for all he wanted to do to her. For hours, he could see like an after-burn his thumb at the end of a telescope’s long tunnel, spreading her pink slit, peering in. Sure sign of his wayward nature; his general unsuitability to the business of love. None of his friends wanted to look, they just wanted to clamber in, hook and line.

But she no longer saw him.

It had almost been easier back then, being ill-formed and awkward, his bones clashing under his skin when he moved. But some time between seventeen and twenty, his body remade itself when he wasn’t looking, conspired to make him a joke in the world, as if he’d named himself out of arrogance. So shunned when he was young, now he had women eyeing him for miles and men too, gazes narrowing in disbelief, and he couldn’t understand how so much had changed when inside he felt exactly the same. His looks were a reputation preceding him, left no room to find a way inside the truth of himself. So he learned to use brooding to his advantage, made laconic arrogance an art form, but the fact was he had no idea how to be, never knew where to look, except away. He studied trees and animals instead of human faces. Swallowed his shyness with a few quick drinks as soon as he woke on the days when faces could not be avoided.

His mother had had a friend called Velvet who was born into a family of horse breeders. How could I not be into horses, she asked, with a name like Velvet? That was Rhett’s problem too. How could he not be drawn into complicated, back-breaking love? Yet every day he shunned it, pushed it aside like a meal he wasn’t hungry for. Anonymous sex was one thing, but he had no vision of a future with family, or if he did it was nebulous – hazy children appeared in his mind more out of a curious interest in the shape of his self remade, in some idea of his fathering, than out of any genuine need to be born. There was a wife, maybe, in a red dress and gumboots, but after Lucetta married Joe, this wife lost her face.

For years, he stayed away, far from women, from Alesandra, far from horses and hills, his father and his expectations. For a while he’d delivered pizzas to the small towns scattered up and down the south coast. He watched the nights unfolding – dusk, midnight, dawn – encased in his car, streets, driveways and houses, the radio left playing, the sound of his footsteps approaching, his hand flat and balancing the spongy heat of pizza to the door. Then the cheer inside, dogs silenced, door thrown open, every time it was like being welcomed, the warm flush of faces, box teetering on the edge of the chair while the cash was counted.

But he quit that job when the same women whose partners were away on business kept calling to order pizza and then invited him in. Sometimes he said okay, woke sweaty and naked in a perfumed bed and slipped out past the uneaten pizza before dawn. Other times he fled their desire. Then, too, there was the inevitability of the sad flats, men whose lives were saved by home delivery and late night movies, the photos of children in the custody of disgruntled wives framed on the windowsill.

After that, Rhett worked a toll booth in Sydney. The lowest job he could find. Aspired to obscurity. Stood still as the wild world zoomed past. He quickly learned to pick from the shape of the driver’s hand which coins were contained there. Could read the colours of the bills flapping between outstretched fingers and tried to see how fast he could summon the right change. There was no risk in smiling at pretty women, for they could not stop, and he always got at least one flash of passing thigh. Mostly, though, he found the lights at night reassuring. Everybody was en route; nobody had arrived. He could turn the radio up loud and pretend he belonged. But he left that job when his boss stuck him on too many early morning shifts. Rhett drank too much, cared too little, slept too late. He hated the callousness his softness bred but could seem to do nothing to change it. He preferred himself drunk and cheerful, though his cheerfulness was still careless about the dictates of the clock, about train or ferry schedules, or anything involving paper that had to be kept clean. His father thought him lazy but Rhett loved to work when he felt the work would please somebody. Now Rhett’s house stood empty, his family gone. So, outside of sporadic, drunken moments when the compulsion to catalogue spools of wire or drawers of his mother’s coupons overtook him, the work remained untouched.

Still, the lake called him.

Rhett came in at dusk. After much searching, he unearthed a dusty bottle, sticky brown rum, from the back of the pantry. He poured himself a glass, drank thirsty mouthfuls, let the Coke burn his tongue, the rum his throat. He dabbed Dettol over a nick on his elbow from a snag of barbed wire he’d caught under the water.

Television did something. When he was away, he’d hardly watched it, but now he filled the echoing rooms with its sound. Loud was how he liked it. After quarter of a bottle of rum and three hours of the TV’s blue pulse, its flickering images came back to him, warm and waking, where was he?, and after a piss, trying to get back to sleep, he was accosted by fragments of dialogue, of deep, old faces and actresses telling him how much they loved their treadmill. How much the mind collected, and it occurred to him, in that half-asleep way, that the mind itself was a TV, or that TV had been built to accommodate the shape of the mind, its dreams and perversions, the desire he had to touch the small of a woman’s back occasionally, meaning to say somehow that he was lonely, but not knowing the words for lonely. He could restrain himself, could satisfy just by looking, which was what these TV people counted on, that you could be happy enough to look and not touch.

Now he lay nearly passed out on the couch. He kept thinking he heard his mother in the room with him. She was pixellated, enclosed in glass, turning to static when the wind blew and then coming back: ‘Fry the duck breast until it’s browned on both sides . . .’ Cooking in her little TV kitchen. Which was his kitchen now.

There were kitchens under the lake less empty.

Outside, he leaned against the sandstone bricks, cooled his hot head. He heard the crunch of tyres out the front of Lucetta’s house. Then footsteps. The door closing. Wind whooed through the pines, brushed his lips.

The roof of the red shack was threatening to crash. Hazel would not live if it fell and so he told himself that he was doing his duty as a landlord, as a new friend, even as a man, to check that she was okay. He was seeking a voice to quiet the other voices in his head and knew Hazel could fill him with sound.

He brought the rest of the rum just in case. Because he had seen her earlier, licking her lips as she stared out at the white horses on the lake’s surface where the wind crested the water, picking at the hairs on the dog’s back, squinting through those tiny, weird glasses that reflected back, in certain light, his own skewed face.

He didn’t want to think about Lucetta.

Hazel answered the door in her baggy jumper and loose pants, drowsy, scuffling in dirty slippers and, yes, squinting a bit at him with a relieved, crooked smile. She was candlelit.

He held up the bottle. It was amber in there, made promises.

‘Thought I’d come by and keep you company,’ he said.

‘Wind is lonely,’ she agreed, letting him in.

‘You must be,’ he replied, because he wasn’t about to admit he was.

She shrugged. There were things she wouldn’t say either. Not yet.

They sat on her front step because he felt as if the room were just an old painting and he a man on a chair in a painting. Plus, he wanted a cigarette.

‘Since when do you smoke?’ Hazel inquired, teacher-like, as he lit up. And seemed pleased to take the bottle from his hands.

‘I quit. But then I started again.’

‘When?’ She held the bottle away from her and studied its contents, then took a small swig.

‘Just now.’ He was happy to fill himself with smoulder. It matched all the ashes in the air. ‘It was my brother’s tobacco. Found it on his desk. A bit stale.’

Exhaling.

She looked at him as if peering into a box. Determinedly. ‘How are you doing, then?’

He tapped the cigarette against the step. ‘There’s a lot of work. I don’t know where to start, really, or what to do with anything. I just move from room to room. Then go out. Then it’s time for a drink.’

‘Are you going to stay, you know, with the land . . . on the land? What do you say here?’

‘On.’ He inhaled deep. ‘But look at it – well, you have looked at it. It’s a dustbowl. There’s barely enough to feed the horse . . . Anyway, it was my dad’s dream. Or my brother’s. Not mine.’

The dirt hurt him. The vision of his older brother on his horse. He could still see the horseshoes pressed into the ground around them and beyond, down to whatever marks of time lay under the lake. ‘Your drover poets are dying . . .’

He thought of Achilles, an old man he’d met in Greece; helping him press his olives. It was work, but in that ritual that transformed the hard, bitter black fruits into a sweet green and gold river, Rhett believed for a minute he had found something that might mend him, a taste for the work of men, so that all the soft goodness in them did not wither on the branch in waste. When the fruit, pit and all, was first ground with water, it made a dark, fertile mud. He thought to himself that this mud was as far evolved as he had ever got, rich and meaty, but unfinished somehow.

‘So who are the new poets?’ Hazel asked the night, and reached again for the bottle. She took a long drink and carefully wiped her mouth. ‘I was going to say it’s the skaters, surfers – you know, the ones who ride the land.’

‘Snowboarders,’ he added.

‘Exactly. But Danny was a skater. Skaters just skim the surface of things, choose whichever road is smoothest and ride that. I think now that we only got together because I was there and willing, not because he actually ever chooses what he wants his life to be or who he wants to be with. But as soon as there are some bumps, he’s gone with the next big wind.’

Her sorrow glowed in the dark.

‘So you should be happy it’s finished,’ he offered.

He too was caught sometimes by the wind’s will, though he no longer believed he could tame it. Nor was he a poet.

She looked at him and he saw that she saw it too. The ways he was similar and, therefore, as dangerous.

‘Sometimes I am happy. I have this work now . . . this exhibition . . .’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I have my habits . . .’

The neighbour’s porch light came on and, for a moment, the dark circles under her eyes were sculptures. He had formed no new habits in this old place; perhaps that’s why he wasn’t yet saved.

So it was settled then. At least for one night.

‘Despite Danny’s imperfections, of which there were many,’ she continued, and he saw that she was already rather drunk and still in love, so therefore travelling in circles of talk, ‘we were like two children discovering the meaning of love together – that’s what I thought anyway.’

‘So what was it really, then?’

‘A waste.’

‘Maybe you think that now.’ He remembered Lucetta as a child, challenging him to a battle of wills and always winning. Then walking away with it all. How he hated her for years. Maybe still hated her.

‘I have some photos,’ she remarked cynically. ‘He’s already just about disappeared.’ Her fingers flicked open in the air: poof.

He wanted to bite them.

The trees blew in the terrible wind.

Inside his house he poured her another drink. She lay down on the mattress in his mother’s study, her legs bent, her hands tucked between her knees.

‘Whose books were these?’ she asked quietly.

‘Mum’s,’ he said, and the word bobbed in the room as if floating on water.

‘What kind of mum was she?’

‘She was my mum. I don’t know. She worked with my dad at the auctions sometimes because he made her. Cooked tea. Played the piano. But she was really a potter.’ He shrugged. ‘We weren’t a happy family.’

‘Piano sounds happy.’

‘Piano sounds damn sad when you’re five and just want a hug.’ He lay down on the far edge of the bed on his back. The spines of his mother’s books were eerie in the light. Pulsing letters that wanted to tell him things.

‘After my mum lost everything and everybody, I was left,’ he said.

‘So you left.’

His throat closed. ‘I guess.’ He could barely get it out.

They were quiet then in the room that had held his mother and killed her too, because she wasn’t allowed to live in it, and she couldn’t inhabit the real world.

‘How come when our relationships don’t work out we blame ourselves – at least, I do – but when it’s our parents, it’s always their fault? Why don’t we just admit that maybe we can’t or couldn’t love them enough?’

She was tugging at something, as if with her teeth.

‘How do you know I don’t blame myself?’ he asked. ‘You just assume.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She turned to face him and her lips were perilously close to his. ‘See, this is what happens, when I’m drunk . . .’ She smiled. ‘You see now.’

‘I don’t wanna talk anymore . . . too tired.’ He closed his eyes.

The continuous cycle: wrongs, reaching, retreat.

She stared at him for a moment, he sensed. Then he felt her turn over.

‘Goodnight,’ she said, though she shrunk as if punctured, and there was space between their skins.

He couldn’t sleep. Listened to her breathing, slow, then deep, so quickly she slept. He envied her that. He inched himself closer until he could feel her warmth across his belly, radiating out in five directions like a hand.

Her hair smelled like hair. But that was all.

Her glasses were folded up on the little table.

He reached his arm out, hovering above the knit of her jumper, over her ribs. Then his finger on her ribs, just at the arc of her breast and above, ever slightly, the place where he imagined the flick of her nipple. His finger wanted to circle it. Wanted so badly to touch. This woman, this sleeping woman. No longer somebody he knew. Just a woman whose breast his finger was reaching for, his body pushing against her perfect sleep. He felt her rise and fall against him, felt his cock rise against her and moved his hips away, tried to will it away, to make it fall again. The way it always found that place, but he didn’t want it, this, with her. Just a sweet woman, the warm curve of her. He had to fight the need. It was too easy, this sleeping woman. This any woman. Too sad.

CHAPTER 12

AFTER SHE’D WRANGLED THE bull back into its paddock, Lucetta drove to New Adaminaby and, after cutting the fur on its forearm away, injected the cephalic vein of a dying cat called Trickster with Euthanasia Forte (like a vitamin, she always thought, for all your death and dying needs). Ten minutes later she was consoling the family’s sad young son. She was still jittery and didn’t yet want to face going home.

‘Where do you think Trickster has gone?’ she asked him.

‘He’s gone through the cat-door, climbed up the pine tree and is jumping off into the sky. Maybe he’s better now . . .’ Then the boy shrugged, while his throat swelled, choked him silent.

Suddenly, Trickster lifted his head and started moving his legs. Slow, smooth, underwater gestures like swimming that sent a cold shudder through her.

The boy screamed. He felt the cat’s chest, was sure the heart was still beating. He kept looking at Lucetta, a lopsided grin she hadn’t yet seen crossing his face in tidal waves, one side to the other. ‘He’s alive!’ You could see his excitement: Trickster was coming back. The nightmare of endings would be over before it had had too much time to hurt.

Lucetta – her own heartbeat telling of old things, long buried, twitching open again – pressed Trickster’s chest. Like a flood, death’s permanence questioned. Like a flood, all her involvement with last moments questioned. A flood inside her, who was she, to have this power to take life away?

But what she felt then was only the last jolting of Trickster’s chest muscles. She assured the boy that the cat (at this point she stopped using his name) was definitely dead. (Later she realised she said it like that: dead. Cold and hard.) That he was only moving because of a spontaneous stimulation of muscles and nerves, rigor mortis. She could feel the sharp shapes of her language unpicking all of the good work of the last quarter-hour; could feel the boy’s grief beginning afresh, and in it, something new, something newly broken.

The boy was staring at her, looking between his father and Lucetta as if she’d done something horribly wrong; as if this time, she had actually killed Trickster, killed his cat.

It occurred to Lucetta at that moment that she had.

Lucetta bought some flowers at the shop in New Adaminaby, then, a minute later, chucked them away – Joe had always hated the idea of cut flowers. He couldn’t see the point in killing them just to watch them wilt.

She drove down the back roads to White Rocks Inlet. Her house was visible in the distance, the peninsula it sat on jutting out just beyond the rise of the point and across Springwood Bay. She could see it if she stood on top of the largest rock and turned to her right, looking north-west, upwind, across the lake.

When the valley was flooded, in the late fifties, the water had taken on the land’s shape, and so the lake turned out to be more a series of inlets and bays that spread out from Eucumbene River and Frying Pan Creek than an evenly built oval of water dug out of the earth.

She sat on the edge of a granite boulder, close to the light, lapping water and chucked stones. She tried to think of Joe. This was his day, and yet she kept feeling that his flame was continually being blown out.

She and Rhett had been friends as children. From the earliest time she could remember, when she was four and he was six and a bit, she and Rhett had only each other in a world of adults. White Rocks was one of their favourite places when they got older, a couple of hours’ walk along the shore from their houses, up over the hills and through the brush, or accessible with Rhett’s boat, a straight line practically, from the shore at the bottom of their road. This was the dinosaur part of the shore, where the crops of granite formed forbidding limbs and heads, crashing, thrashing tails and horns. Fallen T-Rex they slayed with their driftwood swords and stood upon, Lilliputian, before splashing in the icy shallows.

Rhett of brown hand-me-down jumpers, ears sticking out, his two big front teeth pressing down on his bottom lip when he smiled. He ate dried dog food, first on a dare and then because he claimed to like it, took her rabbit hunting and fishing, barefoot, hooking trout from the edge of the water.

Lucetta had been all tomboy, scratched and tree-climbing, nail-biting up in the highest branches where the ants’ nests smelled like bleach. Wore her hair short and bird-nested at the back, sucked the marrow from her bones at dinner, left pale clean piles stacked on her plate like the ones she collected outside. Cow shanks. Kangaroo skulls.

Inevitably, Grandma Flood and Hortense planned their marriage, jokingly, from the verandah, watching their silhouettes at dusk, jeans rolled up, casting lines and laughing at Rhett’s dumb jokes.

But when Lucetta reached high school, two years later than he, her long sandy hair straight down her back, her blue eyes wet as new grapes, she passed Rhett in the halls and said little, then less and less, and soon nothing at all.

Rhett in high school was long-legged but still short for his age, verging on chunky. His brothers’ old pants gaped at his waist; already moulded to another boy’s form, they refused to move into the future with any sort of flexibility. In groups he was too quietly spoken to be heard. Not cowboy enough to fit with the rodeo kids, not cool enough for the rich, three-generation farming families, he lived in a fourteen-year-old’s no-man’s-land. His name was not Jacko, Mick, Travis or Shane. It was Rhett, so the kids called him Scarlett.

Occasionally Lucetta would slide her eyes sideways, pass him shards of acknowledgement, but Rhett by this time had learned to expect no heat from her glances and never again allowed his eyes to meet hers. It wasn’t that she disliked him, but she was so temporarily taken over by the tidal wave of school politics, so washed of her old self, that sometimes, on the street, in the gang of girls, her own mother didn’t recognise her.

But she knew Rhett’s secret shame, or what she imagined must be his secret shame, so close did it come to touching her own for putting the laws of cool before the sympathies of their shared childhood. The best she could do was bend down and yank her socks, tie her shoes, refuse the others one bright note of her laughter, and hope the sight of her bent head might conjure the image of somebody bowing, not to the weight of others, but like a branch heavy with disgrace.

She knew it was wrong, she knew it was wrong each time somebody hissed Hey, Scarlett! across the playground and she did nothing to defend him.

If she was popular in the true sense, in that rare ability to befriend all sorts, then she should have been able to acknowledge him properly, in front of the others, without fear of reprisal. She saw that now. But those years were a strange blur of gossip and dances, a time when even she forgot the drug of riding; years when her white stockhorse, Paris, sulked in the paddock, abandoned.

Rhett had left school at the end of year ten, and she hadn’t seen him since he was about seventeen. Nearly ten years. They’d missed each other by days, by fractions of days, for years, and she wondered sometimes if they’d organised it that way. He got work in Cooma, lived in town. Visited his mother every Sunday, or so Byrne said. Then he had moved down south to Batemans Bay, Coledale, and eventually to Sydney somewhere. Lucetta went away to Sydney University to do agricultural science straight after she finished her HSC at seventeen and ended up falling in love over the Christmas holidays with a boy from Jindabyne, of all places. They had only been married six months when he drowned.

Sometimes she’d run into old school friends in Cooma. It was common gossip, what had happened to their school captain’s husband. Girls who Lucetta had once called friends came up to her and said how brave she was and how if it had happened to them, they would never be able to fall in love again. Lucetta wanted to slap them, though sometimes wished those things could be true.

Really, she hadn’t known Joe for all that long by the time he died, didn’t even know herself all that well. She didn’t know whether, if given a second chance today, she would choose him again. She put up with those trashy nights and stupid fights in the doorway with Joe’s temper flaring. She had thought that was what love was. She wasn’t saying he was a bad guy. She knew he had cared, sometimes too much, sometimes not enough, and that generally he’d thought of himself first. He’d died, hadn’t he? He’d just upped and left without a goodbye. Had he shown her one fleck of concern the night he took the boat out, fishing at midnight all alone? How fucking stupid that had been.

It had taken her a long time to say that, but there it was. His selfish stupidity, thinking that he could do anything without consequences. Being dead might be a consequence but Joe wasn’t feeling it. As far as she was concerned, the consequences were all hers. And his family’s. Even her decision to switch from ag science to vets was absolutely entangled with his accident. A simultaneous shrinking from people and a desire to believe she could have some power over death after all.

Now Lucetta sat watching the smooth surface of the water where she and Rhett had swum as children, where she had first taken Joe in order to show him her childhood in the shape of a shore, the place where Joe subsequently fished and drowned, this lake she had not since set foot in.

She remembered Joe’s immediate, inexplicable dislike of the idea of Rhett; how whenever she’d spoken of him, his face went blank, and she realised that perhaps Joe had known all along what she hadn’t. He’d heard the wistfulness in her voice as she told him stories of this place, recounting moments from their childhood, and knew that a previous model for love, although wounded, already lived within her. It must, for why else did Rhett’s dismissal of her that first morning leave such an ache?

But if Lucetta was good at dissecting the old wounds, she was also scared, in the case of Rhett, of what she might find if she dug too deeply. She’d treated a dog near Cooma, once, for an abscess formed around a small bit of wooden stick. When she’d cleaned out the abscess and tugged at the stick, it kept coming. It turned out an entire chopstick had lodged through the dog’s stomach, pushing out through its torso. What had amazed Lucetta most was that, although perfectly pierced, the dog was not unhappy, nor was it in any noticeable pain. The body had accommodated its spears.

Dusk fell in dusty pieces around her. The shore felt haunted.

By the time she got home, it was late. TV light flickered forbiddingly in the lounge room of Rhett’s house. Next door, through the tangle of vines and branches, the once dark windows of Sara Flood’s shack pulsed with their own small radiances. Lucetta’s stomach lurched. Now a woman lived there who knew Rhett better than she did.

Lucetta entered the kitchen. She was exhausted, bone weary.

Esme was at the table, leaning over her brandy. Lucetta kissed her on the top of the head. ‘Hello, Auntie.’

‘Hello, dear. Are you feeling better?’

‘I’m fine, Auntie.’

Lucetta pulled out a mug, flicked the kettle, removed the plastic tab from the bread bag, pulled out two pieces with her right hand, dropped them into the toaster.

‘It just doesn’t seem right. Leaving you out of the notice like that.’ When Esme spoke, she drew in as if gasping, short, sharp intakes of breath. As if continually startled.

‘It doesn’t bother me, Auntie. Really. Can’t it just be another day? It’s just another day. Really.’

Lucetta turned away, felt tight, her spine a string of quick, hard knots.

‘So many days. But it’s not too bad. I haven’t done too badly . . . Heh-heh-heh.’ Esme giggled nervously, and soon the coughing began.

‘You okay, Auntie?’ Lucetta dropped a tea bag into her mug, poured the bubbling water over it, stirred in a dollop of milk, left the bag in, sat down, tea-colour slowly leaking through the white.

‘I just worry,’ Esme ventured once she had recovered, ‘that when you get to my age, there will be nothing left of him and you.’

‘Auntie, I’m not having this conversation.’

‘You’re upset because you forgot, but then you don’t want to remember.’

Lucetta got up from the table. She had to get out of there. Esme reached for her arm.

‘You don’t go on but you want to go on. You don’t remember but you don’t want to forget. Make sense of that.’ Esme inhaled shallow and sudden.

‘I’m too tired, Auntie. I’m not having this. You do this. All the time.’ Lucetta picked up her hot toast, saw beads of perspiration in squares beneath, against the plate. Sweated internally in response.

‘We have conversations, yes, all the time. That’s what people do.’

Lucetta sighed. She didn’t want to be harsh. Remembered Hortense saying to people in shops, If I’m sharp, stay with me, I’m having an elderly flash.

She sat down again. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to stay where it hurts because at least it’s familiar, Auntie.’

Lucetta stayed with the dogs whose owners couldn’t bear to watch them go, laying them down on the floor, lying down sometimes alongside them, stroking their soft heads. Letting their eyes close in slow sleep. The cats’ paws curling as if grabbing on to one last claw full of curtain, one last fleshy lap. Then releasing.

She scrutinised the release most especially, the instant of last surrender, that softening second. Forfeiting their being to the black hug. Studying animals in passing helped her brain grasp spirit, and what it meant and where it went when it wasn’t.

‘I know,’ Esme said. ‘It hurts to stay around, but going, well, where am I going? At least you can go somewhere.’

Lucetta placed her hand on Esme’s forearm, where the inside skin was soft and loose. It had its own lifetime of marks and dings. She squeezed it gently. ‘What do you think happens when you die?’

Esme looked up. The clock ticking, the bird inside biding the minutes until it could spring out, taunting. She shrugged. ‘When you’re there, you’re there. They can go from earth to the moon . . . you wonder where heaven is then. They say it’s space . . .’ She drifted off. ‘Sometimes I go to sit in the church, not to hear a sermon, but just to sit and have some thoughts to myself. That makes me feel at peace. I don’t mean to be unkind to people who go to church, but bits and pieces happen that give you doubts, I mean –’ She broke off. ‘From the beginning of time,’ she continued after a moment. ‘Well, Adam and Eve, they had children, didn’t they?’

Lucetta stared at her great-aunt, at the lines of life carved into her face. She’d noticed that she didn’t have smile lines. Maybe Auntie was right. You could be free, ostensibly, and still feel that you were locked up inside. Or you could be actually locked up, while your mind wandered, free to go anywhere. Perhaps happiness only depended on the scattering of certain genes, optimisms and pessimisms typed in from birth.

‘You had a child too, Auntie. In a way. That counts.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining, Lucetta. I wasn’t brought up to complain. I love Byrne. Of course. I’ve had a lovely time.’

So started the repetitions.

Lucetta took her toast to the window. She saw Rhett and Hazel sitting on the doorstep of the red shack. The lamp from Lucetta’s front verandah threw a slow, smoky glow over them. Their heads were close, comfortable. A red cigarette ember bobbed in the air. She heard Hazel laugh. She wasn’t that pretty.

Lucetta remembered the grip of Rhett’s calf against his horse. How when she looked up at him, however briefly, she saw just a mess of hair and eyes that scattered the light. She could no longer read him.

‘What are the clouds doing out there, dear? Any sign of rain? I don’t suppose there is.’

Lucetta flicked the switch by the door, dousing the verandah’s light. Rhett and Hazel went dark.

Did he look up? Did he see her?

She shut the curtains.

When she opened her bedroom curtains on Tuesday morning, he was there again. Only now in Lucetta’s own back garden, under heavy storm clouds, pumping the sandy sludge from the bottom of the old septic tank.

‘He’s going to reseal it and make a pond for the ducks,’ Byrne said without looking up from her book and crumpet.

‘Doesn’t he have his own work to do?’

Her mother shrugged. ‘He offered his services. I suppose he’s a bit lonely.’

‘He didn’t seem lonely last night.’

Lucetta’s eyes settled on Rhett through the window. His head in the thunderous air, his mop of hair, standing up to his neck in the tank. He vaulted out of the tank and uncoiled a flat pink hose. Stretched it over the sparse grass like the guts of some giant unfolded, yanked it across the garden and left it to disappear under the back gate. He leapt back in and jammed a wide piece of wood into the sludge, breaking it up as if with a spoon. When he switched the pump on, it convulsed, the hose ballooning, a snake with its supper. He slapped a mosquito. Swallowed a long drink of Coke. He glanced up once, as if he felt her watching him.

Distant thunder moved in, closer, taunting. It did not rain, but sparked and raged over hills too far to feel, and spat six drops into the rain-gauge. Esme was diligent, creeping out in her slippers to check it regularly. She came in through the lounge room. ‘Eighth of a millimetre. Better than nothing.’

The screen door squeaked as Lucetta stepped down from the verandah, the dogs following her. Rhett didn’t turn around.

‘Would you like a cuppa or something?’ she asked him.

He nodded to his bottle of Coke on the ledge of the tank. ‘I’m right, thanks.’

The tank hadn’t been used for twenty years at least, the solids long turned to dirt, thick and earthy after years in darkness, not unlike the hearts of old trees dragged up from the lake, the wood murky with decay. Pads of algae had sun-bloomed across the tank’s open walls. He scraped them and a fine mist of dust and spore splattered down, washed over his legs.

‘You’ve got your work cut out for you there,’ she persisted.

He shrugged. ‘I like it.’

‘Watch out or Mum’ll fall in love with you.’ She edged closer, squatted down near the ledge, her long brown thighs tucked under her like wings. ‘Clearly we’re all desperate for some excitement around here.’

‘Can’t help you there. I’m not very exciting.’ He continued pounding the sludge. The slow trickles of sweat down his back, a creek between banks of muscle, moving, changing shape.

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Stinks, doesn’t it?’

‘It smells like dirt. That’s all. Dirt.’

‘Oh come on, it smells like shit.’ She nudged at him. Wanted something. For him to look at her, perhaps. Really look at her.

‘The great creativity of humankind,’ he said.

Lucetta stood up, stretched. Her legs were flickering hollows. Her mother’s wind chimes blew in the wind.

‘The churning guts of man . . . And woman,’ he added.

‘Speak for yourself.’

He wasn’t looking at her.

‘Well, if you need anything . . .’ she started. The grass blades were sharp under her bare feet.

‘Hey, Lucetta?’

She turned.

Inside, the phone began to ring.

‘Thanks for looking after Billy.’

She doubled back a step. ‘I wasn’t going to just leave him out there. He had to have his feet done. Had to be wormed. Fed. His teeth checked. Otherwise the RSPCA would’ve been out here. I would’ve called them myself.’

He looked sad. Or was it some flash of reluctant pride? ‘It’s great you did it.’

‘What?’

‘Became a vet.’

She mounted the verandah step. ‘Don’t worry,’ she teased. ‘I’ll be sending you the bill.’

Lucetta was grinning as she picked up the phone. The voice that cut her down the phone line was so unexpected she almost didn’t hear the rare splendour of Rhett’s laugh, echoing back from a depth as if caught inside the tank of his own chest.

An hour later, after the resonances of forgotten speech had settled in her like silt and she’d had time to review the phone conversation, the last two days, she lay on her bed with the curtains slightly parted, a line of light that offered a sporadic view of Rhett’s back. The muscles on either side of his spine as he bent and rinsed a paintbrush reminded her of two fish buried beneath a shallow mound of sand, side by side like lovers.

She wasn’t sure which man to think about, so she tried to think of both of them equally, alternating, then at one point, together in the room beside her, her body taut under their twin gaze.

‘We’re having a party on Friday night, for Joe,’ Nadia had informed her from down the phone. ‘If you’re feeling so left out, I suppose you’d better come.’

Lucetta touched herself until she cried.

CHAPTER 13

FOR THREE MORNINGS, THAT first week, when Hazel woke up, she said, So it is.

Then went to work, riffling through photos and papers, the happenstance of fragments, the short, sweet verse of daily lives. Her anger was passing, though something essential inside her had been broken. She still dreamed of Danny, epics in which they cried or argued or got back together. Hazel lay awake afterwards, thinking, No, no, it’s wrong.

But still the spill of tears, alone, in her messy house. There was a chill she couldn’t banish.

The word ‘kiss’ read in a book made her crave lips; the sudden image of a mouth opening over hers with all the soft hunger of delicate skin. But it was the breath of life lips delivered, rather than the sex they suggested, that she truly wanted.

Bursts of hilarity from the women next door caught her unawares, leaked in through the burnt doorframe, sifted down with the dust and coated her. Their shouts, their laughter, reminded her of what a family was, and how now she had none.

She trailed damp footprints over the cracked floorboards.

Rhett had appeared at her door again, late and drinking, the last two nights. They drank more and talked and slept. Occasionally, Hazel woke to feel Rhett’s hand hot around her waist. That was what she missed most. When a broad hand pressed across her belly could stall the pain.

So these nights were unspoken.

Rhett’s plan had been to get in fast and get out fast, he said. Only his house defied speed or order or escape. The pipes rumbling with disuse, the windmill blades next door screeching in the wind like fingers on a blackboard. He hated it. He opened any drawer or closet or tin box under the bed and it burst, stuffed with the family’s hoarded data. Boxes of old legal documents pertaining to the land and farm, wills, executed deeds, correspondence with the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme written in his father’s shaky primary school hand. A few old love notes written to his mother from previous suitors and his mother’s framed school certificate had been left to moulder in the attic.

Rhett told Hazel that his parents had been newly married at the time of the flooding. The Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme men tried to convince his father to shift his house, but Bruce cornered an engineer in the Cooma pub, put a hundred questions to him, went home to do the calculations himself and declared that the new lake’s water wouldn’t reach their door. Rhett had found a page of these scribbles tucked in with the letter informing the SMHS that he was refusing to sell his land or move his home due to insufficient proof of peril. It was one thing, in the end, that his father had been right about.

Rhett said he could leave the house as it was, let it slowly rot from the outside in, but knew it would always bother him if he did. Or he could sell the house like he was the last of the machinery, take the money and go back overseas; he could live on it for years, he was sure. Or he could compromise, with his mother in mind, and fill up the bins with all that he couldn’t use, which was most of it. He had taken out all the tins of food left in the cupboards and pantry and lined them up on the table. But for days now, all he’d been able to do was stare at them. He ate what he could bear to eat, buried the rest around the property in shallow graves marked with sticks like he had as a child, in case of nuclear war.

On Wednesday he had planted ten tins of beetroot on the hill, finished sealing Byrne’s septic tank, then dived headlong into the lake’s cold fist of water to wash generations of filth from his skin.

Down there, he said, the real museum lay.

Hazel pictured herself giving patrons a torch before pushing them through the black curtain into a totally dark room, where rusted kitchen cutlery floated in jars of lake water, glass scoured with beams of light. She imagined a cross-section of water like an exhibition from her childhood that wound down a ramp past walls of windows, from the sun-splattered shallow regions, deeper and deeper, darker and darker, to where the purple neon eels lived, at the very bottom. She pictured this reproduction of a drowned town, fish moving out of windows, the bricks crumbling, dirt in the bubbles that rose to the surface. Wandering through the corridors and passageways at night, passing light over the sleeping faces of the dead.

On Thursday morning, when she woke, she felt sure it was Danny clasping her and she turned, turned on, to kiss his lips, before realising the way the light had arranged the sleeping head into another form, and quickly retreated before Rhett woke.

He found her out in her garden.

‘Even snails come to my house to die,’ she told him, attempting levity, as she examined the newly crushed shells on the hard dirt.

He smoked a cigarette in the sunlight but his eyes were drawn across the fence.

When Hazel got to work later that morning she found a package from her mother just inside Burchill’s front door. It was coated in American flag stamps, fluttering, flag-confident red, white and blue.

Hazel had often thought her mother would make a good spy.

No matter how little information she divulged about her whereabouts, her mother could track her down. Hazel had mentioned a drowned town and the Snowy Mountains Scheme on the phone; that was all.

She opened the brown paper package. Inside, a small bottle with a rubber nipple attached to an eye-dropper, like something used to feed a bird. There was no accompanying card, no note. The off-white label on the bottle said: BACH FLOWER REMEDY: ASPEN. TO DEAL WITH VAGUE FEARS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN.

She set the bottle on the table and got to work. Picked up a photo sticking out from a nearby pile. The 1950s. Two young girls with two men, and one was Burchill, no mistaking it, leaning his elbow into the lap of one of the women (his wife?). His collared shirt open at the throat, a V-neck jumper over that, his hair slicked back from his forehead, and his ears two handles for hoisting his head, square and full as a white-glazed tea mug. The look of a boy of twenty-four, perhaps, no older. Strange to think of Burchill Benbow’s young man’s eyes now staring out at her from the old, doughy folds of skin.

‘G’day, Miss Rey.’

Hazel felt a sudden warm gust of his breath on her neck. She turned, dropping the photo. ‘Oh, hello.’ Had heard neither door nor floor on approach.

He was peering at the little bottle her mother had sent. His hair was wet from his bath. ‘Fear of what?’ he asked, indicating the label on the bottle.

Hazel shrugged. ‘Unknown fears.’

‘You mean fear that you don’t know you have?’

‘I think you know you have it. You just don’t know what it’s of. It’s from my mother, so that means fear of death, most probably.’

Hazel turned the package over, studied the address. Hazel Rey, c/- Adaminaby Post Office, Adaminaby, Australia. ‘How did you get this?’

‘Meryl at the post office says a woman rang and woke her up about eleven o’clock on Monday night, said she was looking for a young lady with an American accent who had recently moved to a town in the Snowy Mountains to do some archival work. Said she had a dog and glasses. Meryl recognised you. She had called every town on the Snowy Mountains map, apparently. Today, this arrived. Global Express. Meryl brought it over to me.’

He poured Hazel a glass of pale liquid, handed it over.

She smelled it.

‘The juice of pickled onions. I have it three times a day. Good for regularity.’

That morning, Hazel dug her way through a pile of old newspaper clippings in the far corner of the dining room while Burchill Benbow siphoned his bath water onto his vegetables with a hose. Later, he invited her to lunch again in the garden. He had stuffed the hollow gut of a trout with herbs, garlic and butter and cooked the fish in a camp oven on the electric stove.

‘If it weren’t for the drought, I’d be making a fire out back,’ Burchill said. ‘It roasts up nicely, all crisp and buttery. These red rings are crap. Look like crap, smell like crap, burn pans like hell. They said ‘electricity’ like it was sizzling enough in itself to make us do anything. They said jump. We jumped. Nobody ever suggested that gas was better to cook on. And lights so bright, there was no such thing anymore as secrecy.’

She watched him slipping through the garden, clipping lettuces, depositing leaves into a burlap sack hung across his chest. He slid the fish onto a pink plate trimmed with lettuce leaves, ripped basil and whole long-stalked chives.

Then, for the second time that week, she sat with him pincering food from a shared plate and dripping the juices down her shirt.

Burchill’s face slackened and sweetened with eating, his eyes soft.

She switched on her tape recorder, pushed it across the patch of grass between them. He would tell her the story of the town.

‘We’ll start with what we’ve got, how ’bout,’ Burchill said. ‘Leftover signs of a world – a little world, mind you, but a happy one once. Or so they say. First drowned by water then dried out by drought, left to bleed out all the red of its gums. Trees, that is. Or maybe like teeth. Gums that hold it all together in your mouth. When the gums go, the teeth go, then your mouth’s just a tired pink hole. That’s me. That’s this place. Same difference. At least the water’s alive now. At least there’s that. Though we can’t tap it.’

‘What do you mean by “tap”?’

‘Patience, young lady. I’ll get there.’

Hazel shut her mouth.

‘So basically, as you know, Australia’s bloody dry. Every winter, the Snowy Mountains covered in snow. Every spring it melts, rushes down the mountain rivers and flows out into the sea, totally wasted, while inland, nothing was growing. So they thought if they could dam the rivers, redirect them west, they could solve the water problem, turn semi-desert into farmland while also generating power. This was just after the Second World War, so everything seemed precarious. Anyway, they reckoned the valley that housed our town was the perfect place to create the Snowy Mountains Scheme’s biggest lake, and we had no say in it.

‘Town then was just dirt streets, more like lanes than proper streets. Not too many cars. Just horse and sulky. A couple of old Chevs. A Ford. Maybe a Bedford. No electricity. I told you that. We’d make lamps by putting a bit of fat on a stick in a tin. You wrap a bit of old flannel around a stick, fill the tin with dirt. Poke your stick in so it stands up and pour the fat down. It’ll soak through. Burned black smoke but would go for a few hours. There was no town water. Cooked in the fireplace mostly. Wood stoves for cakes and such. Snowed a heap, first week in June, every year. Winter mornings, overalls so stiff with frost they’d stand upright. Big snowstorms, we’d be cut off for a few days at a time. We didn’t mind.’

‘But when those migrants came in ’49 to work the scheme, they thought they’d come to a shanty town. They’d left those big European cities and all. They didn’t cart water from a well, burn fat on a stick. They thought we were as poor as crows. Thought they’d rescue the ladies from their apparent misery. And some they did. There’d be the Saturday night dances, the newcomers knew all the fancy dances, rumbas and sambas and I don’t know whats, and by the time we boys moseyed up – we’d have been having a few drinks around the back, we always did – well, all the girls had been snatched up already. That’s how little Charlie Crimson lost Pictoria.’

Hazel didn’t get a chance to ask who Charlie Crimson was, or Pictoria. Burchill handed her an open jar of beetroot. Again no fork, so she fished the slippery, crimson balls from the juice. Popped them quick into her mouth without dripping.

‘She eloped with one of the serenading, dancing Italians,’ he continued. ‘My brother Boyd called him a “garlic muncher”, but now that I grow garlic, we should be thanking them for bringing it here. You have no idea what the food was like back then. Now my brother used to eat five cloves of garlic a day when he was alive – raw, or so he bragged. Ended up with an Italian girl himself. Nadia. Her father came to Australia from Italy in the fifties for the work, and he ended up tightrope walking high, six-inch steel cables for the electric power transmission because he was so small and acrobatic and could balance in the air without belting up.

‘A hundred thousand men worked on that scheme total, Ms Rey. That’s about five hundred times the population of this town today. When I walk to the shops these days, I pass this big old tree – half dead now, but still tall as a church – and there’s these ants living in it, thousands of them going up and down the bark. Every time I see it I think of all those Snowy boys making roads out of mountains, in and out, up and down, thousands of them. Like ants.’ His voice trailed off. ‘What was I saying before that, before ants?’ He slurped on the spine of the fish.

‘The newcomers.’

‘Yeah, well I’m getting ahead. I’m trying to stop rambling, but watch, when you get older, you start poking about all the tracks. So they launched the scheme in our town, Adaminaby, 1949 . . . I’ve got the souvenir brochure around here somewhere – some crap about if we’re going to have all the new settlers in Australia, we needed to find work for them to do, but it seems to me that Australia had the work but not enough people to do it in the first place, and not the other way around. Suited them fine then.’

‘Doesn’t suit Australia fine now,’ Hazel added. ‘Newcomers, that is.’

‘You’re not wrong. Anyway, some people blamed the migrants for all the changes. Said they couldn’t adjust, couldn’t speak English properly. But really it was the locals themselves who couldn’t adjust to change. Couldn’t make the new town fit their old forms. It wasn’t the migrants’ fault.

‘Still, some people felt tricked. We wanted to be a part of this great thing, it was our patriotic duty to sacrifice ourselves according to the lingo of the day, and we were promised all sorts of things. We were given three choices of new town sites but we chose badly, because this one is considered “three overcoats warmer”. Still, doesn’t make up for losing our big gardens, farms, orchards, sheds, animals. There wasn’t room for them anymore.

‘Then once they moved us out, they made blocks of land available by tender, to make money on it, I guess. Future lakeside views. But only available to people who lived thirty miles away, you see, not anybody who lived in the old town. That was the catch. No lake view for us. Not that we’d have been able to afford it anyway, now that we were paying off mortgages on our new little houses or trying to build gardens around the old homes we shifted up here. We could sell our house to the Authority at market price plus ten per cent or have the house dragged here on a truck.

‘The day they started moving them, there was the worst mud. I mean, the worst. Trucks stuck, it took a whole week to move one house, dragging it up the hill, everybody directing and levering, tyres spinning . . . I was lucky. My house and I had long disagreed with each other. Was happy to sell it, see it sink.’

‘Hang on – you said there were tenders for land on the edge of the lake. But there are only three houses on the peninsula now.’

‘That’s because of Alesandra Davys. The Davys’ land was just out of reach of the water, so they didn’t have to move. And Alesandra had this uncle in Canberra, a lonely, weird, rich uncle – the best sort of uncle, I reckon – and she convinced him to buy up all the available tenders under different names. When he died, it all went to her.’

‘I picked Rhett Davys up on the side of the road, practically.’

‘Ulysses, that one, back from his many turns.’

‘He’s letting me stay in Sara Flood’s old house.’

‘You really do live in the old town then, in the oldest possible way.’

They went inside. Burchill put on the kettle. Licorice tea. With milk and molasses.

‘Sara Plowman Flood,’ he said. ‘She was a potter. Her mother was a potter. Her daughter, that’s Alesandra, Rhett’s mum, she was a potter too.’

‘I’ve been drinking out of her old cups.’ Hazel sipped hot thick licorice.

‘Steeped in tragedy, that family.’

‘What kind of tragedy?’ Hazel asked.

‘Rhett’s older brothers – both killed. One of them flipped the truck, out doing some bloody fool nonsense in the paddock.’

Hazel remembered Rhett mentioning it, so casually, in the car. Somebody he knew once.

‘And Rhett, the lone, last son,’ Burchill went on, ‘caught between those tough old Davys – drovers and cattlemen, up top all summer rounding up the mobs, sleeping in hollow logs, frying rump steaks on long-handled shovels, drinking hot whisky out of a kero tin – and those rich, dreamy, arty Floods, his mum’s people, with a piano in every room. Wet as water . . . But I’ve gone way off the track again, haven’t I?’

‘Burchill, whatever you say is good for me. I’m just taking it in.’

‘What you really need, Hazel,’ he said, ‘is to meet the people. Everybody has their own interpretation, see. Nadia is having a do, tomorrow night, for my nephew. Really, it’s just an excuse to get together and reminisce a bit. Six o’clock. Here’s the address. You’re welcome to come along.’

But Hazel was thinking of Rhett, alone in that stone house, and of herself in the last stand of Sara Plowman Flood’s red shack. Side by side.

The way lost things come together.

CHAPTER 14

IT WAS THE SILVER blades that kindled Esme awake. Night roiling its rusty edges; the shimmering half moon.

Outside her window, the cirrus prints of duck feathers whirled by the water heater. Hung in spiders’ webs. The knives of the windmill clicked in the dark, dredging up a last, brown gurgle of liquid, a ghosted clock ticking for the buried, ringing when they rose up, keeping time. Time that caught in her own torn veil.

Esme hunched over the side of the bed, rose slowly, felt her back jar and spasm as she attempted to stand and had to clutch at the dresser to stop herself falling onto the floor. The pain was always worse after she slept, made her want to get down on all fours and crawl instead. She re-dressed, adding a brown jumper that bagged open at the front and hung down with her chest in sympathy. Once upon a time, when she got up she was immediately into the day. But she spent so much of her time in bed lately, it seemed she was always getting up; she had to rise twice a day at least, go through all the mechanics of morning in the near-dark.

She sidestepped down one side of the room. She had overdone it that afternoon, feeding the dogs and the chooks for Byrne. Now the pain in her ankle and leg and her lower back were pushing like press-studs through the flesh. Bruised spinal rod made her cranky. She kept seeing her leg shrinking before her.

She sat hooked up to her puffer. Twenty minutes to oxygenate her lungs, scrape the channels of whatever sewage sleep caught. Still, she fancied a brandy. Or several.

‘Sidestep’ was a nice way to say she hid from the long reflection on tilted legs, a dangerous companion that shared her bedroom, a mirror twin. Now that she was eighty, she saw how she’d worried about her body when she was a teenager and twig-skinny with budding breasts, and how, though she’d thought herself special, as her twenties passed alone, she’d grown to hate it. She realised that she had essentially hated herself ever since, even during the years when she was crazy to hate her body because her body had been close to perfect.

Now, she wouldn’t say it was too late to love it, because she knew that there was always time, but she’d be loving it like one would a crippled dog. She recognised with shame how much she had spent of herself; decades of her life spending the love. Years when she might simply have stood before the mirror and stared at her firm, curved thighs, stared at her strong stomach, her hips, her small round breasts and sighed, even one sigh, not with disappointment, but with the loveliness of skin.

Her skin.

She wishes she could see that skin once again; she promises she would not take it for granted: the having of skin; the having of young, unblemished skin. Touching it without hiding it, without saving it for the day that love might come.

Her arms with their pale blonde hairs tilted up slightly when she was cold and the white speckles beneath the brown on summer days when she was tanned. That little pink splotch on her left arm by the elbow, she can still see it now between the folds of wrinkles, a strange mark as if once bitten, the blood fanned out, staining the skin around it. White scars from where a cat had bitten her wrist.

There were places now that were still almost smooth, if she spread the extra skin out, if she took the time to look, her breasts near the nipples, the inside of her thigh, high up, near the tide line. But it was too late now, really, wasn’t it? Too late to love her body; too difficult to look at it; almost impossible to find it lovely.

She explained this to Lucetta often, told her to stand in front of the mirror, look at how perfect you are, how sweet and smooth, because there’ll be plenty of days for bony and wrinkled, for reptilian elbows and feet withered beyond recognition, much less the face that you can no longer find yourself in. Savour each age you are, she told her, don’t try to be older, because you’ll be there soon enough anyway. Esme’s birthmark was now hidden in excess of skin, the singular kindness of those creases that enfolded like cake batter the perfect mark of the small brown heart, now so maddeningly, humiliatingly true, that had been stamped on her face at birth.

A valentine from God. The only one she ever got.

It was lost now, thank goodness, but could be found privately if she used both hands to pry back the pleats of her face. She did this, though rarely, as if to check that the girl she glimpsed in old photos was still linked somehow to the face she now carried.

To Lucetta she said, love your legs now, because there will be decades when you no longer see them, when you and your legs are like two separate guests in a boarding house, one waiting politely until the other has drained the tub and left a trail of wet footprints along the bathroom tiles, before you venture down the empty hallway.

Esme inched out of her room, drunk on forty winks and snatches of remorse. Her family, fat with supper, stretched around the TV like a gang of cats, their backs to her. Several actual cats competed for cushions.

‘Why didn’t you tell me she’d rung?’ Byrne asked.

‘It just doesn’t make sense. Why she’d assume I felt left out,’ Lucetta replied. She was hot and cross in the throat.

‘She probably said it to make you feel guilty, Luce,’ Byrne said. ‘Nadia never wanted you to move on. If I hadn’t told her to lay off, she’d have been after you for years now.’

‘Exactly. She’s never rung before. It was weird.’

‘Are you talking about Esme?’ Hortense interjected loudly.

‘No, Gran.’

‘Because she’s drinking a lot. She won’t lay off it,’ Hortense continued.

‘I know, Gran.’ Byrne had paused her reading, was tracing the outline of her nose with a thumb and second finger.

‘All day, those little nips of brandy in the teacup. Two bottles a week,’ Hortense insisted.

Byrne yawned. Peeled off her socks, dropped them by the couch, tucked her feet under a warm cat. Went back to the book.

‘You should take it away, Mum,’ Lucetta insisted. ‘No wonder she’s not feeling well.’

‘We’ve tried,’ Hortense said virtuously. ‘She cries. I saw her sneak off when we were in town the other day. She insisted we go. She got more from somewhere.’

‘But that’s why she’s depressed. And sleeping. And coughing. And then always on the nebuliser.’

‘It’s her asthma, Luce,’ Byrne said.

‘Whatever.’

‘She digs her heels in. What can you do?’ Hortense shrugged.

‘She’s going to go sometime. Might as well enjoy herself.’ Byrne kept her eyes fixed to the page while she talked.

But Lucetta suddenly cleared her throat, motioning to the others as Esme slowly crossed the room, past the dining table to the kitchen bench.

Esme could see her own billow of hair in the mirror across the room, a cloud hovering over the top of the high bench wall that separated the kitchen from the lounge.

‘One of these days, I’m going to finish reading a whole chapter in peace and silence. Peace and silence.’ Byrne threw down her book, picked up the TV guide instead, flicked pages noisily.

‘How did you go on your driving test today, Gran?’ Lucetta asked. ‘You haven’t said.’

‘How do you think I went on my driving test?’

‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.’

‘They can’t stop me anyway. What are they going to do, arrest me?’

‘Yes, Gran!’

‘I said I could drive you.’ Byrne tapped the couch until the tabby jumped up. It inched onto her stomach, its eyes alien-wide, its meow short and sharp, a sheep’s maaaa.

‘I’ve got to do something about this snail situation.’ Hortense changed the subject. ‘My lettuces are fucked.’

‘Gone with the Wind’s on. You should tell Rhett, Luce.’

‘He’s your friend, Mum. He barely even talks to me.’ Lucetta got up and left the room. Her hand reached out and trickled over Esme’s sleeve as she passed by.

Esme’s eyes watered. There was no possible way now to pour a brandy without them hearing her.

‘He goes diving,’ Esme mumbled to her. ‘I saw him flopping down to the water again today like a seal. He says he can see some of the old homesteads’ foundations. Imagine that. They’re still down there.’

She flipped on the kettle; it might drown the distinctive, unsteady clink of the bottle against the lip of the cup in her hand.

‘There’s nothing down there, Auntie, but truck bodies and dead trees,’ Lucetta replied.

‘What are you doing in there?’ Byrne asked.

‘Having a cuppa, is that all right?’ Esme snapped, and Lucetta left the room.

‘Pellets, you think?’ Hortense was grumpy now.

‘No.’ Byrne shook her head. ‘The dogs might eat them. There’s this stuff you can make, like a snail trap. I saw it in the paper.’

‘Personally, I just stomp them,’ Esme said. There was something delicious about the sound the shell made when it crushed under her foot. A small power she had in the world.

‘You don’t.’ Byrne looked revolted. ‘Imagine if a giant foot came down out of the sky on you.’

‘I do. I keep waiting,’ Esme said.

‘There was a book somebody told me about,’ Hortense recalled. ‘A story about kids who used to snip off the snails’ antennae with a pair of scissors. Who was it that told me? Snail’d just melt from not knowing where to go.’

‘Now that’s cruel.’ Esme felt vindicated.

‘Well, there’s got to be some way,’ her mother grumbled.

The kettle boiled. The electric ones never screamed like the old enamel ones. Bored already with its singing, it switched off before she was prepared, before she’d bent for a cup and measured a perfect nail of the stinging balm. Esme ducked a little, brought the bottle to her lips. Coughed it down before the steam died. Before the next room’s chatter returned to the flip of pages, the incessant clicking of her mother’s tongue against the roof of her mouth; a measure of her pleasure as she watched the TV.

‘You right, Auntie?’

Esme lurched forward and plonked the bottle back on the bench next to the olive oil. Her eyes bugged. Pounded her chest.

‘Just a little breathless is all.’

‘Just a little brandied is all,’ Hortense chuckled.

‘I’m having a cuppa, Mother; if you’d like one, you just need to ask.’

The lights and television flickered once, then twice, holding out for an extra long second before resuming their sixty-watt radiance. Byrne looked up. ‘Andy’s gremlins back again,’ she smirked, a reference to Rhett’s brother, who had once rewired the house, somewhat waywardly. ‘Rhett must have brought them home with him.’

‘It’s that bluster, Byrne,’ Hortense said.

Esme tilted her head, tried to hear. By the time sound now reached the ten thousand hair cells that waved in the snail of her cochlea it was as if they’d swum through glue to get there. She heard a bang on the verandah instead. ‘What’s that knocking out there?’ she asked.

‘It’s just that damn chair, Auntie. It crashes around in the wind.’

‘I’m scared it’s going to crash through the glass one of these days. You should go tie it down, make it behave.’

‘Just leave it, Auntie.’

‘I might go out for a minute,’ Esme said, standing at the back door, letting the breezes wash over her. Those balmy winds possessed her, always had and would until the day she keeled over.

‘No, Ez, it would blow you over.’ Her mother sounded worried for once.

‘But it’s all whipped up now, the dust in the moonlight.’

‘Don’t you go out there,’ Byrne called, taking up her book.

‘Well then, I’m going back to bed with my cup of tea, if you don’t mind,’ Esme said.

Byrne’s eyes had already been lured back to the page. She was sucked up like rain into the land.

Esme slunk back down to her bedroom carrying her cup of tea. Shifted as slow as a block of chocolate over a burner. Indeed, her path and pace so annoying even to herself, she hoped it might entice the gods to send down a giant foot. Just punishment for dilly-dallying in the corridor over quickly cooling tea.

She closed her bedroom door, turned on the TV, shivered and watched for a second as Vivien Leigh was swept along the fiery streets by Clark Gable in his open carriage, then she unlatched the door that led from her room to the back half of the verandah and stepped out into the ravages of wind.

She loved those nights, moon-washed, cloud-bright, the leaves doing their brave, bald dances over the bare patches of earth. She wanted to move too, expand into those places she could no longer reach. Inside she was flying, across the water, the gold band of light, skyward.

Esme had a plan for herself, a last plan.

Once she’d sorted out her cupboards of clothes and photographs and her clippings, she knew where she was heading. Once she’d collected enough down feathers to fill a small pillow as wide as the bone at the back of her head, she would buy some vitamin tablets and ask the girl in the travel agency in Cooma about a coach to Birdsville.

When the weather cooled down and she was feeling just a bit better. She wouldn’t tell a soul until she got there.

When the weather cooled down.

But for now she would have to settle for earthbound motion. She’d take a stroll to the coop and learn the rhapsody of birds, stirred by wind, instead.

Inside the cage, a confetti of dust and feathers greeted her, the ducks and chickens luminous in their silver webs of wire. Rearranging wings, perched, awaiting the rooster’s dawn call.

She unlatched the gate, stepped inside. The birds were unmoved, didn’t rush down to greet her as they did when she scattered the pellets. They opened one eye, stared at her, a mislaid, misplaced, hunched-over outline of person, backlit by sky, then they settled again into sleep. She was beginning to see that a bird’s love, like any, was absolutely conditional on what you were willing to pay them.

She’d go back to bed, back to Scarlett O’Hara, to Vivien, to Mr Rhett Butler, whose love never seemed to alter no matter how many times Esme gave herself over to him.

As she turned to leave, a sudden chair-blowing, windmill-churning, heart-rending gust hoisted her up and threw her down again, onto her knees, crunching her spine. As if God himself had to remind her, Pray, lady, all you can do is pray. She landed on her still bruised knee, and thought, Well, here I am, God, on my knees. Just where you’ve always wanted me.

There she was, sprawled in the coop, with two scraped knees and who knows how many broken bones; she couldn’t feel much of anything but her dress, now torn, and a terrible throb in her lower back. Her left arm tucked underneath her chest, a kernel of corn dug its sharp beak into the skin of her wrist, her right hand splayed out in the dirt. She couldn’t seem to get enough leverage from that one arm to push herself up. I shall live here with chooks, learn to roost my last years.

Except most likely she didn’t have years. Most likely she had minutes. She could feel them now, seeping out of her like grains of sand. So there she was, Birdsville in an ironic sort of way. God with the last laugh on her wish to see the world out in a little border town of Queensland.

But how sad it would be to die here, with chooks.

It must be nearly ten o’clock, she thought. There was no sense of lifting, no ability to lift or shift, there was no getting up, and only a croak in her throat to call out with, no chance over the raucous tree-winds. She would have to wait for the dawn’s light in pink arcs, those hot, shimmering summer sunrises; for Sir Rooster to strut around her as if she were a large bird in need of rousing, walk the notched length of her spine with his talons and watch as the birds’ perfect beaks beat out tunes in the dirt around her.

Hope for Byrne. Early, dependable Byrne.

Her face stung as tears leaked, caught in the creases. She hoped she’d pass out. But some line she had heard . . . was it a poem? It kept haunting her mind, though she couldn’t speak a word of it. Something about the sun. Or a cloud. Everything twisted, rusted and worn. All of her life dashing across her brain in mad currents. Hot prawning with her mother. Her sister’s birth when she was four. That little cave they found, imagined it magic, as children, crawling in.

The dutiful daughter should not die before her mother. What Esme wanted right now: her mother’s lap. To lay her head in its deep warmth.

A twig cracked. A dog growled, low and deep, hovering in the dark. A torch flashed over her.

‘Hello?’

It was Rhett.

‘It’s just me, Esme,’ she tried to say cheerfully.

Rhett told her later that when the clouds blew past the moon he was given a glimpse out of his mother’s old bedroom window – he was just sitting – sudden, shifting illumination. He’d thought he’d spied a fox in the coop.

‘You always say you go to bed with the chickens around here, but I didn’t think you meant it like that,’ he teased as he bent down from his hips in that way that young men did, that way that made a woman with a back like hers clench her teeth, so painful it would feel to bend that way, and scooped her up in his arms.

‘Wind and I are not very companionable companions tonight,’ was all Esme managed to say, but felt the wet flood of relief, and something else too. A tenderness. Being carried in those arms, so close she was sure she could feel his heart shuddering.

She leaned into Rhett’s shoulder. The smell of him, a bit whiffy, the sweet, drifting smell of spirits, but not at all unpleasant, she decided. She watched his profile, the rise of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, the tufts of hair around his neck that Alesandra had loved.

He carried her across the shadows.

‘Shall I get Byrne?’ he asked, heading for the front door.

‘No, please, don’t bother her, Rhett. I’ll be fine.’

As he delivered her through the back part of the verandah that led directly to her bedroom, back to her bed to lick her wounds – nothing broken – she thought that even Scarlett O’Hara never had such door-to-door service.

He slipped her shoes from her feet, lifted her legs onto the mattress, laid the doona gently over her. ‘Do you want some Panadol or something? Some more water?’

‘What I’d love, if it’s not too much bother, is a nip of something strong. Like a brandy?’

‘Oh, sure. Where do you keep it?’

‘It’s just that . . . I’m all out at the moment. You wouldn’t happen to . . . ?’ she hinted.

‘’Course. I’ll be right back,’ he said with a grin.

He returned with a bottle and poured a russet triple into her water glass. He sat on the chair next to her bed and drank straight from the bottle, wiping the rim with the web of his thumb and forefinger.

Rum, thick and sweet; she drank it quickly.

Esme had noticed Rhett up on the hills behind the houses, a fair sweep of land, all his now, she guessed. Worth a fortune. It would take eight hours or more to walk the span on foot, to discover all its shadowed crevices, but she knew how being on top of a mountain could bring some sense of peace, an elusive belonging.

For five years, it was Lucetta she’d watched up there, climbing silently at dawn to where the half-wild horses lived. Lucetta who found in those hills a diversion from the squabbling of her old family of women, from her absent father. But now that Rhett was back, he’d reclaimed his family’s hills and Lucetta avoided going there.

Esme saw that she’d been mistaken about Joe. Encouraging Lucetta to hang on to what no longer existed, when so much else, these strapping youths, did exist.

‘Will you be staying long, do you think?’ she asked.

‘Long as it takes to sort out the house. Depends on how bothered I can be with it.’

‘Oh, your mum would be proud of you,’ she sighed.

‘She would’ve been prouder if I’d got back sooner.’ He took a long swallow of rum and stood. She saw that he had been already slightly drunk.

‘You’ll be right, then?’

Esme grabbed Rhett’s hand and her fingers could barely close around it. ‘You should talk to her,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Lucetta. Talk to her.’

Rhett flushed, unpeeled his hand from hers. Esme throbbed with it.

‘I have talked to her.’

‘But it mustn’t have been very memorable, Rhett.’

‘Well . . .’ He exhaled, half-snorting, and stepped out the door, sliding the screen closed behind him. ‘Remember to shout if you need anything. Byrne’ll hear you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered from her cold sheets. But he was gone.

Later, she realised that Rhett would always be young to her, because she’d be long dead by the time he went grey.

She remembered Owen Swan, and Burchill Benbow too, a little, though he was so much younger than her, all the boys in their suits, their firm brown skin, shirts off as they started shifting houses during the spring of 1956, before the town was lost beneath the water, as they bent from their hips in the sunlight to lift unfathomable weights; how the wrinkles around their eyes from laughing appeared early, twenty-five, those boys always had them, from the amount of time spent in the sun. Now they wore hats mostly, there was this whole sunscreen revolution, but Rhett never did wear a hat and he smoked and so his face was already furrowed.

Rhett’s swagger was hardly pronounced, you’d have to squint to see it, but he’d go the way of Burchill, of Owen, the slow creep of decay, the withering of limbs, and leave only photos of the face he once had. He’d leave just memories in those aging girls, those women who had known him well, and their own daughters would swoon over him in secret moments, think My dad was a spunk; there he was, young as me once, even younger.

Esme knew what they didn’t know. You could meet the most perfect lad, but hands could not link you across death; you could not take love with you. Whatever it was you built with another, that private room, that two-pillowed project, would turn to dust. The thing most people spent their lives trying to create could not be carried across. Nothing material could be taken, that was obvious, but the notion of love was writ large, beyond and through death. It was meant to transcend.

All must be spent here on earth. All must be spent now.

We all go to the grave equally, alone.

It seemed mean, she knew, the bitterness with which she twisted things, the things she’d never admitted she wanted, even for years, in the privacy of her own iron heart.

She had never told anybody what had happened that winter at Sue City, it was nobody else’s business, but night after night, as her match burned a bonfire within and the iron throbbed, she whispered it to herself.

CHAPTER 15

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, HAZEL SAT in her garden under her red cowboy hat with her notebook and a borrowed box of Burchill’s treasure. She wanted to create an encyclopaedia of traces, as a museum to the future, an inventory of souvenirs from the passing of this town, like Burchill’s front door of petrified chewing gum, something that held the postures of people long dead. She had sorted through much of Burchill’s stash and divided it into letters, photographs and paper souvenirs, yet so far no plan had suggested itself. It was doing her head in, how nostalgia itself was inward turning. It looked in and backwards and down, and brought with it the loss of perspective an everbackward glance created. She kept bumping into things.

Like loss. The backbone of nostalgia.

Like longing.

She swayed, caught in the air, in the wind. The garden curled around her. Her mind drifted. She was occasionally still struck, while glancing at an old photo – of the newly married Burchill and his wife, say, now long divorced and aged – by the sting of shock.

That night Danny had left her, loading his things into his car in the rain. How many of his things had accumulated in her house. So many trips up and down the four flights of stairs. How when they hugged goodbye finally, at midnight, it started firm and slow and then they didn’t let go. They clawed each other’s backs and ended up on the floor, in their raincoats, in a hug that felt it would never end.

When they finally pulled away they stuck to each other, their raincoats separating with a rip.

She hadn’t seen Rhett last night. She hadn’t thought she was expecting him until he didn’t show up, and she scolded herself as the wind shook her house for getting netted in something that had no purpose but distraction, because it would never lead anywhere.

They had been strange to each other yesterday in the morning’s light, she reminded herself. The birdsong hurt their ears.

She had dropped into work earlier and before she left, Burchill handed her a glass teacup filled with a pale green tea, limp leaves in shreds at the bottom, and said, ‘Green, of course. With peach.’

Hazel had swallowed and was softly filled with warm essence of peach, of tree, complete with buds and leaves and birds then, a relic of morning she hadn’t at the time been able to absorb.

She had pressed her palms around the glass and was limpid, wanted to cry. It was a reminder of how close she’d come to handing herself over to a stranger, cupped in a palm like a warm, worn coin.

Still, she had dreaded, when she hadn’t before, being so alone. It was surprising how quickly she had become accustomed to living in charcoal and plaster, dust and webs and buckets, but could not accommodate a solitary, wavering evening while wax grew on the candles, then melted. The cuckoo clock on the broken wall misplaced entire hours, though swallowed along with them much of the pressing silence. She was impatient for a future when she would feel better.

She took from the box a yellowed piece of paper, folded in three. On it was written some sort of fable, long loops and scrawls: ‘Once upon a time,’ it began, ‘there was a girl born with one good eye and one bad eye . . .’

Then she heard a small sound, like cracked nuts falling from the beaks of birds, pheut, pheut, pheut, or perhaps the fat, welcome sound of rain. She looked up. Tiny missiles were being launched over Byrne’s fence into Hazel’s garden, a constant brown arsenal ricocheting and sailing and landing and bouncing up again.

Hazel watched amazed as dozens of little rocks flew from hands unseen and scattered among her chives and daisies, rolling over the patchy ground. She dropped the paper fable and bent close to the ground. Squinting through her dirty lenses, she saw a smashed shock of crushed shell at her feet, where the snail had landed and flattened, its armoury so thin, the flakes were broken puff pastry in her fingers.

She knew from working at the museum that if a shell was cracked, fractures radiating out from the point of impact but not entirely shattered, and the creature inside was not smashed, it could survive, regrow its shell. But whenever large chunks of its shield were wrenched out, the air got inside, the snail died.

Hazel crawled to the fence, found a hole where a knot of wood had fallen from the plank and put her eye to its aperture.

On the other side, kneeling deep in green, among the vegetable garden beds, her old neighbour, under a wide-brimmed hat, her face shadowed and crosshatched by woven straw and sun, had perfected the pinch and toss of snails. Grabbing them three-fingered from under rocks, extracting them from the clustered stems of parsley like old scalp-scabs through hair and throwing them into Hazel’s yard, where they landed with a sickening squelch that Hazel now couldn’t help but hear.

‘Hey!’ Hazel yelped. The old woman stopped mid-pinch.

Hazel grabbed an empty bucket, started collecting the wounded from the ground, the dead and half-dead, carefully placing them into the bottom. Desperate for still land, for safe dirt, those still alive started sliding out from the snail heap, feelers out, inching over one another; snails could never give escape the urgency they must have felt.

Hazel knocked hard on her neighbour’s front door, rapping with the flat weight of her palm.

It was a long time before she heard the slow shuffle of feet across carpet. The door opened. Esme Windle stood in the doorway, a hand on the jamb, breathing heavily. She had removed her sun-hat. She looked so much smaller standing there in front of her, her back arched into a hump under her cardigan, so much smaller than Hazel. The hem of her dress clung to her thighs and to her knees with static. She wore house slippers and her stockings, loose over bruises, bagged at the ankles.

‘Oh hello!’ Esme’s face looked like it hurt to smile.

Hazel thrust the bucket at her.

Esme looked at it in dismay. The remaining snails had nearly reached the top now and were hovering at the edges, ready to take the downward plunge along the outside of the bucket. Several lay curled at the bottom, motionless, though they rolled across the plastic with Hazel’s every jerky move.

‘Is this some kind of a joke?’ Esme asked, recoiling from the feelers waving up at her.

‘You threw them over my fence,’ Hazel said. ‘Just now. I saw you.’

Esme opened her mouth. A deep sound rose out of her, chuckling interlaced with coughing and she took a moment to pound her chest, to settle down before a smile slipped out of the side of her mouth. ‘Oh my dear, you’d be wanting my mother.’

The word ‘mother’ hit her. How could somebody this old still have a mother? Hazel could hear the hoarse keening of cello music from within, notes vibrating from a distant room. She saw how Esme’s fingers gripped the door for support, how her eyelids seemed to fall and rest there for a second instead of blinking; how she grabbed Hazel’s hand in hers, squeezing tightly – whether for support, or out of sympathy, Hazel wasn’t quite sure – and led her down the long, dim corridor into the heart of the house.

Hazel’s bucket swung awkwardly in her other hand, the snails still trailing down, their escape suddenly too quick. She worried they would fall to the floor and crack their heads before Hazel and Esme had crossed the kitchen to the back garden, before they were returned to their rightful lettuces.

After recommending stomping on them (Hazel had looked at her in horror), Esme had suggested that Hazel leave the bucket of snails in the back garden while she made them both a nice cuppa.

Esme’s mother Hortense was refusing to come in from outside, or to right her neighbourly wrong. Through the window, Hazel saw her glaring at the bucket exuding snails. They inched and slid for their lives, disappeared into the grass, into the cracks between the boards of the verandah.

‘Don’t mind her, Hazel. She’s slowly going blind though she won’t admit it. She probably had no idea where she was throwing them.’

Esme poured Hazel’s tea. Her bony arms shook at right angles against the armrests as she slowly lowered herself into a red plush cushioned dining chair. It was covered in cat hair.

‘You’re the one collecting the memories, I hear?’ she asked.

Hazel thought of herself attaching the old ladies of the town to a drip, draining memory like blood. Jars of recollection lined up on a shelf: putting her ear to the glass and hearing dream frequencies from underwater.

‘I am. Well, I’m trying to. I met you at Mr Benbow’s, remember?’

Esme looked around nervously, then she lowered her voice. ‘That’s just between you and me, dear, if that’s all right by you. Some of the others might not understand, though believe you me, my motives were pure . . .’ She sipped her tea and Hazel caught a whiff of brandy.

Hazel glanced around the room. ‘Have you lived here a long time, Esme?’

‘I’ve been in this house seventy-seven years give or take a few in between. You don’t get that long for murder.’ Esme inhaled suddenly. ‘I keep things, you know, to remember. Little things that please me. I don’t know what interests you, Hazel, but they interest me. In my day, things were done differently. Men these days have no manners. An older man lifted his hat to me in Cooma recently – I felt like the Queen of England.’ Esme giggled.

It was disarming and slightly frightening to hear an eighty-year-old woman giggle. The young woman was still inside, but the vocal cords had shrivelled tight and the laugh was more bird than girl.

‘Most of the people I used to know have left the area,’ she continued. ‘After the flood. Of course there was my friend Minnie, now passed on. I met her up the mountains. We had fun . . .’

Esme kneaded her bony fingers, entangled them in her lap. ‘But New Adaminaby isn’t my town anymore. I can’t keep up with all the young faces now. See, they tried to put the street signs back up in the new town, the same signs, but all in different places. They thought the names could be separated from the roads they used to mark. They can’t. See, they never saw us, or our town; they just saw a potential lake. I was a midwife up at Happy Jacks, which was one of the camps, but you can’t birth a new town like you can a baby . . .’

Hazel wished she had brought her tape recorder. She saw all the words popping in the air around them, bubbles rising with the steam from their tea.

‘Never mind. Street signs or no street signs, I still know where I am when I look out over the lake, still can travel along the old roads, in my mind, down Denison Street, past Stewart’s Store. I can still see the wild black horses running past through a slick of snow . . .’

‘It sounds magical.’

Esme took Hazel’s hand and squeezed it, eyes watering. ‘I’d like to show you something, if you’ll fetch it for me, please. Just down the hall to the right. The box on the bedside table.’

Hazel crossed the worn strip of carpet, the roses still bright at the edges, past a series of doors to the last room at the end. Cats scattered, their paws thumping.

The room was dim. Yellowed lace curtains dangled over the windows like limp hair. A crocheted blanket pulled over the bed. Hazel caught sight of herself in the floor-length mirror. The dark circles that had colonised her eyes had not yet left.

She returned to the dining table carrying a small shoe box.

‘Open it, dear.’

She lifted the lid. Inside, the precious pleats, the scissor-snagged edges, little capsules of the world.

‘I love a good clipping, don’t you?’ Esme peered over proudly.

Hazel picked up a folded square, worn at the creases, from the top of the pile. She read out loud: ‘Long passion for deer life.’

Esme looked happy. ‘Oh, that’s my favourite.’

Hazel studied the clipping. A cartoon of a woman in little round glasses not unlike Hazel’s own, wearing a sheet over her backside and antlers like a deer, loading the barrel of her shotgun.

‘Patricia Strutt was her name,’ Esme explained. ‘She’s dead now. Was a deer-stalker. As famous as Alma, Marchioness of Breadalbane. She spent years crawling around, stalking deer, over bogs and everything – She was wonderful. That was in Scotland, mind you. We don’t have bogs here, do we?’

‘It says here when she got up in the morning she’d crawl back and forth across her floor to help build up stomach muscles,’ Hazel said.

‘What I’d do for stomach muscles again,’ Esme said dreamily. ‘When I was young, we nurses – well, it wasn’t a job for weaklings . . .’

Hazel read aloud: ‘If ever she felt cramp coming on, she would lick her wrists for the salt in her sweat.’

‘’Course.’ Hortense had appeared in the back doorway. ‘Sounds like one of your famous masochists.’ She was leaning against the doorjamb, breathing deeply. She threw off her hat, as if it might help her catch her breath, and revealed a broad tanned face, which had suffered for a near century the indelicacy of sunlight, though the pale blue eyes had also filled with this light until they shone.

‘She reminded me of you, actually,’ Esme said under her breath. Then more loudly, ‘They say she was a brilliant shot, fast and consistent. Like when you used to get rabbits, Mum?’

Hortense wavered, only seemed to get half of her word out.

‘Oh, Hazel, quick, can you please help my mother to the chair there?’ She glanced towards the kitchen window as Hazel jumped up to help. ‘Byrne’s still in town, I suppose.’

Hortense flinched at Hazel’s touch, wouldn’t look her in the eye, but let her guide her to the wicker armchair in front of the wood stove.

Hortense dropped into it, rather suddenly.

‘Are you all right?’ Hazel asked her.

‘Byrne said she was dropping off a paper for Owen. She should be back by now . . . What’s the clock say there?’ Esme asked.

‘I can’t see it,’ Hortense muttered.

‘Oh Mum, you can’t help it. It’s normal!’

‘Deterioration.’ Hortense spat the word out.

The kitchen clock ticked loudly. Five o’clock. Hazel would have to leave soon.

She didn’t know what to say. She remembered how astronomers used the word ‘eccentricity’ to describe the shape of a planet’s ellipse. Zero eccentricity was a perfect circle, but it seemed nobody on this lake aspired to that shape.

‘Her husband disappeared mysteriously,’ Esme whispered some moments later, once Hortense had dozed off. ‘They found him five years on, a clothed skeleton, sitting up against a tree trunk.’

‘Your father?’

‘No, dear, the deer-stalker’s husband.’

Esme glanced up through the kitchen window as Lucetta came onto the verandah, flushed and wild, her hair tangled from riding. ‘His watch was still ticking. A Timex. You can’t stop it, can you?’

‘My father says a Timex is the best watch,’ Hazel agreed.

‘I meant time, dear. Joe’s watch was still ticking too. They never knew the time of death. Never knew it.’

Hazel was confused. She didn’t know who Joe was, but assumed it was the deer-stalker’s husband. ‘Einstein claimed gravity can make time go slower, so that what is a tick on the clock, a second, may actually take longer than a second,’ she said.

‘Slow is not stopped, Hazel.’

Lucetta was kicking off her boots, slid in her socks through the door.

‘Oh, hello,’ Lucetta said, looking put out. She went to the kitchen and switched on the kettle. ‘Can we not have shoes inside?’ She was picking chunks of mud from the floor.

‘Sorry.’ Hazel jumped up. ‘That’s my fault.’ She quickly removed her shoes and placed them near the back door.

‘Luce,’ Esme stretched out her name, ‘this is Hazel, the squatter from next door.’

‘We’ve met,’ Lucetta replied.

‘She’s here to make a special museum for the old town.’ Esme was breathless.

‘So you’ve come to dredge us up,’ Lucetta observed.

‘Oh, Lucetta! I think it’s so helpful of her – to come all this way for us.’

‘I just hope I can do a good job,’ Hazel ventured, attempting a light laugh. She watched Lucetta wrench open drawers, asserting her place in the house.

‘Well, I’d better go have a shower if you’ll excuse me,’ Lucetta said, stirring her coffee. ‘I’ve got to go out tonight, which I’m already regretting I said yes to.’

‘You should go to functions if you are invited, I always feel,’ Esme announced.

‘This is not some function, Auntie. You know that. It’s all going to be rather depressing.’

‘Still, you never know what might happen.’

‘If you’re so keen, you can come with me.’ Lucetta strode out.

Once she was out of earshot, Esme leaned closer to Hazel and whispered, ‘Joe’s family wanted Lucetta in black, after he died. They wanted her to mourn for the rest of her life. But I said no. She has to have hope. Hope for love. If she went to the pub, one of his brothers would turn up and stare at her. Well, I told Byrne to march over to the house and tell his mother a thing or two. “She’s a young girl, she’s got her whole life ahead of her, you can’t do this to her. You’ve got four boys left, you’ve got to get on with it.” Byrne and I set her straight.’

‘What did we do?’ Byrne banged through the back door. Esme blushed.

‘Nothing, Byrne,’ Esme croaked. ‘Did you get the paper to Owen?’

‘Oh!’ Byrne brightened when she saw Hazel. ‘And I was just saying to Auntie yesterday that we should invite our new neighbour to dinner.’

‘Thank you, I’d love to, but I can’t tonight,’ Hazel apologised. ‘I’ve got an invitation already.’

When Hazel left, she took her red hat from the hook, put it on her head and tipped it to Esme, whose eyes widened with wet affection.

‘I’m sorry.’ Hazel wasn’t expecting tears. ‘I didn’t upset you, Esme?’

‘No, my dear, you’ve warmed me.’

Hazel stepped out into the late summer afternoon, the light sinking over the lake, the long shadows pressed against the trees. The water’s surface was lifted into small white peaks. Rhett had called them horses.

A door slammed shut in his house, calling her closer.

She thought of the dark plain on the moon’s far side that had been mistakenly named a mare, the Latin word they used for the moon’s seas. It was once called Mare Desiderii, the Sea of Dreams, but now it was no longer acknowledged.

She knocked. Could still see his wet footprints on the verandah, carried straight from the lake. She would invite him to Burchill’s family party.

There were things, perhaps, for her and Rhett to speak of that didn’t come so dangerously twined with sleep.

CHAPTER 16

THINGS HAD BEEN DISTURBED, Lucetta thought, like pages so long folded that when you opened them, they broke in your hand, and the air was filled with particles.

Lucetta stood before Joe’s family’s double-storey house, the blinds in his childhood corner bedroom still drawn, and wanted to turn back.

The sharp corners of the brick walls hurt her.

The long stripes of grass, watered with the sprinkler secretly, at night, shone like emerald quicksand. Lucetta wondered if the back garden beds would still be filled with wooden stakes to drive through the hearts of the blood apples. Joe’s mother had always grown tomatoes; the best in the district. It had been there, in the back garden, after Joe’s death, that the power of the Italian mother, fed on grief, had taken root. Though Joe had been only half Italian, he was all Italian, all Catholic, in his mother’s mind.

The moment Lucetta stepped inside, she wavered. The smell of oregano and tomato drew her through the empty lounge room, past a dozen frames bearing Joe’s face (she regarded his photo distantly, sometimes, like a cousin she’d once known as a child), down the hall to the kitchen, where the walls were sweating with the steam of Nadia’s cooking.

Pepper caught in her nose. Colanders of pasta jumbled in the sink. Gorgonzola smeared on the breadboards. Whiff of garlic on fingers.

Trailing behind Lucetta into the den of scent and light, the sight of noodles reminded Esme of limbs in love. She’d long been haunted by the image of two blue-tongue lizards wrapped around each other on a sunny path.

Nadia looked up from her cooking as they entered the kitchen. She was fierce. Her eyes glimmered. It had been years since they’d spoken.

She handed a small black-haired girl a fistful of pasta and sent her outside.

‘Nadia, do you remember my Aunt Esme?’ Lucetta asked.

‘Thank you for inviting us, dear,’ Esme stammered. She was flustered, watching all the plates being passed out the back door to the long, wooden table where twenty or so near strangers lingered with beers and red wine. ‘I haven’t had noodles in years.’ Her mouth watered, but it was something other than food she craved.

‘You’ve grown up . . . Of course.’ Nadia took Lucetta’s shoulders in her hands and pulled her close, a kiss to each cheek, but did not hug her.

Lucetta’s nostrils flared. She was stung by Joe’s scent dripping from his mother’s neck.

‘There was a whole bottle left,’ Nadia said, knowing. Lucetta nodded, for she was the one who had given it to him that last Christmas. ‘So I wear it. Though I’ve lost the whiff of it myself. I can’t smell it on me. But others . . .’ she shrugged. ‘Well, most people are used to it. I’ve been wearing it for years.’

Lucetta felt as if she’d been jabbed in the ribs with Nadia’s wooden spoon.

‘I’m sorry, Nadia.’ She was dry and hollow. ‘I don’t know what happened to me. I thought . . .’

‘This is not the time for thoughts,’ Nadia answered and turned back to her stove. ‘I am cooking . . . Go see your brothers,’ she added. ‘They’re outside. Have a drink.’

She was still cross.

‘And it’s tagliatelle,’ Nadia corrected Esme as they turned away.

Ah, yes, thought Esme. A drink. That was what was missing from her veins. She might need a few, even, to get through this evening.

Lucetta’s eyes watered. Through the wall of glass she could see Joe’s four brothers congregated around the barbecue, beery, laughing. The fat from the sausages dripped and splattered at their legs. They wiped away the slick burns with their fingers and gnashed their tongs in the air while they talked. Those boys, all bright, nervy bravery.

Joe, forever hot-wiring the safety switches, throwing away the guide manuals that Lucetta foisted on him on their first dates. Curling his index finger, head tilted sideways from the sheer weight of his mischief, daring her closer.

Come here, he whispered, and she did, and found herself a widow at nineteen.

Esme had plopped herself down in a nearby chair and was wrangling a five-year-old grandchild into pouring her a glass of wine. She seemed exhausted already.

Lucetta wanted to go home.

‘You go on with the others, dear,’ Esme said. ‘I’ll just sit and have some wine. I believe it greatly contributes to my longlivity.’

Lucetta stepped outside, bare-armed, without wine or shield. The garden blazed with lanterns, with moths. Her hair blew across her mouth.

It was silent. Everybody looked up.

His mother’s stories had been the music of his childhood, and now that he was back, Rhett was bringing them up from the mud.

Only bits of them at first, a wayward image, a line, and the way she had held her face when she recited it; then larger chunks of stories surfaced, slippery pieces he could just about clasp in his hands, like fish.

There were so few stories in Australia that qualified as fairytales, she once said, that she had to invent her own. She called them horsetails and they were as dark as her eyes and as unsteadily hopeful.

Just this afternoon, he’d come up from the bottom of the lake with a whole tale intact. Back inside his house, still dripping wet and cold, he clutched it, unsure of where to set it down. The words were lead shot to his brain.

It was in this highly hazy state that he had let Hazel talk him into coming to this party, which, he was now discovering too late, was being held in honour of Lucetta’s dead husband. There was a complicated paradox of denial involved in being here, since Rhett had never even allowed himself to believe she’d been married in the first place. The one time Alesandra had pointed Joe out to him in town, before Rhett left for overseas, he found himself perversely turning his head away so he didn’t see him. Over time, Rhett found he had a gift for negation. Even once he was away, and knew there was no chance of catching them together, Rhett played out childish scenarios in his head in which he ran into them at the pub in town and attempted to humiliate Lucetta by refusing, over extended minutes and sentences, to bear witness to Joe.

Such deception thrived in the mind, but was impossible to keep up when your rival’s sweet face was staring out at you from a gilded frame set in the centre of the dinner table.

Rhett’s own sadness got the better of him then. He drank his wine fast. Smelled all the rotting things still unsaid in the air, alongside the love. They mingled with smoke and citronella. He was smothered with the remembrances of miserable mothers, dead brothers, though Joe’s mother, he could see, protected her grief righteously, like a seed she had sown.

Outside, Lucetta stood among the brothers, in the midst of broad arms. Mark, Tony and Fred kept theirs crossed over their chests in defence against her, though the messy-haired Marcello, who still called himself by his birth-name, had strayed closer, and was using his bent tricep, slung casually around her neck, to keep her near. The other hand gripped his bottle of beer. He looked like a European actor who had been beaten up one too many times about the face.

‘Everybody has their own way, Marcello,’ Lucetta was saying to him. ‘I guess you don’t know what you will do until it happens . . .’ Her voice sounded light, but her throat trembled.

Marcello nodded at Rhett and Hazel as they came down the back steps, though in slight confusion, for this was a family party and he didn’t know who they were.

Lucetta turned, bewildered. She burned under the bulging arm.

Rhett and Hazel said hello to her. There were awkward pauses in the introductions. Rhett became a neighbour Lucetta barely knew. Hazel, a virtual stranger who worked for their Uncle Burchill. Marcello rubbed the back of Lucetta’s hair with affectionate possession.

‘You’re still family, Etta. Our little sis,’ Marcello said, pinching her cheek.

The other brothers’ jaws clenched. They didn’t say much. Their Australian voices soon shaped Italian vowels in the air to better protect the privacy of their shared banter.

Rhett quickly guided Hazel away.

They huddled in a darkish corner with a bottle of wine. Rhett hoped he would be invisible to Lucetta’s piercing stare. Hazel’s glasses were a confetti of reflected light.

‘It smells like a wake in there,’ Rhett said, looking back towards the bright kitchen. Burchill had just arrived with his plastic bags of salad, and was chopping and talking and tossing and kissing his sister-in-law Nadia – none of this airy cheek to cheek business for him – full on her red mouth.

‘What does a wake smell like?’ Hazel wondered.

‘Candles . . . I don’t know, casserole, scotch, canned talk . . . I’ve been to enough – I should know.’ He saw Lucetta watching them.

‘Your brother, you mean?’ she asked quietly. ‘From the truck?’

He wanted to crush the wineglass in his hand.

He’d grown up thinking being a man was a dangerous job, as both of his brothers disappeared from earth and his life.

Seventeen to Rhett’s seven, Jason had been the brother he most loved, watching him with his mates, drinking beers in the shed, or rolling in the tussock with a girl after school. Rhett had been warned many times by his mother to please, please, not follow in the footsteps of Jason.

The midnight raid by the police, red lights spinning over the water, searching the house for ‘a plant’, his mother had explained when he’d asked. Rhett had wanted to show the police his mother’s fancy garden.

Alesandra and Bruce had eventually traded the dining suite for a pool table, stocked a small fridge with beer, encouraged Jason and his mates to hang out at the house instead of the pub; to crash on the floor rather than along some dark stretch of road coming home.

The boys drank the beer, played the pool, then took the ute out into the fields at three am and cut doughnuts into the dirt. It was during one such night-time skid that they’d flipped.

Rhett had been jolted awake by the horn. It jammed on impact, pierced through the otherwise silent night.

The day after Jason died, while his father raged in the stock-yards, his other brother Andy, twenty-two at this point, had pointed his horse at the farthest hill and galloped away.

‘You don’t have to talk about it,’ Hazel was saying.

‘Sometimes, it’s like they were born in my mind already dead,’ was all he said. He had only figments to bring forth.

‘I guess all of this must remind you.’ She looked around, as if for confirmation.

‘Everything reminds me,’ he answered, looking at Lucetta. ‘And everything doesn’t . . . There’s nothing I can do about either.’ Lucetta’s shirt was tugged up a bit over her lower back as she leaned over to touch the head of a small girl. He could see an indentation in her skin, a dimple.

He wanted to press his finger there.

Never did he want her more than at that moment; never again would she appear so necessary to him.

When he returned his gaze to Hazel, she was studying him closely. He wanted to shake her away. He was losing his ability to be alone with her.

‘What?’ he asked impatiently.

‘I guess I’m meant to mix,’ Hazel remarked. ‘It’ll be good for me.’

‘Okay,’ he said, and was relieved.

Whatever spell there had been between them broke effortlessly in the yellow night.

Esme, kitchen-bound, wine-tipsy.

Earlier, she had discovered another old auntie in a knitted jumper and bulky black lace-ups, resting nearby. She seemed to Esme to be a twin, though it quickly became obvious that the other woman didn’t speak much English.

‘Nowadays they wear their hats so tight they couldn’t lift them if they tried,’ she said to the woman in black while eying a young male cousin, a hulking sort of boy with a baseball cap turned backwards.

She was dimly aware that she had already said this three times.

Esme dozed for a moment. People were guitars thrumming around her.

When she opened her eyes, a face loomed. A man was bending down to her with a plate of noodles and red sauce.

‘Are you hungry?’ His eyes were moons set deep into his skull when he smiled. His warmth was familiar; a return to an old heater after a day spent in the snow. She thought she’d once known him.

‘Ivo!’ Nadia called. She held out a bowl of shaved parmesan he’d forgotten.

Esme’s brain ticked open.

When he returned with the cheese, she gripped his wrist lightly.

‘I know you,’ she insisted, ‘from the snow.’ And it meant several things at once.

He looked at her questioningly, for everybody he knew was from the Snowys.

‘What’s the opposite of a love story?’ she asked to prompt him and he wrinkled his forehead, balancing the question between his brows.

‘Who were you?’ he wondered. She thought later, how apt that he used the past tense.

‘Esme,’ she said. ‘There was a blizzard.’ And she was sure of it now. ‘You recited poetry.’

The past was a place that warmed her.

Hazel had left Rhett and their complicated silences and entered the crush and scent of bodies. Now she stood in the corner of the lounge room, her mouth woody with plum-coloured wine. She was prying. The wheels of her tape recorder turned.

Esme was introducing her to Ivo, an old friend of hers from decades ago. The smell of crushed coffee beans simmered in the air.

‘So how do you know each other?’ Hazel asked.

‘In a winter house,’ Ivo said. ‘Esme was very beautiful.’

‘Oh, I don’t remember that, but Minnie was beautiful,’ Esme insisted with some quivering and a plate of tiramisu. ‘All in red.’

‘Minnie was asleep,’ Ivo answered. ‘As I recall.’

Esme wasn’t listening. ‘If you were born beautiful, then you’re lucky, but if you’re not, well, you have to live with it.’

‘Esme didn’t fancy me,’ Ivo told Hazel. ‘She fancied that other bloke.’

‘You left,’ Esme said. ‘You didn’t finish your poetry.’

‘But poetry is never finished,’ he answered and grinned. ‘The poem I’ve been reciting in my head has been going a good sixty years.’

‘Esme’s Law of Thermodynamics, I call that, Ivo. The unprecedented delay in the time it takes for things to wear out. I find that things do not go suddenly, most of the time.’

‘My wife went suddenly,’ Ivo said. Then, ‘Did you marry, Esme?’

Esme squirmed at the question. ‘I did other things,’ she said resolutely.

Ivo turned to Hazel. ‘They say there was drowning.’ He shook his finger and the poetry drained from it. ‘My grandson drowned.’ He knuckled a photo of Joe. ‘That was sudden. But the town, they had plenty of warning. It’s all a bunch of ballyhoo propaganda.’

‘How was it then, if it wasn’t that?’ Hazel asked him.

‘We threw our winter coats overboard,’ he said. ‘We thought it would be hot here. Arrived with nothing but ourselves and we worked that to the bones. We men were proud of what we did up there. It was our life. Not the life between where we come from and where we ended up afterwards, but the marrow of it. Right there. The juice. Because if you didn’t know who you were before, you knew soon enough.’

‘They came and there was work to do. They did it,’ Esme said. ‘People say that Australia is racist, but thousands of them we let in after the war.’

Ivo looked at Esme. ‘Them?’ Then to Hazel: ‘She grew up in Adaminaby, but she helped just as soon as I did, to bury her town.’

Esme flushed and looked away. ‘I birthed the next generation’s workers, Hazel.’ She shrugged. ‘But you can’t please all people.’

Rhett had buried them all.

He was a lone satellite in a constellation of bodies, sunk into the white couch, collecting sounds. Encircled by a family where the ratio of the living to the dead was twenty-five to one at least. Joe was his anti-matter, he decided, or he must have been Joe’s, because Joe’s absence seemed brighter, more palpable, inside the cosy billow of life he had left behind, than Rhett’s presence in the cold lake of black ever could.

He couldn’t stand parties. All the mindless chattering. He heard every noise that passed underneath the clamour of talk, two conversations cutting across each other, how did people do that? He couldn’t follow those to save his life. All he heard was the toilet flushing upstairs and cutlery hitting the bench and the coffee percolating in the kitchen, and a jingle of coins in Ivo’s front pocket.

He watched Hazel, tape recorder in hand, working the room, as if time were something she could tap.

As the lovely Lucetta was passed from brother to brother to mother to uncle to child.

And Esme, trembling bow-legged at the arthritic hand of Ivo, at the brink of history.

While a barefoot five-year-old granddaughter insisted on dripping a warm, wet cloth through the house, in order to wash, over and over, the glassed-in edges of Joe’s many faces.

Rhett plummeted deeper.

His life, a game of Cluedo: you wondered who would be dead by dinner.

Andy had gone next. He was thirty. Rhett was fifteen. This time it was Rhett who quit school and took off, looking over his shoulder for the curse that would surely catch up with him.

Andy had been his father’s favourite; the best by far on a horse. Won the Kevin Miners’ Memorial Endurance Race three years straight. You couldn’t walk through the house without bumping into a photo of Andy in his jeans and checked shirt, white floppy-brimmed hat, white teeth clamped down in a smile, leaning against a fence, one leg up, ready to sell you something.

Andy in action, being bucked halfway to heaven, people pressed along the fence, watching him. Andy standing on his mare Brave’s back, whip in hand. Andy’s trophies, spit-polished. When he wasn’t competing or working the property with Bruce, Andy was breaking in horses, and training on the side to be an auctioneer. Walked around the house, slapping his own butt, neck bobbing like a duck, doing the auctioneer’s dance. ‘One sixty-five, sixty-five, sixty-five, sixty-six . . .’

Andy – talking over the top of Rhett to protect him when their father looked at Rhett sideways. Making up for Rhett’s stammering shyness at home and on the horse by trying that much harder. Trying to be three sons instead of one. Which was stupid, Rhett thought, because doing too much then meant he was doing fuck-all now. The hooves that carried him to early stardom and the Snowy Mountains hall of fame were the same ones that had trampled him to a muddy oblivion. ‘A spooked horse is a dangerous horse,’ Andy had always said.

There was bad luck in that family, in that house, his father declared afterwards, and his mother went quiet.

Bruce spent his nights drunk on rum, smoking and cajoling anyone who came through the door into sitting down for the six-hour Andy Davys video-a-thon. ‘That boy was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ to anybody who’d listen. Even to Rhett.

Especially to Rhett.

Although neither Rhett nor his father could untangle that last lonesome brother from a lifetime of regret, even that didn’t have the strength in the end to link them. Rhett’s father had gone after a long spell of protracted silence caused by the cancer chewing his throat – but it was not an accident, Rhett believed. He was wondering when his turn would come. Rhett had started on the rum purposefully at sixteen and now found solace in its stink. He would drink and hate and die just like his father had, on a stretch of wasted land by a sunken town. As if the only way to revenge his father was to prove him right.

He wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t do anything.

‘My father was king of the brumby catchers,’ Esme was saying now to Rhett. She had joined him on the sinking couch.

‘I remember you said he ate black cockatoos,’ he answered distractedly. ‘Maybe that’s what I should do.’

‘Only when he was short on supper, Rhett,’ she said, looking at him strangely.

It was heart failure, they said, that killed Alesandra in the end.

Night had not exhausted its betrayals. Lucetta was caught in a king-size bed, sandwiched between Nadia and Marcello and several grandchildren, forced to relive Joe’s funeral on video. Nadia was resplendent, propped up by several overstuffed pillows, drinking Semillon now, so she didn’t stain the duvet when she shook.

The room scrubbed with light and Joe’s face in the corner, cold as milk in the casket.

Lucetta was overheating.

‘And there you are, our Etta, before we lost you too.’ Nadia laced her fingers through Lucetta’s, a starfish gripping a rock. Lucetta watched as the camera swept past her own face, such a distorted face; she looked fat, or was it the swell of sadness? Salt-filled skin, eyes glazed with lack of sleep.

The children gazed, thoughtfully chewing jelly snakes, and little Della wanted to know did everybody die, Nonna?

Yes, everybody.

Even me?

Yes, even you will.

Nadia and Marcello sang all of the hymns. Even the children knew them.

‘It was such beautiful service.’ Nadia wiped her eyes and took a slug of white wine. ‘You seen a more lovelier funeral ever than our Joe’s?’

‘I don’t know.’ Lucetta didn’t mean disrespect, but she felt suspended between times, hanging from a shaft of an elevator which, at any moment, would fall. Between herself now, watching herself then, and a welling homesickness.

When the tape finished, the screen went blue.

One of the children asked if they could watch it again.

‘Of course.’

Marcello turned to make sure Lucetta was comfortable. Did she want anything from downstairs?

Only the front door, Lucetta prayed. She had a feeling that she’d never escape this bed, wondered if that was, finally, what marriage meant.

Rhett walked by at one point, looking for his coat. ‘It’s in the spare bedroom, love,’ Nadia called to him, still weeping, and when Lucetta caught Rhett’s eye, she tried to plead, Save me.

Downstairs, earlier, she and Rhett had circled one another through the drunken room, exquisitely, while Hazel hovered, always nearby.

It was seen by some as true proof of love to claim you could never move forward after losing it. These were the television dreams the girls from Lucetta’s school had woven, tales told about those who died of sadness.

Was it better, she wondered, to agree with those who wanted there to be only one for one for life, and thus show you were a solid force of love to be reckoned with? Or to disagree, explaining that your heart was no metaphor, but simply a blood-moving muscle, an internal timekeeper that knew when enough beats had passed, and that you were still open for more bliss?

‘We’re going.’ Rhett teetered, glancing forlornly at Lucetta. ‘Thanks, Mrs Benbow.’

He disappeared from the doorframe.

Lucetta imagined a ghosted girl behind him, taking his hand, leading him out the door into an idea of the future, and bliss.

There was music, insistent, pulsing through her veins. She was light for the first time all night, outside in the gentle night, at the picnic table, Esme, with Ivo by her side.

Joe’s brother Fred had painted a votive offering in dry, scratchy paint on the back of a piece of tin found on the shore of Lake Eucumbene. The blue-black lake, with Joe floating beneath the water’s surface, his hair in streams of moonlight, and below him, the crumbled town, a mass of sunken bricks. On top of the darkening water, his boat held the entirety of his extended family, all twenty-three people, pressed together to form a cone of bodies that piled into the wobbly wooden husk. The mountains behind them were brown knobs streaked with tangerine reflections from ominous clouds. The lake was a bowl of black with white peaks stitched across it.

It is perfect, Esme thought, for she remembered how it seeped in.

The Virgin Mary sat in a cloud above the painted mountains, in streaks of blue that might have been air or might have been water, looking over the family. In the corner, Fred had scrawled in white capitals EX VOTO and, beneath it, listed all their names.

When she’d seen it Hazel had inquired, politely, if she might acquire it, temporarily, for the museum.

Now this painting sat on the table between Esme and Ivo.

Ivo was watching the sky. ‘Heraclitus said, “To become water means the death of the soul.” But in the end, my soul is all about the water.’

Esme nodded. ‘Mine, I think, is snow.’ There was something perverse about those words breathed into the balmy air.

‘I moved away from the snow,’ he said, ‘but you can’t escape it.’

‘I never left the water,’ she said, and there was a choked laugh in it.

‘I guess you working girls weren’t the marrying type.’

‘Oh, I’ve done some lovely things, Ivo.’ Because how did you tell somebody that you’d never once been asked? ‘I’m not the type to complain.’

There by the water she had lived, somewhat quietly, somewhat slowly, in a house that, if you could measure its inner temperature like a body, would exhibit signs of high fever.

When she breathed in too hard, it felt as if there were a bird caught in her chest. It began to thrash its sharp red wings.

Ivo brought her water, but no, she waved, coughing up feathers and trying to extract them from her throat while simultaneously thanking him for his kindness, searching for her purse, her puffer, for Lucetta.

Bodies rushed towards her, voices closed in and Esme was transported to the ground. Soon, the purse and puffer were found and the bright plastic end stuck into her mouth.

Heeeeeeeh, she gasped, and felt the flow of life return to her.

Ivo had moon’s eyes that crinkled when he smiled.

Santa Maria, he sang and crossed himself.

Rhett drove Hazel’s car. His hand on the gearstick, shifting awkwardly, brushed against her knee. He flinched.

‘Sorry.’ He turned up the music and bobbed his head to the bass.

She gazed out at the eerie, humped hills, then dozed against the window.

When they got home, he tossed her the car keys and yawned open-mouthed. ‘Thanks. See ya.’ Heading for his dark house.

‘Hey.’ She grabbed his sleeve as he stepped away. The look on his face, when he turned, as if he expected it.

She leaned forward.

He leaned back.

‘Come here.’ She tugged again. His lips were chapped and creased with ruby lines of wine.

He stumbled backwards, away from her kiss. ‘I can’t.’ He touched her arm quickly and lifted his eyebrows, bit his bottom lip. ‘Sorry, if I gave that impression . . .’

Hazel was so small she thought the night might absorb her.

‘It’s fine. I just thought . . .’ She flushed, exposed. ‘I’ll go then.’ She turned towards her door, her bed, the covers over her head.

‘No, come over,’ he insisted. ‘Let’s have a drink.’

‘I’m going to bed,’ she said.

She slipped through the backyard to find in blue, cool cumulus a smattering of smashed snails on the path, under her boot soles. A walk of snails.

She couldn’t sleep then, though exhausted from unexpected tears. She kept seeing little snails lobbed over the fence. Moonlight smeared her hands.

She reached down and dug out the tape recorder from her bag, rewound the night’s tape. Then she extracted perfect pieces of the party’s sound from the hum of the recording, as if picking scallops from a plate of sauce.

She heard Burchill saying that he had last cleaned his fridge properly just before his wife left him. Then somebody cried, ‘But that was fifteen years ago!’ She could almost hear him shrugging his soft white shoulders; he reckoned that, after long enough, they cleaned themselves.

But mostly, she kept finding shards of Lucetta embedded in the noise, alternating with Rhett. Each time she found Lucetta’s voice, there was Rhett’s moving that much nearer. Hazel heard them as two thrashing swords in a box, though she couldn’t remember them ever once speaking directly to each other.

Lucetta said: ‘I’ve saved every dog tag from every dog I’ve put down whose owner left it behind, but I’ve lost Joe’s watch.’

Rhett said: ‘My old man spent his nights on the piss, until beer-laced tears dropped to his lap.’

A contest of grief was flaring.

Hazel saw the tiny nipple-topped bottle her mother had sent her on the floor. She succussed it against her palm. Extracted the glass, tear-tipped dropper.

Let four translucent beads fall under her tongue.

When Lucetta finally left that night, alone, for Esme had said she would get a lift with her friend, she breathed out the night’s stale air but still felt she was being watched. When she turned back to the house she saw Marcello and Nadia, standing side by side in an upstairs window.

Once she got into her car and closed the door they shrank a little in the extra square of glass that now stood between them.

She had the sense of a series of doors closing.

Halfway down the block she could still see Marcello’s silhouette in her side mirror. He lifted his hand once, it hovered there, and then she turned the corner.

Esme woke up on Nadia’s leather couch, her head throbbing, the smell of bacon and coffee close, the screech of cutlery over bone china.

Her lips parched and open, as if in the shape of a kiss.

Ivo had already left for his long trip back up north, Nadia told her, but he said to tell the Snow Girl goodbye.

It was true. History was just states of deja vu.

CHAPTER 17

THE NEXT MORNING, BEFORE day rose, sugary, and the laundry kicked on the hoist, Lucetta, unable to sleep, saddled Paris, inhaled his musty mane, his molasses hay, and climbed the foggy hill.

Her favourite time and weather, when day was still half-obscured. She could close her eyes and just ride without steering, let Paris pick her way over the stones, through the cloudy molecules of dawn. She liked the feeling best that they were one beast, not two; they breathed like lovers fallen asleep on top of one another, rising and falling, rising and falling.

The body moves, and the world changes.

She knew if she waited on the high hill, under the crying trees, all would be revealed. Day’s intentions told.

She thought of Hortense’s mother, bareback, riding forty miles through midnight’s gloom to give birth to her babies, riding back again in the rising sun, cradling that new pink warmth in her trotting arms. Lucetta didn’t envy her, but knew she didn’t know herself what it was like to have it rough.

Lucetta and Paris rode into a circle of gum trees.

On winter mornings, up there, the trees defrosted, each leaf encased in a skin-thin gloss of ice, dripping a thousand drops from their tips. Waterfalls: loosening their nightly ice. You could hear the sound of rain, yet no water touched your skin. Then somewhere, under last shawls of melting fog, that mob of near-invisible, near-wild horses, their hooves avalanches. They often ran when she arrived, or halted, clustering under the branches. Paris would toss her head from side to side, eyes wide, searching through the fog, smelling, knowing they were there.

There was a spot Lucetta liked best, from which, when the fog dissolved, she could see out through stretches of tussocked plain and hill down over the entire lake. She’d always wished she could have a tiny house up there, windows on all sides, so she could watch the weather arrive and depart, burrowed at the wind’s churning core.

But today, as she came up through the trees in the dawn chill, she saw a figure in the mist, and knew by her stalled blood that it was Rhett. He was bent over a single Primus stove beside the log where she often sat. The little blue flames flickered. Next to it, Rhett on his knees, fiddling with the pump. She wanted to turn around, but his ears were tuned like a music fork to the cadences of mist and took in what his eyes hadn’t yet the chance to.

‘Just in time for breakfast,’ he called before turning to her.

Lulled by Rhett’s voice, Paris stepped closer, and Lucetta immediately cursed herself for being the less brave one, the one who hadn’t spoken first.

‘I’ve got pancake mix and a frying pan,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided to eat every last thing my mother had in the cupboard, though some of it’s a year gone.’

‘There was a girl at uni,’ Lucetta managed to say, though her mouth was suddenly dry, ‘who had her dog cremated and sprinkled the ashes on her mashed potatoes when her family wasn’t looking. They thought it was pepper.’

Rhett looked up at her as though he were touched by this, then back at Scout.

‘Hear that, Scout? When you’re gone I’ll have to eat you. Out of love, you understand.’ He poured the mixture into a plastic bowl, added some water and an egg, and whipped it with a fork.

‘We just bury ours, dig a big hole in the ground and there they go,’ she said.

‘Every dog we’ve ever had is stuck out back under Mum’s spinach patch.’

He was talking like he might to a stranger, making them feel as if they’d known him forever, yet although she had known him forever, he wouldn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he was telling her things she’d known since she was five. She’d helped him bury a couple of his dogs.

He poured a circle of thick batter into the buttery frying pan.

Lucetta climbed down and Paris moved towards the trees. It was only then that she noticed the horses through the air’s grey-white coat, close, watching. Her mother had said he had a way with creatures. She’d know.

Standing here, she could suddenly sense it. Some humming, magnetic force. Or was it just the numbing work of nerves in her skin, the fog’s presence, she felt? The trees were awakening too.

‘It was cold this morning,’ he said, watching the batter bubble, his hair sticking up at the back.

‘Did you sleep up here?’ She looked around for a perspiring tent, for a car. Found only a rolled-up double swag on the ground like a second log.

Rhett nodded. ‘Though I didn’t actually sleep. The house . . . I don’t know. I get the shivers sometimes. So I shut the blinds and windows. Don’t know half the time if I’m locking myself in or closing something else out.’

She knew that feeling, curling up under the covers only to realise that you were wrapped up tight around the very thing that was killing you.

‘I prefer it up here, where the only ghosts are the trees creaking.’

‘I find the trees lonely,’ she said. Day pinked in the distance, fog lifting.

He almost smiled. She almost smiled back. The moment balanced between them like a seesaw, neither rising nor falling, but hovering motionless. They waited to see who would drop first.

‘I’d still rather sleep inside,’ she said, sitting down on the log.

‘You can have my house.’

‘I miss your house.’

He glanced over and there was a flicker in his eyes.

‘Nothing’s changed,’ he said.

‘You mean, you haven’t changed.’

He sat beside her and it felt to her as if it were the first time he’d ever looked at who she’d become. This woman: long and brown and irreverent, with a bit of sleep still in her eyes, last night’s knickers beneath her jeans and a noose of grief. Those tough eyes were blue, but they gave and took life on a regular basis.

He saw that she’d seen him seeing her and looked away. Lifted the frying pan and flipped his wrist, let the pancake belly-flop, batter spraying the sides. Then up to the new morning. ‘Fog’s nearly gone,’ he said.

They shared pancakes smeared with butter and strawberry jam; ate them folded over in their hands, still burning. They didn’t talk about last night or about Joe. It was as if this were the first time they had seen each other all week. Lucetta felt new heat in a circle under her belly button.

She shifted down to the ground, her head resting on the log, looked out over the glowing valley. Let her eyes slow. She noticed, peeking beneath lowered lids, how when he thought she was sleeping he extracted a roll of newsprint from his pack. How he knelt, privately, as if praying, leaning over the log, the local paper spread out on the ground.

She watched him through slitted eyes and it was a curious, private, intimate thing. To watch somebody read. The way he kept touching his chin, brushing the pad of his thumb over the knuckle-long scar, a pink moon he claimed he got from falling off some rocks when he was eleven, where the bristles wouldn’t grow. His toes turned in to each other, pushing into the dirt, his thumb and index finger pulling at the skin of his neck, and the way his eyes moved over the black words. He yanked his jumper over his head. His arms brown, with the golden down of goose chill. She thought to herself that he was just a boy caught in a beard. He was still eleven somewhere.

Then she dozed. She dreamed.

Later, when she looked back, it was the dream that changed things; that began it all. The slow relinquishing.

She dreamed a room like clouds, edges indistinct. A glazed, languid space and she and Rhett, close, in intimate, whispered confidence. They’d made love, she sensed.

She woke to a small tornado of wind, dirt blowing into her mouth. Opened her eyes, embarrassed, wiped lips. Found his Driza-Bone laid over her and Rhett securing an assortment of things (swag, pan, fishslice, bowl) to his horse with a cradle of rope.

‘See, you can sleep outside.’

‘It was nice.’

‘You were talking.’

She blushed. ‘I do that. What’d I say?’

‘You said, “You know what the problem is?” And I said, “No, Lucetta, what’s the problem?” And you said, “I tell you what to do and you don’t do it, that’s the problem.”’

‘Oh god, I didn’t.’

‘That’s why I’m packing up. I’m outta here.’ His eyes stony, serious. But her face was so sweet in quick humiliation, in its unexpected panic, that he couldn’t help but grin. ‘Actually, I made that up.’

‘You dickhead.’ She laughed. How easy sleep made things. The way you woke from a dream changed, so that when you next saw the person they seemed so much more familiar to you. She wanted to reach out, to graze fingers over the lifted hairs on his forearm. She wanted to touch something old in him; all that had passed between them. She had no brother. He was the closest thing she had to a brother.

‘A girl really did once say that to me in her sleep. The affair was already doomed, but.’

Lucetta stretched, handed his coat back. ‘Your pancakes put me to sleep.’

She wanted to seal this meeting with something significant. Not games. She kept looking at him, even as he mounted Billy, even as she called Paris and hooked her leg over, even as they descended the hill towards the three hushed houses.

What did she expect? She was still weak with dream. It was as if this hill existed out of time, and as earth’s mossy, rock-strewn steeple, had hosted their reunion, allowed a small intimacy to break through the crust of their ten-year silence. She didn’t know what would happen when they reached the bottom of it, but she wanted him to turn, to tilt his head, his eyes delighting in her form, the very way of her, and say that all that had been wrong was gone.

Instead, Rhett put his hand up, jolted horse to stillness. Rhett and Billy and Scout, six ears twitching.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Shhh . . .’ He listened, and then kept moving.

‘What was it?’

‘A tinkling, a bell. I realised it’s the little clasp on your bracelet,’ he said. ‘And Billy’s hoof cracking a stick, a skink running under a rock . . . your mother talking to the bird, hello, darling, dogs barking . . . I hear too much.’ He sighed.

‘So, what now?’

‘You know . . . the whole wide world going on without us.’

It was as if his face had been carved in the last second before he completed his smile, unsung; the deep, curved lines from his nose to the edges of his mouth like the ‘s’ on a violin.

‘You said “us”,’ she said, and felt the goose bumps it brought.

He looked at her then at the ground, as if shy, dug his heels into his horse’s ribs. ‘I’m really sorry about Joe,’ he said softly.

Then clicked his tongue, blurred down the hill.

CHAPTER 18

HAZEL WOKE HUNG OVER. She had been dreaming that she was drinking the lake. She remembered last night, the glittering moonlight, the snails, Rhett stepping back from her, and groaned.

She dressed and tucked her hair into a scarf. When she put on her shoes, the dog jumped up from the floor, stretched long and yawned, went to wait by the door.

She watched the sun push its head out from under the horizon, just a glimmer she could touch almost, finger extended. She saw the far eastern shore of the lake, how it curved away out of sight and continued over a rise of gum trees and beckoned. She would follow that left curve around to where the southern outskirts of the old town once lay.

She got in the car and followed the back roads on the map until she found it.

Esme had called this part of the lake Springwood Bay. She suggested that it was particularly good for hunting treasure.

Hazel got out of the car. With a swollen pop, like a baby being born red-hot from pale thighs, the sun expanded itself into the sky.

Over the lake, sky and sun became one.

The water, Esme explained last night, had spilled over the edges of the creek bed, slowly spread like a blanket, deepening and creeping over the vast, sleeping Eucumbene Valley.

The paddocks disappearing. The farms, the orchards and all of the gardens. The foundations of shifted houses. Hearthstones. Slab floors. Squares of rooms, not just empty, but gone altogether. For a short time, there were markings on the ground, there were inscriptions, a calligraphy of lives, before they too shimmered under plates of water and vanished.

As the water rose, the valley divided into things that swam and things that sank: mailboxes, sheds, windmills and machinery rusted like the hulls of ships beneath the water. Rig wheels, feed bins, carts, watering cans, wagons, empty barrels, sewing dummies, garden chairs, and the occasional bicycle wheel drifted.

Still, the water kept coming. Wooden fences were rulers that marked the depths, while water tanks, full of air, were forced suddenly upwards through the swill, and bobbed like silver buoys on the surface.

Quietly, at night, people heard it skulking nearer, a soft steady gurgle, closer and closer. The sound itself was enough to drive out snakes and lizards from the tussock, skating over the ground, seeking safety higher up the hill.

Main Street lapped up. The road that had carried a hundred years of horses and carts, the dirt criss-crossed with the strange alphabet of habitation, motion, of hooves, ski-marks, sulkies and car tyres. The wooden planks that said City Bank, that said Post Office. All swallowed.

The trees held up longer, Esme had said. As if on tiptoe, holding their heads above water. Hoping somebody would save them.

Now, near Hazel, a whole forest of drowned trees lined the shore. She and Josie strolled and Hazel located by way of wandering fingers old knife gouges on some of the petrified trunks. New wood had grown over these gashes; until the names were brailled, part-tree, but still legible. Cuneiforms of another time nearly faded under keyholes of blue, the gatherings of shadow.

The sludge was a haven of driftwood, old bits of crockery and warped metal. She found and wrenched from the shore a tiny square bottle that might erase all fear if it weren’t filled with sand, a bent fork and several more shards of glazed pottery.

Holding the pieces in her hand Hazel sat on a stone and looked out over the vast, cold plains of stone and bone and mud and water. The lake shimmered, a pale mint in a giant marble palm. The creases of hills beyond, the fingertips of distant mountains.

She continued wandering down the shore, along the sandy, shale-lined base of a gummed hill, among the old trees. For a second she shed whatever it was – heaviness, a chill – that was hurting. There was clarity to the air, the sky; the whole world of light.

She stripped her clothes off then, shedding skins, crossed the shale, and waded into the water. It was freezing, but her body, having grown up swimming in cold lakes, quickly adjusted. She floated over Adamindumee, the Aboriginal name that meant ‘resting place’, under a sky blown out with new blue morning. She might have been working, but she was resting too. From the demands of love.

Hazel floated on her stomach with the dragonflies, her arms yellow fish under the murky water, paddling back and forth. It was as if she were flying, yet when she compared her distance against the shore, she realised she had only simulated movement, her brain tricking her into a false feeling of progress, nothing more.

On the shore, Josie sat like a stern brown Buddha, like a mother, eyes fixed on Hazel’s bobbing back.

A water-hugging breeze rubbed the rippled surface, rubbing up all that old water, the smell of lakes, childhood lakes.

She was balancing over whole lives trashed, dug up, forcibly extracted. She put her face under the surface of the water and wondered how something that had been so painful to others could be such a source of joy to her. ‘To the householder . . . We regret to inform you that we will be flooding your town . . .’ Little did they know, when they changed the name from Seymour to Adaminaby in 1886, what a resting place it would end up becoming. In her trove of facts unearthed from Burchill’s tip (as if whole worlds were stored in the lean of his nose), a lone sentence haunted her: ‘Thousands of years of Aboriginal history were also lost beneath the waters.’

On command, three bubbles floated up, the golden gas of life from beneath the water, microbial. Or maybe just a lungful from hungry ghosts.

She had a thought that her exhibition could simply be an abandoned house, or just a room, if she couldn’t get a whole house. The empty room, the worn boards, the old fireplace, and on the floor, so you had to squat down to see it (although not so good for the old people, of which she imagined there’d be many – perhaps set alone on a wooden table instead?) would be a scrapbook in which all the bits of lives had been somehow catalogued, preserved by family, by hand, by glue stick. Like the photograph she had lifted at random from the junk on Burchill’s lounge room floor: a blurry black and white house in the middle distance, lost in a field of long grass. The house was already deserted against the sky, all the shutters undone.

Inside, she imagined wooden floors softened under years of bare feet, crooked planks warmed by sun streaming through the bubbled glass, flooding through the open door. On the back of the photograph, a scribble: ‘1956. The last time I saw my house.’

She knew that a flooded house would not fill like a bath, how beneath the water, a person’s skin seemed bloated and yellow, hands clutching, she imagined, at things that once stayed put. Instead, a life drowns in dreamtime, in the slow second between an inhalation and an exhalation.

Regret: a longing for somebody or something that is no longer there . . .

Hazel splashed back into gravity, back to her own waiting, belly-wet Buddha. She dried herself with the scarf from her hair, put on her clothes, and scoured the shore. Clambered like a child in the hot wind through the eerie grove of trees. Pretended she was the last person left on earth.

She sat again and soon noticed a letter chiselled into one of the flat, white rocks near the edge of the water, among the old tree trunks. A deep, well-shaped ‘T’. She slipped a finger beneath the dried-out moss that covered the rock and felt the notches. She recognised two ‘T’s first and then, on her knees, she peeled off the mat of dead leaves and moss, ammonia-rich dirt rising up, filament of root. Felt archaeological.

The rock was really a set of three stone steps that must have once led up to a house, but now only seemed to take you down into the water. It was one of these steps that had been carved with the deep, even letters.

It didn’t take long to scrape the stone clean.

She jumped back when she read it. The slab of moss flew out of her hand. She looked around. It was too weird, as if she were being watched.

I LOVE YOU LUCETTA

So everybody had once loved the girl next door.

Danny had a game he used to play. On those nights when the waves and the sea and the cliff winds wouldn’t die down and Hazel paced the flat in panics of task, or lack of time, or the less frequent but no less dismantling ship of moods she named my lament (she felt sure the moan of the winds outside was all her own), Danny, without speaking, would pull her into the hallway, and down the flights of steps, push her through the foyer door and carry her across the street to the park by the cliff. There he’d instruct her to remove her shoes, her socks, her jumper, regardless of weather or season. He’d kneel down and roll up her jeans and then, under the moth-bitten lights, under a fat moon, he’d instruct her to dance on the wet grass, while he danced too, lifting his knees and swaying from side to side, saying, Doesn’t it feel perfect? Hazel would swish her feet in the cool wet green and wish in that moment for no other life but the one she had.

In love. In laughing love with the night and this mad boy.

She imagined Danny in front of her now, his hair a black tangle in the wet. C’mon, he urged her. Come on out. Put your head back, that’s it, feel it. What is a life for, anyway? C’mon, dig your toes in, let it in, let it in . . .

I am.

I am.

*

When Hazel pulled up outside her shack later that morning, hair still damp, she saw up on the hill behind the three houses the gallop of two horses, one brown, one white, a gap between them that she could measure with one hand lifted: Rhett at her wrist, coming down fast, thumb-side. Lucetta was about to trot over the nails of Hazel’s fingers, tracing the pinkie, going the other way, her hair let loose.

She could hear Byrne with her big white cockatoo, coaxing him out for corn, hello, darling.

On the abandoned hill, the last of the fog threaded and spread skyward. A portrait: a man, a woman and their horses. Caught in oils of motion.

So it is.

She mounted the steps, banged on Byrne’s door. Through the verandah screens, Hazel could see Rhett and his horse disappear behind his house. Lucetta reached his front yard, was gazing in his direction. Then she yanked back on the reins, the horse’s top lip lifted, all teeth, and its head turned quickly. Spurring the ribs, the horse turned on its haunches, and they took off behind Rhett’s twelve-windowed house.

It was Lucetta’s absolute impulsiveness that struck Hazel the hardest; a dazed recklessness that could mean only one thing. But she admired her anyway, for her bravery.

Byrne answered the door. ‘Oh, Hazel . . .’ She let her in.

‘I’m not interrupting?’ Hazel untied her shoes.

‘I just got back from picking up Auntie from the Benbows’. She wouldn’t leave with Lucetta, for some reason.’

The kitchen smelled of toast. Hazel noticed a Post-it note stuck to the fridge with a little drawing on it, like a cartoon: an upside-down two-litre water bottle with a little door cut into it; a beer chamber, with a snail sliding closer: Snail Ale, it said. Various parts of the drawing were labelled: water bottle, snail, beer, dead snail.

‘She met an old friend,’ Hazel explained. ‘They knew each other up in the Snowy Mountains. I got the impression it was a romance, maybe.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, Hazel, not Auntie.’

Hazel was led to the dark bedroom where Esme lay in her pink sheets, breathing hotly.

‘Auntie, Hazel is here to see you.’

Esme’s eyes fluttered open. She put a hand over her mouth, mumbling.

‘Just a minute, Hazel,’ Byrne said. ‘She’s got to put her teeth in.’

Hazel waited in the corridor.

They sat on the back verandah near Esme’s room. The black cat wove through their legs desperately.

‘Will you tell me about the Snowy Mountains, Esme?’ Hazel asked her.

Esme took Hazel’s hand in hers.

How was Esme to face the soft being that flowed out from her, an old self nudging aside all the sunlight suddenly flooding the verandah?

‘I can hear Minnie sometimes,’ Esme began. ‘Visiting me in heavy winds. Raising the hairs on the back of my arms . . .’ She gazed out towards the lake. ‘I can hear them sometimes, Esme, Esme, calling. Remember me, they say. But when I turn, nobody is ever there.’

CHAPTER 19

HE WAS SQUATTING WITH his back to the gate when she arrived, moments after their hilltop breakfast, his head tilted, dark hair dented from the rim of his hat, eyes half-closed in pleasure, a lazy smile, rubbing his nose against Billy’s muzzle. For a second, he felt happy.

He leaned in, touched the long scar above the horse’s straight, full black lips. It matched the scar on his own chin. This was something he did when he thought nobody was looking. But Billy was looking; he was looking up, distracted.

What Rhett heard was this: quick trot through the back gate, the exhalation of Paris, the thump of dirt as Lucetta’s feet hit the earth, the rub of jeans high between her thighs, her breath coming closer. All of this took four seconds maybe, not more.

Rhett stood, turning his head, and found Lucetta’s face leaning towards him, her cheeks red with exertion, exhilaration, her eyes closed, her lips opening. He realised this was the expression he had seen when she was sleeping on the hill, her lips pushed out as if kissing an invisible face.

He felt Lucetta pressing against him full and wet and hard on the mouth, and his own lips couldn’t help themselves, parting to let her in.

Their tongues met. His spine elongated with desire, pulling her to him, feeling his hands span her waist, the arch of her spine, marvelling, this child, woman, child, woman, Lucetta. All at once.

Before he tasted the salt on her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry . . .’ She was trying to hold back tears. ‘I haven’t kissed anybody . . .’

He put his arms around her, his heart thumping, let her head fall into the groove of his neck. But the pull in his gut was abrupt, to get away, though something about her pain was also so compelling.

Her whole body sobbing then, relief and old grief, because that, unfortunately, was what love was to her: a cobblestone street under her bare feet, soothing and jabbing her soles simultaneously against the knuckles of rock. It could not be simple by definition – love, entwined forever with loss.

He remembered his mother quoting somebody or other: ‘Every disease is a musical problem. Its cure, a musical solution.’ Sadness could be a sickness, especially if kept at bay.

‘The month before he died,’ she said, ‘we went ballooning. In Canberra, for his birthday. It was, like, five in the morning and we watched this huge orange sheath filling with helium, like an egg growing upwards. Then I couldn’t believe I was in the sky, in a basket. The sun coming up beneath us . . . There was a flash of pink in the photo I took . . . like something new had been alchemised.’

She started crying again. Closed her eyes, tilted her head away, neck outstretched, as if her sorrow were a bad child she had to stop herself from smacking.

‘I took a photo of Joe, in that hot-air balloon, with the mountains in the background.’

She wiped her eyes, over and over, though they kept refilling.

‘For months after he died I kept repeating this thing. Your mother said it to me: “When it’s dark enough, you can see the stars.” It probably sounds stupid.’

‘No.’ Nobody, except his mother, had ever said so much to him before. He felt agitated. Sadness was dissolving him.

‘At night, the moon reflects on my bedroom wall,’ she continued, ‘coming through the windmill blades. I keep thinking it’s like this door I need to enter, the next step, you know? It’s easy enough to close yourself off from everything. But to go through . . . I just wish I could stop it turning long enough to climb through.’

He reached out to stroke her leg. She looked down at his hand. He realised it was instinctively gliding towards her thigh. He moved it away.

All he could hear was his mother’s voice instructing him, ‘Women like men who remember the little phrases that please them, not just where they like to be touched.’

But he had lost his ability to respond.

‘Do you want to sit down?’ He needed to sit. He was sweating. He wanted to take off his shirt as well, but he felt it would be inappropriate. ‘I need to sit.’ He plonked himself onto the dirt. Let the earth hold him up, because his legs and voice were failing him.

Lucetta kneeled, facing him. He found himself staring at the long curve of her neck. His mouth so parched, suddenly, it hurt.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Left a sweet smear of dirt across her cheek. ‘Tell me a story,’ she said.

‘Like what?’ His mind was blank.

She lay down with her head in his lap. ‘Anything.’

He shifted her head slightly and pulled her to his chest instead. ‘There was a girl born with one good eye and one bad eye . . .’

Since all he knew of story or music or prayer he knew from his mother, he started to recite a story she had told him often; one of her moral fables for children, one of her horsetails. He thought it right because, at the moment, he felt both old and so young.

‘The good eye was blue and blinking but saw that everything was bad, everything was sad in the world. The bad eye was blue and blind, but the girl pretended she could see out of it just fine, for she was sure if she gave away her secret, no man would ever love her.’

As he had lifted this story from the old mud under the lake, as he had lifted it from the throat of his mother, the story was just a continuation of the music he now sensed between them.

Lucetta raised her head to him as he spoke. She squinted in the sudden marvel of light, a new world made on the morning she stepped through time and found Rhett on the other side.

FLOOD
1957

FROM A DISTANCE, the houses look like snails sliding across the winter land. The year’s first thump of June snow has melted, leaving slush, then two-foot ruts of black, wet mud. The procession is slow, everything is rainwet, is mudsoft and so slow, while the pines creak and groan in sad green huddles at the edge of the dismantled town.

In 1956, when they began to shift it, it took six days to move the first house and the children had stood by the side of the road and waved while, on the verandah, the first wife prayed as the telephone lines scraped by, taking off a chunk of weather board or two, and the men slipped around outside in their gumboots brandishing measuring tapes and rulers, calculating the inches needed to pass through. The house had bounced and banged through the tyre tracks, over creaky culverts, past the old hawthorn hedges. Inside, the furniture was strapped to the walls, the china wrapped in calico and paper inside trunks and boxes – and thank goodness, because it seemed she couldn’t stop the teacup she held up for the reporters’ flashbulbs from rattling violently against the saucer in her hand.

It’s a common sight now, the houses jacked up from the old foundations, lifted on steel girders onto the long backs of Fraser’s trucks; the bank safe on a hanging winch off the back of a pickup, the weight tipping the truck up on its hind wheels like a dog begging as it creeps down Denison Street. Abandoned black chimneys are scattered like stone soldiers throughout the town, places where steps that once took you homeward now only lead you three steps skyward and air-ward and down. The houses have been slowly ascending the hill, rocking up and down the red-brown roads all year, past the dull grey fields, the wet mud fields, the snowfields, past the wildflower-and-granite-strewn fields, the sheep-grazing fields and, finally, bringing billows of summer’s dust that rises in clouds and obscures the houses, making them seem as if they’ve fallen from some transient, misplaced tornado in the sky. Now it is winter again, and they are still lumbering, inching forward or backwards on the same long five-mile trek across the Great Dividing Range, settling themselves into the farmer’s field that will become their new town. They have to keep moving before the rising water reaches them.

***

The eagle crouches over the fleck of green-grey flesh, its wings folded velvet, but capable of all sorts of crushings. It beaks down over the gravel road and holds the mangled head to the ground with its pronged, clawed feet, bites down into the white amphibian belly. It lifts the heavy, arched-back weight of the dead gecko in its jaw and thrashes off good wet chunks of meat.

Down the road, a dozen small birds feast on the bits of splayed leg meat that first lured the eagle to the crossing. The air is loud with scramble and suck, and frost whispers as day wakes from its grass-bladed beds. The pickup truck rises over the hillock, its red roof still head-dressed with frost’s elaborate feathers, and it seems to those pink birds that the vehicle in the distance is just a new manifestation of dust, the churning swell of dark dust. There is no snow yet, but Hortense can see it painted across the peaks of the distant mountains, high up where her daughter works.

By the time Hortense reaches the crest of the hill and sees the eagle, it is already looking right at her. It straightens up, drops the lizard and stares. It’s the beauty of that bird, the muscular, feathered bulk of him, but, too, the feeling that something’s being given in the eye to eye between them, and if she doesn’t screw it up there’ll be more of what’s good about it to be had. The key, she thinks, is to hold the look; to keep everything moving just as it is, so that as she gets closer by way of truck, the eagle’s eye will come closer too, and with it the force of being wrung out completely by the bird’s stare. That’s what flying might mean, she thinks. All of this in the bird’s look and Hortense ploughing straight for it.

At the last second, the eagle lifts its wings. The cold July current captures it, carries it straight over the bonnet of the truck in a single graceful leap and uncoils it back down on the other side in the wake of dust where, thoroughly finished with her, it continues to gnaw its feast. She keeps driving; she keeps looking back in the rear-view mirror thinking how forces come at you like that, land beaked and watching from the middle of the highway, and how you can’t get around them, must plough through or step back and let them have their way, so when she finally gets back to looking where she’s going again it’s the huddle of pink birds circling and lifting and landing she’s about to hit. Jesus. She presses the heel of her hand to the horn. Rack off. The toot that replies does not carry enough gravitas to inspire the moment or any movement in the birds. She wants a real horn; a foghorn capable of sending the ships of the world to sail, a burly, drawn-out throat of a sound.

The birds finally swoop and scatter across the road in filaments of pink just as the red bonnet lurches out from its pale halo of dust and bangs into them. She clocked three, she thinks, on the edge of her front fender. She brakes through the floor and the truck skids to a stop. The glass bottles of crated milk in the back rattle and a few bags of potatoes thump over, scattering across the tray. Bloody galahs. She opens the door and jumps down. Thuds dirt. She can still make out the eagle just up the hill and, at her feet, in the dust, the beating pink and white fist of a bird on its side, all but dead in the middle of the road, bleeding from just below the right wing.

She finds a rock in the ditch. When she first strikes the bird, the wing spreads, and what had been so perfectly folded into itself like an accordion of paper flutters, and rises up.

The eagle looks back once. Sees her hand rising and falling, rising and falling over the head of the bird.

***

You’d never think you could get so sick to death of babies. Everywhere babies popping like kernels of corn from seed. The yowl and screech of new babies hung upside down and spanked in the lamplight. The room warm with wood stove and urine and screeching. The wet towels steaming up the room and, through the window, a frost a finger can’t poke through. Esme can’t wipe away the cold wet day, nor wipe the red-faced screaming that stops only with her special tight wrap, the swag-wrap she’s perfected to keep the babies quiet but still breathing. She tells herself this now and keeps her eye from landing on the soft glad song of two in the bed beneath her, the happy naked sucking that quiets the room to such stillness it irks her. She’s used to assisting the doctor with needles and towels and, sometimes, when the doctor’s busy, delivering the babies herself. She’s used to sponging the blood and wrapping the child and being the first to touch its warm form before whisking it off to the room they use as a nursery while the new mother recovers in sleep. She makes the formula, she bottle-feeds; she is the touch that silences the need. But today’s patient, this mother-to-be, screamed and growled, refused both forceps and anaesthetic and insisted on pushing the head out of her body on the back of her own grunt alone.

Mother and son were now all mouth and nipple.

Esme had done her thing, there was only the sound of hungry love and blood to wipe up from the floor and the damp, grungy towels to boil and stir with her long wooden spoon and hang squeezed on the snowy hoist out back. They’ll be frozen solid within the hour. The blowing wind will grab them like wooden planks, then turn them to sharp weapons that can knock a person out cold. A person would freeze where they fell in the hour it would take for somebody in the steamy, happy house to hear their garbled cries.

Esme hauls the towels up in a heap and feels like crying now. Maybe she’s just tired. It has been a long night. This young Mrs Nagy didn’t speak any English and she kicked and squirmed like a rabbit held by the scruff in mid-air, and it seemed that the idea of a peaceful birth in a clean white place with only the first cry of a child to break the focus was impossible up here in this mountain town, where everybody arrives with different ideas on how best to come into the world. As she leaves the room Esme glances back once and regrets it instantly; thinks for sure she’s turning to salt. The young woman’s hair is still wet with sweat and it falls across her cheeks but she’s glowing with thick, hot peace. She doesn’t seem at all put out by what she’s just been through. Esme, on the other hand, is knackered, defeated, as if thumped in the guts.

Thirty have been born at the tiny, housebound health clinic already since the last winter turn. Happy Jacks camp has only eighty couples but they are rabbit couples and spend so many days of the week apart that they rabbit in extra measures on Sundays. After church, if they are god-inclined, they must take to the sheets with their good socks still on. If they aren’t god-inclined, they pray on an altar of skin, limb to limb under the eiderdown. Because the men’s and women’s days apart are spent not just in simple separation but with extra dread tacked on, the fear that absence will stretch to forever during the time it takes the women to shovel and trudge a snow trail from house to Hills hoist; in the time it takes for the men to reach the face of the dark tunnel and blast out of mountain rock a new world record and return in one seamless piece, or at least with all the major bits intact, and scrawl the shift’s mileage on the chalkboard at the entrance.

Nights when Esme is quiet before sleep drift, when the wind sleeps in the snow drifts, she swears she can hear, carried on the back of snow, the sweet squeak and music of bedsprings from the wooden houses nearby, the men from the barracks half a mile away sneaking over and bedding down with the other staff nurses in the next rooms. She can hear the making of babies.

She had begun her midwife training at twenty-one, when it was clear to all involved that the cinema was not where her destiny lay. For the first year, Esme and the other trainees worked without pay, bought their own uniforms, suffered the hierarchies. Now she’s good at running Happy Jacks’ clinic and helping the doctor coax the wet heads of newborns from the darkness. How cold the air must feel on entering it for the first time. How cold this Snowy Mountains winter morning with the temperature somewhere below zero. How overwhelmed with light and glare. Her own mother was born in a tent in Kiandra, during the middle of winter, on 8 August 1900. Esme thinks about that a lot. How fearless and strong her grandmother must have been to bare her nether regions to the frost. And her tiny mother, too, even then so sea-snake-tough, to splash down naked into a bed of snow. Esme watches as women lie on that table and go to sleep and come to with a new soft, pulsing being in their arms and can’t imagine the shove from within, the thud of pressing like a grape drained of wine.

Esme likes the fact that you can wash the milk bottles out afterwards. At the end of the day, she walks away, she returns to her room in the women’s barracks. She uses her secret, single gas burner to make a boiled egg; then uses the hot water for a cup of black tea.

But she knows, of course, there’ll never be an operating table for her to lie down on until first there is a bed. That’s the bit you can’t get around, unfortunately. The mating problem. That’s the bit that’s recently caused a new sadness to set in. A resentment of all the life-bringing work she does. She’d always thought she’d be a mother by now. That she’d have her own screeching to silence.

Esme sits in the first hot taste of her tea contentment, leaves the shell of her egg in ruptured pieces on her lap. She can hear the other nurses chattering in the next room. She smells the oily burn of hot rollers. Only a thin wall separates her from the daily snow of gossip. This week’s green green lashes and fingernail fashion of Genevieve Deerworth. The tunneller at Cabramurra gone insane, shooting out the lights in the wet canteen with a pistol. The girls snigger for the maleness of it. All that hot heat of lonely men bursting at the seams.

Esme supposes it’s still possible, but babies are a game of odds at best, and at this rate she is losing. She’s thirty-five. She tells herself it doesn’t matter when she still feels twenty-four. But there is, for instance, the matter of the new white spiral emerging from the thick dark mound that has not yet been given a proper airing. It was like digging through brush to find it, but in the light there was no mistaking it: her first grey pubic hair. Already the occasional white thread has begun coiling out from her bun in wayward curls and she plucks them at the root and holds them up to the light as if better to witness her actual demise (who’d ever think; really, who can believe it?). Okay, her head maybe, but the pubis? Oh, not yet. She’s not ready yet for that kind of withering.

But she knows how things can come upon you suddenly. Who would have thought five years ago that she’d be working to help make such a brave, wondrous thing as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme come true? It had hardly existed five years ago and she’d been ensnared in her hawthorn town planning other directions for her life. Now she’s helping to achieve the future prosperity and defence of their growing nation, as she likes to tell her family. Harnessing the mountains and the snowmelt for the sake of the whole country. The war might be over but the new enemy is drought! Her mother is never moved by her rhetoric. All she ever says is: ‘My daughter, the pamphleteer.’

But Esme can see how fast things are changing, even in the three years since the new Queen Elizabeth was here. No longer does it seem that they’re living in ‘regions of vast distances and great loneliness’, as the Queen said. In the cities they might still be waving the British flag (and Esme is rather partial to the lovely young Queen herself; she even still has somewhere her grandmother’s old newspaper cuttings from the coronation of George VI, all the coaches and horses she’d loved as a child), but high up in the mountains the flags they wave are those that will make a new Australia. Up here in makeshift towns cut into the mountainside, they’re walking free of their fixedness; they’re plunging weightlessly into the future.

She takes her tea to the window and, as if talking to all the naysayers in her head, trying desperately to explain all that they’ll never understand about hope, gestures out the window as if to prove her point. There’s a whole continent of nationalities up here. But the only flag she can see flying under the cloud-dark sky is the bright, rippling Yankee Doodle Dandy belonging to the new contractors, brought in to oversee the next tunnelling project.

***

They call Hortense the milk lady, thank god for the milk lady, because the people in Cooma North were getting desperate there for a spell. Hortense doesn’t think she’s doing anything so exceptional. She’s entirely entrepreneurial by nature and could always spot an easy shilling. And she likes to drive, so the whole lot suits her to a tee. Bolt up in the arctic dark, milk the girls (when she’s tired she rests her head on their warm, gurgling bellies and remembers she’s alive), bottle the suds and head out before the sun burns up over the far, snow-tipped ranges. Some days she brings potatoes or carrots from the garden as well. They say there’s a war going on between the old residents of Cooma and the new Snowy Authority people taking over the town. Hortense couldn’t care less, but she’s making a fair buck off the rift. She knows the shopkeepers won’t serve the Snowy staff at all, or make them wait in a queue for hours while they chat up the locals.

Nobody wants to sell them milk? Why, Hortense will step right on in, thanks. She’ll wind around the streets of new pre-fab houses, some with the front steps still missing, but with rows of rose-thorny branches in heaped up dirt mounds; will stop outside each house, leave the engine chugging and carry the bottles right to the front porch. Hort’s own personal touch. Like the name of one of those fancy tinned lotions and potions you can buy at the chemist. Hort’s Own, she could call it. Could make a bloody fortune. During the war she had strapped crates of chooks to the running boards of her old charabanc, sold hens and warm eggs to the Cooma shops. One week she exchanged a dozen eggs and six silkies for a small vial of beauty serum that seemed to be half drippings and slid over her skin like she’d been greased up, and that night Jack said, ‘What’s the stink?’. So that was the end of that. The charabanc, busted up now in her back paddock (bless her soul), had so many seats she doubled as a kind of elegant bus to town and back. She carted mail or goods and kids to school and all the gossip from Cooma to Adaminaby a couple of times a week and loved every minute of it.

The empty crates shift in the back of the Chevy as she slides over the mud ruts, and the potato sack flaps under the tyre iron. The wind picks up. Ahead on the road where the eagle had been is a stopped cart, tilted off into the ditch, gold letters pencilled across its side: SWAN’S SADDLERY. Hortense slows and pulls alongside. The cart is open, two wooden flaps swung out on each side, the bottom flap forming a plank bench and the top flap propped up like a display awning with a bit of wood. A variety of whips and leather pouches swing in the wind.

Inside the saddlery cart, a man’s life and swag. A half-finished whip lies braided on the ditch-side bench. It slides incrementally towards the edge because of the wind and the tilt of the cart. A short, soft-hatted young man stands with his back to the cart and the road, and for a moment Hortense thinks he’s taking a piss. Out in the field beyond, some men are burning a dead cow. Its black body gives off a red glow and choking smoke that spirals up into the sky and seems to melt into and colour the day.

‘Owen?’

The man turns, gripping a slender paintbrush, and Hortense sees that his bulk had been hiding an easel and a small square canvas, heaped with thick smears of oils: a paddock, a second black burning cow, bit of sky.

He gestures at the canvas with an embarrassed shrug, like it’s a child having a tantrum. ‘Having trouble with the sky here.’

‘Yep. Gunna snow,’ she says, looking up at the black clouds, a long wedge of dark hovering over the gravel road.

‘Just hope I can get it to snow in here before it snows on me and the whole lot runs off the edges.’ He regards his painting, steps back an inch and then leans closer, frowning.

‘Bruce Davys’ wife Alesandra stops every hour to take a photograph of her pots so that later she can see exactly at what point she messed up. Expensive exercise.’

‘I’m just dragging my feet.’ He nods towards a heap of saddles awaiting their mend. ‘I’ll have my own shopfront in the new town. More respectable, I guess.’

‘Don’t sound too excited, either.’

‘Strange times, these.’

‘They say there’ll be modern amenities.’

‘I’m happy just fine with my amenities here. Stove, water tap, elec-tric-ity, picture window.’ He points respectively to the billy on a kindling fire, his canteen, the sad sun’s glow behind dirty cloud and the forever-humped hills. ‘Mother said this is the last time I’ll have to work from a cart. That insipid cart, she said, more precisely.’ He sighs.

‘Owen, you’re what, in your mid-thirties? And you’re still talking about your mum. When are you going to settle down?’

‘Mrs Windle, with all due respect, I like to play my violin at midnight.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Not many women are partial to that kind of interruption to their beauty sleep.’

‘Well, you should come by some night for tea, and play for us. Esme’s a good cook.’

He nods, but swerves away.

‘I heard they want to charge you five hundred quid for some little lump of land?’ he asks.

Hortense shrugs. ‘Doesn’t matter. I’m not moving. They’ll have to carry me off if they want me to go. Sara too. She says she’s gunna barricade herself behind her roses.’

Actually, Sara joked that she was going to moor a boat by the front door and when the town is flooded and the water reaches her door the boat will rise to the second floor of her house and she’ll climb out the bedroom window and row away forever. Hortense doesn’t think it a bad plan either. The Snowy Mountains Authority had offered to purchase Hort’s forty acres for five hundred and sixty quid, which she was rather thrilled about until they told her a new house in town would set her back a further five hundred. Now she and Sara insist on believing that if they refuse to budge, the water won’t come at all and they’ll continue to cook on the open fire and power the radio by car battery and visit the river in summer and dance on Saturday nights. She’s not scared of the future; she’s just happy as an apple where she is. They predicted futurity, of course, those Authority-clad men in black suits. They used it to sell the idea of a new town to the people (though more of a hard pinch to the soft skin of the inner arm than a gentle persuasion, Hort thinks). They’d even printed an artist’s impression of what it would look like, with the words Adaminaby – in 1960? at the top of the picture. It was all wide paved streets and impressive stone buildings on the edge of the new lake, with sailboats everywhere and aeroplanes flying over to deliver important tourists to the steps of the big hotels. Some had said they’d even be able to fish from their bedroom doors.

‘What’s Jack say?’

‘Jack never was one for politicking. He’s got his hut up the mountain if he wants it, and all those lost cows sweetened with snow flower. He’ll be right.’

‘My old man always said that you needed a big heart, a damn good wife and at least a blunt axe if you even wanted to think about making a start up there.’

‘I’m still waiting for my wife.’ Hortense winks.

Owen laughs nervously.

***

Esme returns to the maternity ward to check on Mrs Nagy again, but both mother and baby have swum away in twinned sleep. She shuts the door, mops up on her hands and knees the water which had sloshed over the edges of the basin as she hurried from stove to birth room, leaves the wet towel in the sink and then reaches low into the box to retrieve the last wide, splintery chunk of good wood and shoves it onto the hot pink coals of the stove. She holds her hands open over the black range, lets the rising heat dry her palms and is tempted – in the way she likes to imagine all that is possible which she would never actually do (and this list is long) – to touch them down just to warm them through, press them to the iron top and really heat up her bones. Instead she does the opposite: steps away, rubbing her palms together to prolong the warmth, and pulls on her boots, bundles herself in coat and hat and tugs on gloves, thick, second skins that separate fingers and flesh like black puppets. I am gloved, she thinks. And sighs.

She heads out the back of the hospital barracks, and there, under the new sprinkle of snow, the cold soaking through her gumboots, Esme splits the wood with an axe. Thrumps it open at the heart. Watches it shatter and splinter and fall and takes in the quick scent of new wood released to the air like perfume. It’s Friday afternoon and there’s an eerie sluggishness to the air. The snow is sparse on the ground like marshmallow and chimneys already give off trails of pale blue smoke. The cold mountain wall towers over the town, a soaring patchwork of massed black treescape and scraps of snow. High up, sulphur-crested cockatoos scream, white tissues in drafts of air, over the trees, over the stripped-back red threads of the ribbon gums, like girls out after a night of dancing, coming home with dresses shredded.

A few of the other nurses catch up with Esme as she steers the wood-laden wheelbarrow back to the clinic.

‘Ez!’ Five flushed faces striding in gumboots, the black flapping of their long wool coats, hair pinned in close waves across their foreheads, breathless with the weekend’s proximity. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘I wasn’t positive. Mrs Nagy might need some looking in on later.’

Really, she thinks it’s a night for rugging up. The women’s barracks have no heaters, just hot water pipes along the ceiling, and Esme has plans to hunker down in the clinic by the wood stove, in case another baby wants to be born. There’s a full kitchen there and spare beds and she’s dreaming of loads of hot toast and beef stew with potato and cups of tea and a book maybe. There’s never time up here for a book.

‘Don’t be such a bore.’ The girls elbow her and wrestle the wheelbarrow from her grasp and wrap arms around her cold, thin shoulders. ‘It’ll be fun. We’ll take a tour of the new “supermarket”, how ’bout that? I know you’re desperate to see it. And Caitlin says she’s making Manhattans.’

‘I thought that was an island.’

‘She’s daft, isn’t she?’ Giggling. ‘Come on, it’s the Fourth of July.’

‘And yesterday was the third of July and tomorrow will be the fifth, don’t you reckon?’

‘The American holiday. They’ve built a whole new community hall with a stage, and dressing rooms and everything just to celebrate it in. And there’ll be ten blokes at least to every girl.’

Esme won’t admit it, but she’s a bit shy of Caitlin and the other American daughters and wives of the Kaiser contractors she works for. The company’s in charge of the Eucumbene tunnel and Adaminaby dam; Happy Jacks and the new township of Sue City, named after Edgar Kaiser’s wife, are their flag-fluttering home bases. She secretly dreams what it might be like to have the problem of self-love, to swan in cinch-waisted glory, carrying coffee or sherry and blue-iced cakes, wearing skirts that bang in hip fullness and a mouth painted cherry red and witticisms peeling off the lips like pearls.

Though Esme’s waist is trim, is taut and suitable for all the things she imagines a waist might be for, and her hips jut out in a hippy kind of way, and nobody can match her golf ball biceps from years of hauling towels and babies and buckets of water across blood-slick floors, though her smile can be full and generous when she’s disarmed, she knows the other nurses have better legs and feet, better breasts, better accoutrements all round for the luring of a mate. All she knows how to lure are fish and birds and newborn heads. She’ll never own a pair of red gloves or make perfect tuna fish salad or pencil her brows. But she loves the idea of a night out, a different misty street by moonlight, the new faces, warm faces in close exchange, in giddy flush of cocktail, rooms bannered in colour.

‘All right.’ She gives in reluctantly. ‘If you think the weather’ll hold.’

‘’Course it will. It’s the Fourth of July holiday! Caitlin says to think of it as summer.’

‘Mm-hmmm.’

‘The Americans know.’

‘Do they.’

‘Anyway, you really need to get out more, Ez.’

Yes, but she prefers to get out into the air and nail down misbehaving bits of tin on the roof or go tobogganing; prefers any day camping with her mum and sister – how all her childhood they’d just get in the car and drive somewhere and that would be a holiday. And the way they can fish side by side all quiet with each other yet somehow saying everything.

***

Hortense waits in the warm car and watches a white flecked line of convent school children in green-black tartan press forward up the hill, wavering like ants between the pines to church, passing the public school children in blue serge marching down. She can just make out among them Byrne’s little blonde shock of hair beneath her cap, one sock fallen. Below, the town flickers yellow and the slow rain has turned to snow. She loves the song of falling snow, with only short bursts of wind and the ringing of axe-song through the gloaming. And the smell of pine and gum and sweet smoke enough to choke you. They’ll have bread and honey and cream by the fire – she hopes Jack’s done the wood, built a big fire and isn’t already sunk on whisky. ’Cos if he is he’ll court her all night in swaying and Byrne will sulk in the corner, fair enough too.

‘Where’s my mum?’ Her granddaughter stands outside the driver’s door with her hands on her little hips, her skirt scrunched up, her legs goose-bumped. The wind pulls her hair up on either side of her cap in flipped curls. Her face all cheek, all pink with cold, her five-year-old blue eyes narrowed.

‘Good afternoon to you too, Byrne.’ Hortense leans over, unlatches the passenger door, and pushes it open. Byrne throws her bag in, crawls up; her boots stick out over the edge of the seat, she thumps them together, dislodging snow, lets the chugging, dusty heat swim up her skirt.

‘Your mum’s had to go to Cooma for the weekend. Unexpected. Says your dad’s still away with business, and she’s got some things to take care of, so you’ve got your old gran for a couple of days.’

‘Hmmmph.’

Hortense switches on her headlights but squints into the snow. It seems so dark suddenly, with the moon covered by cloud. She pulls onto the road, carefully snakes down the slow hill towards the valley and the blinking yellow town. Byrne’s mother had said she needed to go to Cooma for the afternoon on ‘business’ but Hortense is suspicious, since Pictoria’s never had a day of business to do in her life.

‘Grandpa Jack’s down too. It’ll be a cosy threesome round the fire. We’ll have breakfast for tea and a roast for breakfast and honey and bread all the rest.’

‘There’s a bonfire at the gravel pit tonight – we going?’

‘Whaddya reckon?’

Byrne shrugs. ‘Maybe . . .’

‘See how fast it’s coming down? This wet snow’ll put out the fire before one little miss can say Chev Bel Air.’

‘Chev –’ Byrne starts to say as they are plunged into sudden, spluttering road-black darkness.

‘What the hell?’ Hortense pumps the brakes, heart thumping, prays the truck doesn’t slide off the bend. Out the window, the snow glows and falls, glows and falls, and cloaks the humped shapes of hedge and tree in whiteness, but she sees no road she can follow. She flicks her lights on and off, but no light returns the greeting.

‘What’s wrong, Gran?’ Byrne asks.

‘Bloody wiring. Thought I had that all fixed up. Last week I turned on the windscreen wipers and the damn radio came on. So I got in under the bonnet, rewired the whole thing.’

‘Guess it didn’t work.’

‘Thank you very much, cheeky chops.’

‘How we gunna get home?’

‘Good thing your gran’s a bit clever and keeps a torch behind her seat.’ Hortense pulls out the square miner’s torch, flicks the switch and holds it under her chin, making wide red-skinned ghost faces at Byrne, who giggles. Hortense puts a finger to her lips. She presses her ear to the cold window. ‘This snow, see, it’s quiet,’ she whispers. ‘It’ll just steal away a bit more and more of the land like a thief in the night and what’ll you see come breakfast?’

‘Grandpa Jack’s big white feet hanging off the end of the bed?’

Hortense chuckles. ‘Too right.’ She hands the torch to Byrne. ‘Now you shine the light through the windscreen so I can get us home. And keep quiet. Gran needs to concentrate. We don’t want to end up all mashed up on the side of the road and frozen by midnight to boot, do we?’

Byrne, wide-eyed, shakes her head and holds the heavy torch with both hands to steady the frogs bopping in her guts.

***

By the time Esme and the other nurses get to the dance in Sue City, the snow seems to be bent on becoming the main event, though nobody else seems to care enough to notice.

The troupe of nurses in their strapless dresses, belted waists and bright mouths had already tumbled from the car and teetered in pumps down the electricity-generated bright aisles of Australia’s first real supermarket, American-style, clicking their painted nails along the rows of boxed custards and jellies and puddings and tins of every sort of soup and food you could possibly want to eat if you’d known they’d existed, already prepared to within an inch of its box. As Esme moved dazed down the aisle in her warm skirt and cardigan and ‘boring’ lace-ups (it was just too damn cold and no matter how much she wished it otherwise, she was just too sensible to flaunt her toes to the elements), she was near bursting with new words and names and colours: Campbell’s, Mazola, Kraft, Heinz, Swansons, Del Monte, Gold Medal, Van Camp’s, Birds Eye, Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, Lipton, Tang, Ivory Snow, Ritz, Cheez Whiz, Chex, Jell-O, Eggo, Kellogg’s, Tropicana, M&M. All around her, little cardboard signs waved from the shelves: ALL AMERICAN SHORTCAKE! WHEN IT’S BEAN-TIME U.S.A., MOST FOLKS MAKE IT BEANS AND WIENERS! HOME COOKED TASTING WITH NO COOKING! The other girls vowed to come back next pay packet, and bought a brown plastic bag of candied M&Ms imported from America to share. They piled back into their car and, high on chocolate, singing tuneless renditions of ‘Butterfly’, skidded all the way to the Yanks’ biggest party of the year.

Up this high, when the snow blows it knocks you sideways, icy daggers that drive all sound into some far off country and you can call and call to each other and watch your friend’s mouth move in the wet, white dream and not catch a word of what she’s saying, only that she’s laughing and holding her hands over her hair to keep the curl and pins from flying out, and that her eyes shine with promises of dancing, and Esme can’t help but wonder, as they hurry through old footprints to the door of the bright community centre, how it must feel to all the European migrants told they were coming to the hot, thirsty desert continent when they wind up here. Plunged into sub-arctic temperatures at some American Fourth of July barbecue in a country dying from drought. If the fact of not speaking English didn’t drive them half mad, the confusion of that state of affairs surely would.

But before she is pulled into the warm embrace of song and light and bodies of the community centre, Esme glances down the road once more and sees in the moon’s eerie glow a woman dressed in red, leaning into the wind that keeps pushing her back, like a figure glued inside a snow dome, getting nowhere. Red and white like an almost forgotten dream.

Then the woman is kneeling down in the snow.

***

The light bounces off the glass and gives back more than twice as much reflection as it does illumination. Hortense lets her foot off the brake and lets the truck slowly creep down the curved hill. She knows the bit of road around the next corner falls off into a culvert, and they’ll have no hope in hell of pulling out of that if they slide in.

‘Mona Byrne Crimson, you keep that light steady!’

‘I had an itch on my foot.’

‘Well, you can itch all you like once we get home safe.’

‘Mum says you don’t itch an itch, you scratch an itch.’

‘You know what I mean.’

Hort’s never one to be reasonable, but the fact of having the girl with her and the blinding reflection of torch light in her eyes and knowing she can’t see a damn thing, these facts make her reasonable. She reasons it’s better to stop than to keep going on over the edge of things. Over the edge of things, especially when those things are real edges with steep, deep fallings attached to them, never did anybody any good when they could be helped. She can help them by not being so gung-ho all the time, by taking a bit of her eldest daughter Esme’s gloomy thoughts into herself, all the ways of dying and how slow they might be. She squints one last time through a glare like the sun on a dirty windscreen and stops the truck cold. Bugger the truck; they can walk.

She’ll carry the girl and they’ll walk and it will be fun. It will have to be fun because that’s all there is. And there’s still hot bread and cream and honey. Tell her about the honey; tell her all the qualities of hot honey as you carry her through the snow. How if you heat it fast in the pan, burn it, it will caramelise and you can pull it out in the thinnest filaments like a pale blonde human hair. And you can eat it.

‘Honey, we’re going to have to walk,’ is what she says.

Byrne looks at her, worried. ‘Home?’

‘Yes, home.’

Byrne shrugs. She has ideas in herself. She’s not telling them, Hort can see that. But of course, that’s right. Her mum’s away and she’s suspicious already about how the world seems to be working, at least tonight, because it’s so cold and snow dangerous. She’s walking now, or, rather, she’s bumping along on the back of her gran, the gran she loved once with the unbridled enthusiasm of an open child, but now that she’s five and a half she’s starting to see how things compose themselves and how it’s sometimes best to keep thoughts to herself.

They have rugged up as best they can, with Byrne’s legs wrapped in a blanket and Hort with a girl and bunched blanket all around her middle keeping her warmer too, across her lower back, where it counts. Hort’s shining the torch one step at a time and watching the moment the billowed pillows of glinting silver are crunched through and they can turn and just see their deep steps marking the path from where they were to where they are. They can always go back if they get lost, but they won’t get lost because there’s the town now just around the bend. And the crunching through snow is good and real.

‘It’s not so bad, Byrnie.’

‘It’s not so good, Gran.’

‘We’re right. Look, there’s the town now. Look how gold with lights it is. Think about the bread snack we’ll have first, before we even get started on tea. We’ll have bread and cream and honey.’

‘And tea.’

‘Tea tea? Or supper tea?’

‘Tea tea.’

‘Yes, with milk. And we’ll hold the hot mugs in our fists and sit by the fire.’

‘And Grandpa Jack will be there.’

‘And Grandpa Jack will tell you a story. I bet he’s just sitting there now dreaming up Byrne stories. He’s turning them over in his hands like hot potatoes and when we get there he’ll plop one down on the table and it will split at the skin and send a column of steam into the air and you’ll add butter and that will be your story.’

‘And I can eat it.’

‘You can gulp that story down, child.’

They find the main street in a foot of snow crust, and drifting deep over the drainage ditches. The town seems shut, every person locked in their lair, and only the windows and chimneys’ blue smoke show any signs of life. Hort’s light wavers over the empty shops; how the doors rattle on their hinges in the wind!

‘Look!’ Byrne yells. Hort turns the light to find a woman and cow bogged in the middle of the road, in front of the bank. The woman is waving her arms now. Waist deep in a white drift.

***

Esme reaches the young woman, who is squatting down, patting her wet, red leather-gloved hands over the deepening banks, slowly reading the Braille letters snow has built.

‘You’d best come in out of this weather. Do you need help?’

The woman looks up, flushed with drops of melted snow snap-frozen on her cheeks like glass jewels you can imagine picking off her skin. She has a small, pretty round face and pale curls that stick out from under her red hat with a small pine bough pinned to its side. It nods and bobs over her head like a mistletoe kiss, collecting white flakes.

‘I dropped my handbag and all of my money fell out. It’s not a fortune or anything, mind you, just a few bob – but my new lipstick too.’

‘Oh my dear, never mind. Your lips are lovely.’ Esme peers at the dim shapes of snow. She can feel the feathered flakes as they land on her eyelashes, and how they stick there for a second before melting cold on her cheeks. The woman crawls forward a little, refusing to give up.

‘You’ll end up with frost-bitten fingers if you’re not careful and your leather gloves will go to waste as well. Here.’ Esme helps to lift the woman by the arm and, as she does, she spies out of the corner of her eye a yellow glint in the white. She pushes her fingers into a coin-sized tunnel and comes up with Queen Elizabeth herself between her thumb and forefinger. ‘If you look directly at something in the dark, you can’t see it. You have to look away a bit.’ The coin has a red blotch on its face, a perfect dot of nail varnish that matches the young woman’s dress and gloves, and it seems to Esme as if it were just today that she held that handful of coins dotted with blood. As if it were just this morning that she was handed the watch and the pocketful of silver and told to clean them up for the family. And blood dried in the grooves on the edges of coins and so hard to scrub clean. Now she gives the coin back to the woman, shrugs sadly that it can’t be more.

‘Thank you. Do you work in Sue City?’

‘Happy Jacks,’ Esme tells her. ‘The clinic.’

‘You’re a doctor?’ She’s younger than Esme. Late twenties, Esme’s guessing. Thirty, tops.

‘A nurse. A midwife. Though I help the doctor with emergencies too. There’s a few of us. Sometimes we get called to the tunnels.’

The man was brought up from the tunnel at Junction Shaft in a bucket lift, his head crushed by loose ceiling rock after a blasting. He’s dead, isn’t he? somebody said and of course he was dead, he was so bashed up. A slab of rock shook free and fell onto the place where he was standing, just back from the tunnel face, fingers in ears. His oilskin and his boots were slick with grease and water and his head hung back like he was trying to see the sky. Like he was waiting for the stars to come out.

Worked stopped that day, on any day a man was killed. The men needed time to adjust to the shock of seeing a spray of rock blown through the guts of their mates like shrapnel. The tunnels were black, but after a death they were stained red and the men were starving, they had to eat and all night they ate and they drank and they told loud stories even louder than usual to prove to themselves that they were still alive.

The watch face came clean with a soft bit of wet cloth but the leather band was ruined with blood.

‘I work in administration; I’m Minnie Mueller,’ the girl says, and offers a wet red hand.

Esme knows red is said to increase the appetite, it makes a person feel hungrier, more agitated within. Now she feels that nervous red restlessness as if she’s already late to a party she doesn’t even want to attend. She knows that excitable sort of thrill of arrival is the best bit, where there are still hopes that you might be beautiful. After that it was usually all downhill.

‘Esme Windle. Pleased to meet you.’

And as they step, arm in arm, over the icy patches of road towards the waggle-rock of Elvis and the laughter of jiving bodies, Esme can’t help but wonder how cold Minnie’s open red toes must be. She is still thinking of it when she hears the awful munch beneath Minnie’s shoe and sees Minnie bend to the snow once more to retrieve her red lipstick, splayed in the white, a smashed berry.

***

Hort deposits Byrne on the bank’s front verandah and takes the blanket and wades out to the woman caught in the drift like a plug in a drain, and it feels like wading into the sea, unsteady, with arms out, not knowing if some unseen current will rush in from beneath and pull you under. She leans in as close as she can to the woman without falling over herself and throws the blanket to her. The woman wraps grey wool around herself.

‘We got stuck on the way back from the commons,’ she tells Hort, chattering. ‘Cow won’t budge or can’t. I don’t know which. It didn’t look deep. I forgot about the ditch. We just plunged right in.’ The woman laughs nervously at herself and her throat squeaks with chill.

‘I’ve always wondered what it’d feel like to be bogged. How does it feel?’ Hort grabs the tips of her hands and gives them a squeeze.

‘Cold.’

‘Would too. How are your toes?’

‘Okay. I’ve got boots.’

‘Still, that’s no good. I’ll have to fetch some others and get a couple of shovels but we’ll get you out of here. Just keep jiggling your toes, stamp your boots up and down if you can. The warm dance. Think of what you’re going to eat when you get home.’

‘Might eat the bloody cow if Burchill doesn’t already have the tea on.’

‘Good girl. Now, stay put. I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

‘I’m going nowhere, Mrs Windle, I can assure you.’

Hort leans into the wind. She wants to be home already. She wants to be done with tea, too, and just be at the point in the night when she can press her head to her pillow. But her stomach’s rumbling; it’s not ready to dispense with food. And there’s a blizzard ready to knock them all down, and she’s got a woman here to un-bog and a five-year-old girl to feed and who knows now how long she’ll have her for at this rate, with Pictoria running off for god knows what lie of a reason. It’s been an unending week and an unending afternoon and tonight she’s been siphoned of petrol and light and will and, soon, all charm too.

Lately, something, maybe it’s age, has been catching up with her. Nights she lies down for a second, and between lines of her book falls asleep, the wind wailing between words. And even though the fire cracks loudly, popping and sparking unexpectedly, she’s so tired that she can’t undo the second and open her eyes again.

Lately, she can nearly nap in the middle of her soup, rest her head in the warm bowl with its herb-sweetened chicken smell and its circles of floating oil, over-salted, the way she likes it. She can practically sleep in the damn thing. All night too. Even driving some afternoons with the sun on the side of her face makes her want to just let go. For strange seconds she even believes a little snooze at the wheel would be a good idea. Why is she so tired? She’s always looked and felt a good ten years younger than she is, which is a miracle considering all the time she’s spent in the sun, but lately, her body just can’t be bothered keeping up.

Hortense and Byrne bang on the white door of Sara’s red weatherboard. Hort can see her glazed form hurrying closer through the opaque glass. Sara flings the door open, her apron and her hands covered in flour, little stuck lumps of dough caught in the webbing of her fingers. Her eyes widen, amused and happy.

‘Hooly-dooly, it’s the Abominable Snowman herself! And baby Abominable.’

Hortense catches a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror, and indeed she is tall as always and her hat and hair and black coat are balled with icicles, with dirty, hairy, dark snow.

‘I’m the Abominable girl,’ Byrne says emphatically, and lifts her arms to show off her icicles. She stomps her boots, leaves snow flour in a circle at her feet much like Sara’s flour trail from kitchen to door.

‘She is too,’ Hort answers. ‘Truly abominable.’

Sara opens her hands. ‘Making bread. Who knows how long this’ll last.’ She gestures to the churning sky with some remorse, some excitement. ‘Alesandra and Bruce are here for tea. Well, truth, they came by and decided to get stuck. Come in and get warm. What in god’s name are you two doing out there anyway?’

***

Time passes more slowly under red lights, even when the lights are flashing and the red skirts are flying and all the red, white and blue flags for this holy fourth are fluttering in the draughts and the whole community centre has been roused to sing America’s national anthem, except most of the people don’t actually know it, so they just move their mouths a little and press their hands harder against their chests and soon they are all blessing themselves with another Manhattan. Blushing, down the hatch.

Esme is nursing her second Manhattan and finds the strange, bittersweet flavour of the drink makes her head and throat feel like they are coated in warm brown velvet, but still she feels something hollow, something all the pretty food and pretty people and maraschino cherry cocktails and couples can’t fill up. She has turned down ten men at least for dancing. She knows her heart will beat too fast and they’ll be able to feel the awkward punches through their shirts. She’s hoping the drinks will slow her down, but the only thing that seems slow is the night itself, clicking over, minute by long minute as she watches exuberance she doesn’t feel. Her legs and arms don’t move like that. And her head doesn’t tip back in wide, full-mouthed hilarity; she hasn’t a clue how to shoot coy glances like hot darts. And she’s exhausted by yoo-hooing. Her mother’s right: she has no sense of spontaneity, no sense of humour. The only humour she seems to keep in abundant supply is the yellow and black bile of medieval science, for her temperament is too prone to hot or cold, irritable or excessively melancholic.

Esme lifts a cracker and cheese from the tray on the nearby table, then peels off the slice of orange rubber from the cracker and watches mesmerised as it flops in her hand. The entire slice leans over. She jostles her hand, watches it flip back and forth, back and forth. The hostess, Caitlin, catches her out of the corner of her eye, tightens her thin, pinked M-shaped lips at Esme despairingly.

‘Excuse me, what is this?’ Esme asks her.

‘It’s cheese?’ Caitlin sounds dumbfounded. She turns away, whispers to another hostess.

The second woman looks over and laughs loudly.

Esme has heard that Caitlin dragged a canoe all the way from America, like the explorer Charles Sturt, who, in 1844, hauled his whaleboat into the Australian desert in search of an inland sea that in the end didn’t even exist, and she thinks that if Caitlin hurries before the tunnelling’s done, maybe she can sail the spring’s slow flood and snowmelt all the way back to the Tasman Sea.

***

Hort wants to dig a tunnel out to the woman and cow but Bruce reckons it’d be faster to lasso her like an animal and pull her out. Hort says perhaps, but what about the cow? Bruce says unless they’re planning on inviting her in to Sara’s place for a cuppa, he can’t see where that cow is going anyhow. Hortense snorts and rolls her eyes; knows Bruce just wants to do some roping, to be the big man and rescue the damsel in distress to impress his new wife. It’s a piece of piss, he says, nudging his head into his Akubra, and heading for the door. He wades out a ways into the snow bank, coiling his rope and crunching across the surface like broken glass. Alesandra and Byrne watch from the front window while Hort follows Sara to the kitchen. Sara boils hot water, assembles blankets and dry clothes and whacks her loaves in. She says by the time the woman’s in and they’re warm and changed there’ll be hot bread to have with her lamb stew. Hortense can see Sara getting excited; she loves a drama.

‘And besides, who knows how many more times I’ll get to have you all here – now that everybody’s leaving . . .’ Sara says.

‘I guess that’s what happens when a bunch of black suits come and inform us we’re going underwater.’ Hortense watches Sara pick up her iron tongs to fiddle with the fire-box’s burning wood. Smoke steals out from the open door, it rises over the stove like scarves pulled from sleeves.

‘Alesandra thinks Bruce might be open to shifting me up onto their horse paddock. Since he won’t have to move.’

‘But everybody has to move.’

Sara closes the door on the little inferno. ‘Bruce said their place’ll be just above the water line. He’s worked it out. He might have to wiggle it sideways up the hill a bit but he told those Snowy men he’s not going anywhere. That they can get stuffed, basically. In any case, they say they’ve started the flooding already, but I reckon it’ll take ages. I bet it won’t even be up over Frying Pan Creek by Christmas, if it ever gets up at all.’

‘Maybe . . .’

‘You should ask Bruce too. There’s heaps of room up there.’

‘Let them have a few years of marriage together.’

‘The thing that vexifies me, Hort . . .’

‘Vexifies?’

‘It’s my poetic licence.’

Hortense chuckles. ‘You sure you’ve had it renewed?’ Hortense gives her a squeeze.

Sara sighs and her eyes fill with tears. ‘What bothers me is how many people are just leaving. Leaving town altogether.’

‘You can’t expect them to farm their old acres on little squares of dirt.’

‘Yes, but it won’t be the same, you know. It’ll never be the same.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s why I’m not going, and if you can’t move your house next to mine, you can come and live in mine, how’s that?’ She wipes her eyes. ‘We’ll be twin old ladies with my loaves and your fishing.’

‘We’ll see.’ Hort doesn’t like to get too caught up in promises. She thinks promises are things people say in the moment to make themselves and not you feel better. They’ve got something good and they’d hate for you to hate them for having something good so they promise you some of their good, though down the track they’ll take it back in their mind and tell themselves you never believed in it anyway.

Sara pulls out the bowls for supper. ‘I was thinking of producing a special commemorative set of bowls and plates. The Drowning Series. They’ll be entirely blue with two white specks in the middle. You’ll need a magnifying glass to look at the specks, but when you do look you’ll see they are arms, somebody in the water waving their arms before they go under.’

‘Optimistic.’

She hands Hort the stack of bowls.

‘You know we can’t stay for tea, love. Jack’ll be fretting.’

Sara presses her lips together. ‘Since when does a man fret?’

‘Sara . . .’

‘Hmmmph.’ Sara takes the bowls back, pushes her chin towards the lounge room, banishing her. ‘Go on and get that little girl warmed up.’

***

‘Yoo-hoo!’ Minnie Mueller waves at Esme through the crowd. She teeters across the dance floor in her pumps, makes her way through the swinging couples and flops down on a chair at Esme’s side. Her dress floats up as she settles, like flower petals around her. She has lost her evergreen branch somewhere in the crowd.

‘Not you too.’ Esme shakes her head.

‘Me too what?’

‘I didn’t think you’d be a yoo-hooer.’

‘Oh, I’m not. I couldn’t stand it. You think that about me?’ Minnie studies Esme closely, her green eyes flickering under her scrutiny. ‘I wouldn’t think you’d be the type to think such things about a person without good reason.’

‘I’m sorry. It was mean.’

‘It was mean. I’m hurt.’

Esme looks down. She doesn’t know what to say.

‘Never mind,’ Minnie chirps, smiling cheekily. She grabs Esme’s hand and puts it over her own forehead. ‘Think I’m coming down with a rather tremendous fever. You think?’

‘You’re rather warm.’

‘I love a fever; it’s the best blusher around. Too bad I can’t seem to make the most of it.’ Minnie waves her arm out and lets the palm slap against her thigh as it lands. ‘I would have done better in the days of tuberculosis.’ She heaves out a big sigh.

A bit bewildered, Esme tries to make polite, normal conversation. ‘Are you having a pleasant evening, Miss Mueller?’

‘I’m just heading off and thought I’d say goodbye.’ Minnie leans in and takes Esme’s forearm in both hands and gives her a kiss just above the wrist.

Esme looks at her arm. Then she looks at Minnie. She’s never had her arm kissed before. She’s never been kissed full stop; and certainly not by a girl. She’s not quite sure how she feels about it.

But Minnie doesn’t seem to be thinking anything of it. She wilts back in her chair as if that were the last act on earth she was capable of and surveys the room. ‘I really wish I’d worn my specs. I see so much better with my specs.’

‘I guess that’s what they’re for.’

‘Who’s that fella there?’ Minnie points to a tall, blond-haired man in a white suit doing tall, blond-haired man sort of dance moves with an appropriate sort of female.

‘Some fellow. He looks like a snow bank.’

Minnie laughs uproariously, a kind of heheheheheheheheheheh that never seems to end.

‘I thought perhaps he was a bit of a blond Clark Gable,’ Minnie says once she’s controlled her fit of giggles.

‘I can’t tell you how unappetising that thought is.’ Esme shakes her head in horror. ‘Blonds are not my type . . . I mean,’ she corrects, glancing at Minnie, ‘in men they are not my type.’

‘Oh, do you have a type, Miss Windle?’

‘Not especially. But if I did it would be a Rochester.’

Minnie squints at the dancing man. ‘He looks a bit fuzzy to me. Like a sheep. In fact, they all look a bit like sheep from here.’

‘I don’t mind single sheep really,’ Esme says. ‘There’s a certain dignity in a single sheep, but like people, in a mass they lose all sense and distinction.’

‘Are you talking about sheep or people, Miss Windle?’

‘We’re talking about people that act like sheep and sheep that act like people.’

‘And which ones are we?’

‘While we’re sitting here pretending to enjoy ourselves? We’re people that act like sheep.’

Minnie puts a hand over her mouth, trying to hold back another round of giggles, but they leak out between her fingers like spurts of choked milk. ‘Heheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheheh . . .’

‘It’s not that funny.’ Esme knows the gift of Minnie’s laughter is unwarranted, a product of too many Manhattans most likely, but she can’t help but enjoy the feeling of it all the same. Nobody has ever thought she was funny before.

‘Oh well. I guess I’ll be off, Miss funny Windle. Don’t fancy another drink before I disappear into the night?’ Minnie stands and sways slightly, clutching her handbag.

‘How are you getting home then?’ Esme asks.

‘I’m just up the road that way.’ Minnie points in the direction of the punchbowl. Then frowns. ‘I mean, that way . . . Some way . . . hehehe.’

‘You can’t walk home by yourself.’

‘And why not?’

‘I think you could be slightly too tiddly for this weather.’ For any weather actually, she thinks. In fact, Esme’s wondering if she’s not a bit tiddly herself.

‘Tiddly?’ Minnie giggles again.

‘Yes. Tiddly.’

‘You’re right. I’m tiddly. I’m totally tiddly!’ Minnie turns and sways back onto the dance floor, parting couples, heading for the exit. Esme grabs her coat and handbag, follows her along the periphery of the dance floor.

The music stops abruptly, and for a terrible second Esme thinks they are the cause of the suddenly silent room. She quickens her step through the no-longer-dancing couples.

‘I’m so sorry, excuse me, I’m very sorry.’

A voice rides in on a blackboard-screeching squeal, followed by the thump of a microphone head being tapped. Esme realises that everybody is looking past her to where Caitlin stands on the stage trying to attract their attention. ‘I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your dancing, everybody, but we have a very special surprise for you all. At home it wouldn’t be snowing, of course, but you can’t blame us if it’s got to snow on the Fourth of July in Australia, can you? We must never give in to the weather or the weather will think it’s got the better of us! So please join me and your fellow Americans on the patio for a spectacular display of our pyrotechnic prowess and help us celebrate the day of America’s independence!’

As the room breaks out in foot stomping and cheers, Esme catches up to Minnie. She grabs her arm. ‘I’ll walk you home.’

Minnie looks at her as if she’s never seen Esme before, but her eyes have softened in the time it’s taken her to cross the room. She looks shrunken somehow, so vulnerable in her sagging red frock, her lipstick rubbed off, her blonde hair frizzing.

‘I’m absolutely pickled,’ she says.

‘I know.’ Esme puts on her coat.

‘But you’ll miss the fireworks,’ Minnie says.

‘I’ve seen fireworks before. We have them here too, you know.’

Minnie smiles appreciatively and takes Esme’s arm in hers. ‘Have you ever had a turtle? I had a turtle before I moved here. It was called Po. Po the turtle. I loved Po. I love you too.’

Esme shifts her eyes to Minnie, but she’s focusing on buttoning her coat as if she never said a word. ‘Here,’ Esme says. ‘You’ve missed a button.’

Minnie looks down at the red gap between buttons. ‘So I have.’

Esme sets her bag on the floor and unbuttons Minnie’s coat. Minnie stands with her arms at her side like a child. When she has finished buttoning the six round black buttons in a neat line, Esme’s heart is warm and glad inside.

She pulls open the heavy door and together they step out of the muggy red room into a blast of flying ice and powder.

***

Hort and Byrne press hot against the blaze and turn their bodies sideways so they can watch Bruce through the frosty window as he lifts his right arm in the air like a tango dancer and starts wiggling, twirling his rope.

‘If you stand that close, you’ll get chilblains,’ Hort says and pulls Byrne out a bit from the fire by the shoulders.

‘What will happen to the cow?’ Byrne asks. ‘Will it die?’

‘Not if she’s in good nick; you know, not too many moooos on the speedo,’ pinching the cold, red nub of Byrne’s nose. And Alesandra, coming in with a tray of hot tea, laughs out loud.

There are certain laughs that are divine, Hort thinks, like pure beads of God’s sound.

‘She was in a prison as you see,

All in a cave of snow . . .’ Alesandra recites, glancing out the window.

‘And she could not relieved be

Though she was frozen so.’

Byrne watches her, breathless. There’s a kind of beauty Alesandra possesses, even at twenty-one, that doesn’t need to be paraded or sold but just pours out from her like rain water while she stands, oblivious, over the garden, wondering where all the water’s coming from; as if she’s just beginning to work out her beauty for herself and isn’t quite sure yet what to do with it. Hort has never quite understood how she’s ended up with Bruce. He’s handsome enough but a little too condescending and full of his own boast for Hort’s liking, even for a young man. Then again, Hort’s never much liked young men.

‘I think he’s planning on roping the lady and carrying the cow over the threshold like a new bride,’ Alesandra says, handing Hort a cup of tea out of one of Sara’s home-made wide green mugs from her commemorative Alesandra Is Born Series. This one tells the story of Alesandra’s fingers: her baby prints pressed into the glaze in tiny overlapping swirls.

‘I must know a story about a cow.’ Alesandra brushes Byrne’s hair back from her eyes. ‘For a good girl.’

‘I’m not a good girl.’ Byrne watches Alesandra carefully.

‘Put on these dry jarmies then and keep quiet.’

Bruce is now holding the loop of rope in his left hand, lifting his right arm and spinning a wide orbit and grinding his hips like they’re attached directly to his rope arm.

‘I once heard about a woman who was riding down the mountain – she’d just had a baby – and the snow blow was so bad she had to dismount and she was bogged in a snow bank for eight days,’ Hortense says. ‘She was a good mother – natural at it, I guess you are, just know what to do – and she kept the baby wrapped up warm under her coats, near her milk. They were rescued finally, but the woman’s feet had to be amputated and she lived only five months after that.’

Nobody says anything, but they all look out to the woman in the snow with concern. The woman looks tired, but her head follows Bruce’s circles and lifts slightly in anticipation of his rope toss, her arm out and waiting, her mouth open slightly in concentration, ready to catch. Then Bruce leans his whole body to the side like he’s actually astride his white mare, Catalina’s Ghost, and not a bank of snow. He opens his mouth, clenching his jaw and revealing his big white teeth, a horse himself, and tosses the rope. It comes down with a thump around the woman’s torso in one go and he grins, then turns immediately to the house to see if anybody is watching. Hort lets the curtain fall over the three faces, but then peeks again in time to see him hauling the rope tight around the woman’s waist and yelling for her to hold on so it doesn’t cut her in two as he slowly draws her from her hole, towing her in over the drifts, arm over arm. Hortense hopes he doesn’t yank her face across the icy crust or she’ll be scraped up to buggery. The cow is looking over suddenly. The woman waves goodbye to the cow; her body rides the frozen waves towards the light.

Alesandra hurries down the hall for an eiderdown.

‘The outside is cold but the people are warm,’ Byrne says suddenly.

***

Esme and Minnie are battling snow and wind, heads down. They can lean into it and, for a few minutes before they’re absolutely frozen, there is a bit of play, tipping as far forward as possible on the palm of the storm, letting it hold them up, buoyed by air. Minnie lifts her arms and her coat fills with wind and she looks like a big red balloon, a big, red, happy balloon. There is no talk between them, except suddenly, over the top of the gale, the tail end of one of Minnie’s giggles, heheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, dragged like a kite down the street. Esme feels safe letting her tipsy new friend lean and ride because she knows that this kind of blow won’t break; instead it acts as a kind, clasped arm that holds Minnie up. Esme doesn’t know where Minnie lives and Minnie is incapable of telling her, and if she could, Esme wouldn’t hear her anyway, so she just follows Minnie’s tentative lead, Minnie’s forward sway through the snow. Hoping that she’s actually going somewhere.

But soon it’s clear that they’ve been caught in a kind of white-out, and there’s no more laughing or leaning, just the biting snow crystal on skin and eyes half-shut with cold and Esme can no longer feel her feet though they shuffle forward of their own accord. She can no longer see the street or any house or even the community centre they came from, which seems to have disappeared downwind, music and walls and all. An empty fuel drum hurtles through the air, bouncing and landing like a bomb touching down. She knows they need to find shelter soon; knows how fast a person can drown in drifts out here; how exposure solidifies the body before you can even fall over.

‘We have to find a lee!’ Esme shouts to Minnie, tapping her shoulder.

Minnie looks up, mouths, What?

‘A lee!’

‘Lee?’

‘Where’s your house?’

Minnie looks so dispirited by cold that her eyelids waver. She closes them for a second. Esme shakes her. That’s all she needs: a passed-out, snow-drunk, sleeping Minnie in a blizzard. Minnie opens her eyes again; then shrugs dejectedly. She stands looking around like she’s just been born, amazed to find herself in a world of this shape and form, and now just wants to rest a little, let it all sink in before she begins the business of living in it.

***

An hour later, Jack turns from the fire, his eyes little embers, his flannel shirt hot; Hort can smell it from the door, the musty heat of him, the good, glowing goodness of him, still, even at seventy-two.

‘What the hell happened to you two?’

They are tugging boots and unwinding the coats from their bodies and waving goodbye to Bruce, who rode them home on his white horse. Now the horse stands in the snow in such a way that it appears as if Bruce sits astride thin air. That he’s floating off through it, before disappearing into black night’s trot.

‘Gran broke the lights,’ Byrne announces. ‘Then there was a cow.’

‘A cow?’ Jack looks at Hort for confirmation.

‘Don’t forget the lady.’

‘Bruce pulled her on a rope.’ Byrne’s eyes are jumpy with exhaustion’s last kick.

Hort yawns, mouth wide. She leans in to plant a big wet kiss on Jack’s lips and drips melting snow onto his cheeks. ‘I’m buggered.’ She can already feel the slow drain of cold from her body like water from a bath soon to be replaced with more warm.

‘I’m not,’ Byrne says, leaping at Jack, who just manages to catch her before she lands in the fire. ‘I’m not even tired one bit.’ Though she looks ready to collapse on the spot.

‘Please tell me you’ve made tea.’ Hort looks around the room, searching for some scrap of something that might be eaten.

‘I’ve made tea.’

‘Thank the lord.’

Jack gets up. ‘Hope you don’t mind cockatoo,’ he says, winking at Byrne.

‘Black or white?’ Byrne asks.

‘Black,’ he says.

‘You’d better not be feeding me cockatoo, Windle. If we were trapped in the desert or in a cave in a snowstorm or on a boat at sea and we’d run out of food, maybe. But tonight I want a big, fat, greasy lamb chop, two, and a couple of taters and –’

Jack lifts the lid off a pot of bubbling brown goo. ‘Roo stew?’

‘That’ll do.’ Hort takes a ladle and fills it, slops the stringy broth into her bowl. ‘A bit of pain and suffering is good for a person.’

She waits a moment and then looks up to see if Jack’s taken the bait and he has, his face has fallen. She stands and holds his face in her hands.

‘My love,’ she whispers and kisses him again. ‘My old man.’

‘That I am.’

Hortense smiles and sits again, leans over the steaming bowl, lifts it with two hands and drinks well.

‘Get stuck into it, Byrne, ’cause I’m gunna be asleep in about two seconds flat.’

‘I’ve put a brick in the bed for you,’ Jack says.

‘You promised honey, and a story,’ Byrne whines. ‘And I’m not tired.’

Jack lifts her up onto his bony lap. ‘Jack Joe Windle’s not known as Brumby Jack for nothin’, Byrnie. I’ve got stories. I’ve got more stories than you can stuff in your ears.’ And he pokes a long finger towards her ear until she screams and squirms from his arms.

In the thrum of warm souls Hortense lets the warm stew fill her until even the snow outside appears to be made of heat through the steamed-up window.

She thinks, remember this. Remember this when it’s all gone, when it’s over.

***

Then quietly, over the sad constant wind that seems to Esme to be playing her death march, comes a faint trill of song. Esme stops, clutches Minnie’s arm, listening, but the drops of song are gone again, swept across the shallow plain. She closes her eyes and for a moment knows that the snow brings music, that the last moments of living will be all music, and this comforts her some. And then it’s there again, notes that dance in the wind, and for a second she hopes that they’ve made a big circle and are now returning to where they began, but knows it impossible. She thinks instead, this music is what death sings to lure you in, how it springs a tune on you, a left-handed piano lark before the dark, booming bass notes come in and swallow you down. But soon Esme sees a flicker through the snow, a warm glow ahead, a pane of frosted glass and silhouettes within. This is where the music swims from. This is where they will go.

Keeping her eye on the light, and one arm clasping Minnie’s, she leans into the swirling cold and snow, pressing forward at seemingly unfeasible geometric angles to the front door. Or at least the place she thinks the front door should be, for there is an impossible drift of snow blocking it. Esme uses her handbag to burrow a hole through the snow until she reaches the hard wood of the door. She can no longer feel her fingers and finds it hard to make a fist, she is so cold, but she pounds her hand against the wood, hoping to be heard above the wind and music within.

‘Hello? Please? HELLO?’

Minnie has slumped down into the snow and is staring at her outstretched fingers. ‘My hands are so warm,’ she says and Esme hears it as a whisper and beats harder. She thinks she hears a laugh inside but nobody comes to the door.

‘A snowman’s no good unless it’s got a pipe in its mouth and a hat on its head,’ Minnie says, continuing to stare at her hands.

Esme leans into the four-inch hole of snow and sees a keyhole of light, a perfect, yellow, angel-shaped aperture burning like she is burning inside. And she’ll be burned out completely before they find her come morning, a blue angel pressed like a biscuit through dough.

She puts her lips to the light, pretends the hole is an ear and yells.

Soon, a large, scruffy man opens the door and when he looks at them he says nothing at first, then calls out to somebody else in Italian, and Esme finds herself being carried on a wave of foreign talk and foreign arms through a house she realises much too late is full to the gills with men. Drunk men rowdy with snow and entrapment. But before she can kick and fight her way back out, she is carried to a place of stillness and silence and warmth. Esme is deposited on a chair in front of a wood stove in a room that smells of tomatoes and spicy meat and the gusts of wood smoke the wind blows back down the stovepipe into the room. She can smell the men now, too, their musky skin as they lean down over her, as they examine her. She feels faint with fear.

Minnie seems to have passed out altogether. Esme has heard about the whores from Sydney; how the men queue up in lines of hundreds to visit one for moments only. She knows how lonely they get up here. How lonely the long winters must make them.

They are looking at her.

She is looking at them.

Nobody speaks.

Then a young dark-haired woman pushes into the room, parting the men, and Esme sighs with relief and really breathes, her lungs popping with inhalation. And just as there had been several moments of silent movement getting Esme and Minnie into the chairs, now that the movement has stopped, the talk begins in earnest again. One of the men asks a question in halting English and it seems to come to Esme from a great distance. Her tongue is a cold lizard in her mouth so she just nods, though she has no idea a second later what the question was. This answer sends the group into another frenzy of action. Somebody is brushing the snow dust from her hair. Another piles a blanket over them and the woman’s hand is laid on their foreheads and teaspoons of something red and strong and spicy are dripped down her throat until she splutters.

***

‘Once upon a time,’ Jack begins, ‘there was a man, a man much like me, only younger and not as handsome, and he lived up in the high country. People say mountain man and they think they know what that means – that we’re all bent and peculiar on account of never seeing any souls but our horses and having to live with the total fickleness of the weather. Here it snows in winter, Byrne, but up there, it can snow at any time. So that might’ve been what made him slightly erratic like a spooked horse in a holding pen, having always to prepare for a world that he never knew from one day to the next what it would turn out like.

‘Anyway, one summer,’ Jack continues, ‘the snow comes out of nowhere and the man’s not prepared for it and he runs out of tucker. Soon, even the rats that eat his scraps off the table at night start to whine. He can hear them shuffling around in the dark and when he wakes they’ve nibbled his bar of soap. There’s still nothing to eat and when he wakes up the following day, the rats have dragged off his soap altogether. He goes to bed on the third night and thinks, when I wake up the sun’ll come up and the snow’ll clear and I’ll get me a wild steer and I’ll eat for weeks on frozen lumps of beef. But when he wakes, the rats have eaten his boots. All that’s left are two soles and the eyelets like a handful of tossed coins on the floor.

‘And still his hunger is the worst sort of emptiness. He thinks to himself, You’re gunna die up here thanks to a bunch of mangy rats that’ll taste like soap if you don’t do something, so he opens the window and pushes a hole into the snow and sits bundled on his stool with his rifle poised on the sill and waits for a bird to land in the big pine tree opposite. And sure enough, soon a big black cockatoo soars down and sits with a pinecone in his fist and rips out the soft sweet chips. The man squints and holds steady and pulls the trigger real slow and the bird falls from the branch like he was just playing at being alive all along. He fixes himself a pair of tea-towel-and-frying-pan snowshoes, fastens them with a bit of rope and goes out, already drooling over bird meat to retrieve it. But hell if that bird isn’t anywhere to be found! It seems like it had clean fallen through the snow to the other side of the world, and he slumps back inside and dreams of frying that bird in the fire and splitting the tough breast open and eating the tiny heart. But just as he’s licking his lips there’s a banging on the door as if the bird’s come back to offer itself up for supper. The man leaps to the door and flings it open to find a beautiful, young woman, her face shining pink with cold. She holds her arms out from her sides and shows him the clanging, shining silver that hangs from her sleeves.

‘“Pot? Pan?” she says.

‘He looks around but sees no cart, no horse, and no tracks in the snow.

‘“What do I need a pot or a pan for when I’ve got bugger all to cook in it but my own two hands?”

‘And she says, “I’ll give you this nice slab of corned pig if you give me your hands.” She pulls out a portion of meat from her pocket.

‘“Hell no,” the man says.

‘She pulls a bag of flour from her other pocket. “A slab of corned pig and a fresh damper, then.”

‘“Hell no,” the man says, but his mouth is wet as a river with the imagined taste of it.

‘She reaches into her top pocket, and the pots and pans bang together, and retrieves a bundle wrapped in cabbage leaves and unwraps them to reveal a cool, firm block of butter. “A slab of corned pig and a fresh damper, with butter. And I’ll even throw in a bit of plum pudding. If you give me your hands.”

‘She pushes past him into his house, begins to unload her silver, places the meat in one of the pans with a slab of butter and he sees it frying before he smells it and when he finally smells it, he goes weak at the knees. She kneads the flour into dough with melted snow and loads it into the camp oven and heaps it with coals and they wait. When the meat is fried, she slides the pan onto the wooden table and sits down and cuts herself a piece and says, “Are you sure?”

‘He swoons and sits closer just to smell it. “Just one taste,” he says.

‘“For your hands.”

‘He looks at them, how good they’ve been to him, thinks of the way they chop wood and set traps and skin his feasts in the days when feasts weren’t few and says to himself, Well, mate, hands or no hands you’re gunna die anyway, so you might as well try, you might as well live.

‘“Okay,” he tells the young woman.

‘She takes out her knife and cuts a hot chunk of meat and spears it on the tip and offers it to him. He reaches for it but she says no, and pushes it towards his mouth. He takes the meat with his teeth and swallows it fast and wants more. She turns and gestures for him to put out his hands.

‘He lays them out on the table like gloves. Her big knife is nearby. He closes his eyes. He can still taste the meat and she places another piece into his mouth and the smell of bread fills the room and he thinks about the bread and butter, he thinks about living through this snow. She takes his hands in her hands, runs her thumb over the rough skin.

‘“Don’t torture me. Just get it over with.”

‘She laughs. “I have,” she says.

‘He opens his eyes and regards her. The knife is resting on the table, and she is holding his hands. Like a lover would. Just holding them softly. Looking at him.’

***

When Esme wakes later she finds herself in a seeping sweat. She is swaddled in woollen blankets on a bed in a dim room, the door ajar, her arms caught at her sides. She feels most particularly like a child. It takes her a moment to remember where she is, for an instant it seems that she is back in her childhood, in her tight warm childhood nest, and when she finally remembers, she despairs at how far she’d have to travel now to actually get back there, with her father singing in the next room. She turns to find Minnie nearby, also without arms. Minnie regards her for a second, and her eyes seem to soften with recognition before shutting again; soon, she is breathing heavily through her mouth, her lips open with sleep. In a far room, Esme can hear laughter and the gnashing of cutlery on plates and even softer trickles of music. It is disorienting enough to wake from a sleep so deep and strange you do not understand who you are. It is ten times more frightening to realise you are caught in the house of strangers; that you might be halfway around the world for all they can understand of you or you them. To hear, even for a second, the familiar tempo of their talk – and tempo is all you can hear, for the words mean nothing – and know that you will have to stand somehow without falling over and quietly shed your blankets and stumble thick with sleep into a room and watch them cease talking, cease eating and eye you, trying to recall themselves who on earth you might be before reluctantly making room for you at their table, this is the definition of humiliation to Esme, who hates to draw attention to herself for any reason. And her sleep has already disrupted any connection and continuity that might have been made between them.

The room does halt when Esme enters it. There is some hushed hilarity going on which is promptly shut down. Nine men and the one woman sprawl around the wood stove, on chairs and couch and floor, eating from bowls piled with string – or that’s what it looks like to Esme as she watches the man from the front door slurp down a long piece from a coil around his fork and smile awkwardly, his cheek popped full with food. He chews quickly and swallows and stands.

‘Good morning. Time for breakfast!’

‘It’s morning?’ Esme glances at the window hopefully, but all she sees is white and white again.

The man laughs. ‘Joke.’

Esme deflates.

He puts his hand on his chest. ‘Sergio.’ He has dark curly hair brushed back off his forehead and wears a high, tight-necked white jumper under his dark suit coat and dark trousers and thick wool socks without shoes.

‘I’m Esme.’

‘Ez . . . ?’

‘May,’ she finishes.

‘Ez-may.’

She nods.

He takes her hand and leads her deeper into the room and the two young men on the couch part to make space, and end up sliding off it altogether, so that when Esme sits on it, she’s all alone.

‘Your friend sleep,’ Sergio says.

‘Asleep? Yes. I’m terribly sorry.’

‘Why sorry? We think . . .’ He gestures an explosion with his hands and smiles like his mouth is doing the same thing. ‘Pof! Gone in snow.’

‘Me too.’

One of the other men says something in Italian and the others laugh as another man takes a photograph with a small silver and black camera.

‘These my friends. Tommaso, Silvio, Mario, Antonio, Ivo, Elio, Serafino, Angela and Ernie,’ Sergio says.

‘Ernie?’ Esme can’t help but chuckle at the grinning young man in the corner.

‘His name Ernesto, but he like Ernie.’

‘And nobody else here speaks English?’

‘Ah, we all speak. We work. We speak. Many things we do. Tommaso was ballet dancer, Silvio doctor, Antonio lawyer, Elio engineer . . .’

Angela interjects in Italian and Sergio puts up his hand and waves it in the air. ‘And she can pull stove out from under bed and spaghetti from a suitcase and make tomato and salami and garlic happen from sky.’

Mario grabs Angela by the waist and hugs her close, nuzzling her ear in agreement as she shouts and extracts herself from the creeping hand that is sliding up the back of her skirt. She straightens her dress and bounds from the room, returns with a plate piled with the steaming string food and hands it to Esme.

‘Spaghetti,’ she says, blushing. Esme gets a strong whiff of something thick and rich and bitter and her nostrils flare. She sets the plate on her lap. She has no idea how to eat it.

‘And what do you do, Sergio?’

‘Sometimes, if lucky, I sing – if you are lucky,’ Sergio corrects himself, sitting back with his plate. He glances up at Esme boldly between bites, sucking the strands into his mouth.

‘Don’t worry.’ Ivo, the man with the camera, rolls his eyes. ‘You will be lucky. Any second now, you will be lucky.’

***

Jack crawls into bed beside Hortense. There is his cool skin. It wraps around her. She turns her head towards his warm breath.

‘She asleep?’

‘She didn’t even hear the end of my story.’

She can sense his smile in the dark. She lets her hand travel up the soft skin just below his belly. The sparse, wiry curls. Remembers his fullness. How he pressed her to the shed wall when she was nineteen and reached under her skirt for the first time. The core of her; wanting more. More of his hands, more of the warm muscle of his tongue. And though their first touch was so exposed to the fresh field and air, they made love under hot blankets in a cold, single-windowed room in his high mountain shack. She thought to herself: a man has caught the inside of me. How he still quivers at her touch. Though quiver is all these days, no more being shot through like a bolt of light.

‘Hort?’

‘Just touching. Feeling the warmth.’

‘Not that . . .’ he says.

She moves her hand away. The clouds have scattered and the full moon casts a white glow across the snow.

‘No, don’t move, I mean.’ He pulls her hand back around him, presses her arm over his hips.

‘Sara reckons I should move up to Bruce and Alesandra’s property with her. We’ll both just shift our houses up there.’

‘That’s an idea.’

‘I guess we can all get woken by his discords.’

‘His what?’

‘Bruce plays bad notes on the piano to wake Alesandra up, apparently. She’s a sleeper. Likes her lie-ins. He’s not.’

‘Hort, we gotta talk.’

‘Wait till they have a baby. There’ll be discords everywhere . . .’ Hortense chuckles.

‘You hear me?’

‘So talk.’

‘Pictoria came by.’

‘I saw her. You were here. We had a conversation the three of us, you might recall.’

‘She came again, after you left. I couldn’t say before. With the little one come back . . .’

‘What’d she want?’

‘She’s left Charlie.’

‘Well, the man’s only around about two days in twenty.’

‘He’s a good man.’

‘Did I say he wasn’t? He’s just around about two days in twenty.’

‘She’s left him. She’s left town.’

‘She’s in Cooma. Though she told me “business”, the girl’s gone out dancing if she’s gone anywhere, and I don’t know why they don’t think a mother knows these things.’

‘She’s not in Cooma, love.’

‘If Esme had told me “business”, well, then I’d believe it. I’d think somebody needed saving or a baby needed birthing, because Esme’s predictable if she’s anything – oh, I mean “reliable”. She hates when I call her predictable. But she is predictable.’

‘She’s run off with a man. A young man.’

‘What do you mean young? She’s only thirty-two herself. Hell, even I’m young to you, Jack.’

‘She’s left town. She’s left Charlie and Byrne and I suppose she’s left us too.’

Hortense feels a cold pang inside her where it’s dark. ‘What do you mean “left Byrne”?’

‘She’s in love, she says.’

‘Love.’

She doesn’t know about love. All Hort knows right now is she’s so cold she knows it’s not just the weather. An internal chill, like her organs are goose-fleshed. A cold that says this is how things end. That slow release of ice.

***

‘What’s the opposite of a love story?’ Ivo asks Esme.

There are three of them on the couch, Ivo, Esme and then Sergio, and there are others who have gone to bed and there are others in the kitchen clanging with coffee cups and loud talk. Serafino is asleep under a towel on the floor by the fire, his feet sticking out.

Ivo, Sergio had informed Esme, was ‘a professor of old books, of Greek. Classic. He speak six language. He can speak them up here, but no use of books.’

Esme looks at Ivo and he winks. She thinks on it. ‘A murder mystery?’

Sergio searches their faces, eyes darting between them, trying to understand. Esme watches Sergio and giggles.

‘So who has died?’ Ivo ventures.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I just said it.’

‘Well, Romeo here says the books are no use.’ Ivo pours himself another drink from the bottle on the coffee table.

Esme smiles sloppily at Sergio. ‘G’day, Romeo.’ Though it’s not close to day. There are hours more of this night to be spent and she is happy for that fact now.

It’s after midnight and Minnie’s still asleep and Esme is drunk, though drunk is not something she’s ever been in her life. But tonight started strange and got stranger and is becoming stranger still. And it’s as if she has stepped out of herself to visit a foreign country. A country where who you are is something pinned onto your jumper when you arrive like a name badge. Her name tonight is Snowgirl. That is what Sergio’s calling her. That is how she arrived. And who she is. And it’s lovely. When he says it. When he looks at her and says it and it’s her. Esme thinks she could be in love. But since she’s never been in love before, she’s holding out for another hour or so just to make sure before making any pronouncements. But she feels a pronouncement rising in her, something she’s finding it hard to gulp down. This must be what love does to you.

Or whisky.

Or red wine.

Or snow.

She’s never had so much attention before.

‘Snowgirl,’ Sergio says again. ‘Have another whisky – or maybe you want to hear a singing?’

‘Take the whisky, take the whisky,’ Ivo begs, holding up the bottle. He is like a young boy gazing up from his mother’s lap to his mother’s face.

Sergio thumps Ivo playfully, pushes him away. ‘Go read a book, Greek.’

‘He calls me Greek.’ Pouring her another shot of whisky.

‘You are Greek.’

‘Tonight, I am Greek.’ He grins at Esme sheepishly. His hair falls over his eyes. ‘Tonight I am “Eros of this warm vigilia for the cheek of a girl”.’

‘Poetry,’ Sergio mutters in disgust.

‘Antigone,’ Ivo answers, and clinks his glass with hers.

She takes a small gulp of her copper-coloured drink. How it burns. How the room, with its black stove and yellow lamps and woven rug and the cold snow pressed to the window, burns her. ‘What a warmer of throats,’ Esme says.

‘It is easy to say poetry. Someone else write. But sing! To sing you have voice.’ Sergio stands and trills his throat like a bird and it occurs to Esme that he is a bird, a squat, black bird with jewelled eyes.

‘You’re like a baby currawong watching and waiting for the right moment to begin singing,’ she says, looking up at him.

‘To begin!’ Ivo laughs. ‘He will begin. He will never end.’

‘What is “currawong”?’

‘A kind of bird.’ Her eyelids flutter.

Sergio sits up proud. ‘You hear that, Ivo? I am bird.’

‘A galah.’

She could almost close her eyes for a moment. She could almost drift in the long wooden boats of their voices.

‘Ivo, get coffee for the whisky. Snowgirl is sleeping.’ She feels Sergio softly brush her hair from her eyes; can feel his electric finger touch her forehead and sparks down the spine to the floor of her. ‘Snowgirl . . . Snowgirl . . .’ When she opens her eyes she finds Ivo looking at them both strangely. Serafino snores and pulls his knees up to his chest. The towel barely covers him. Ivo gets up.

‘Ivo, where are you going?’ she asks.

‘Coffee.’ He walks to the door and then turns back to face her and recites:

‘Sovente il diluvio

Noi abbiamo piangere, e cosi

Annegato tutto il mondo . . .’

‘Oh . . .’ Esme says.

‘Oft a flood

Have we two wept, and so

Drowned the whole world . . .’

Ivo turns away quickly.

‘That’s lovely.’

But he is already gone.

A second later, she cannot even remember what he looks like. Or if he even still exists.

Her eyelids flutter again as Sergio begins singing.

‘You got a voice like eye drops,’ she says, and lets the song of him keep her afloat.

‘Eye drops,’ he says in wonder. Then continues the soft, snow-filled song.

***

They lie in the bed that now seems so frozen on a night that will never end.

‘I can’t take the child, Jack.’

‘She’s our granddaughter.’

‘I can shift the house – maybe that.’

‘You have to shift house. That’s no decision.’

‘That’s enough for one year. Look at us, Jack. We’re old.’

‘I’m old.’

‘You’re right. You’re old. You can’t take this child. And I’ve only got this one chance to have the rest of my life.’

‘And what about her life?’

‘I’ve been thinking about driving to Darwin.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since awhile. Since the flooding.’

‘By yourself?’

‘Who else with? You’re going to come? I can’t see that.’

‘I’m no car person,’ he said.

‘You’re not. And I’m no horse person.’

‘You do all right.’

‘When you force me, mister, only when you force me.’ She laughed.

‘We’ve had this problem.’

‘It’s not really a problem. Just a thing. It’s just us.’

‘A thing.’

‘We’re you and me, Jack. Separate. It’s worked this way. It’s worked for god knows how long.’

‘Thirty-seven years.’

‘Thirty-seven years,’ she repeats, awed by it. ‘We’ve done a good job of it at that.’

‘We have.’

‘And we only come this way once. Far as I know. And I’m about to turn fifty-seven. It’s not fair on her to be lumped with a couple of lumps.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘And I’m difficult.’

‘That you are.’

‘I like things how I like them and when.’

He nods. ‘Then she’ll have to live with me.’

‘You really think she’s going to live with you in a hut in the middle of nowhere on Tabletop Mountain while you feed her your old yarns for tea? And what happens when you fall over one day and break your hip trying to mount that old bitch of a mare and she’s stuck in some windy shack in a blizzard without a rat to eat?’

‘I’ll teach her to shoot cockatoos before I fall off that old bitch of a mare.’

‘You haven’t shot a cockatoo or eaten a cockatoo in fifty years! I’ve never seen you eat a cockatoo. It’s just some story you tell to make yourself feel rough and ancient. Do you ever look at those birds, Jack? They’re the last grace left in the mountains.’

‘The brumbies are the last grace, Hort.’

‘To you, Jack, to you.’

‘Brumby fat’s oil black. Thick like blood. It won’t dissolve in water, but it’ll burn if you burn it.’

‘And cockatoo’s just another name for freedom, maybe.’ Hortense slaps her palms down on top of the blanket. ‘It doesn’t mean shit, Jack.’

‘You sound like one too. I’m right here.’

‘I had to bash a galah today. Clipped it on the front fender. It was buggered. It was never going to fly again. And I felt putrid for killing it. And I still do obviously.’

‘That’s life.’

‘That’s the end of a life . . .’ Hortense turns from him. The moon through the white window casts an alien glow on the floor. ‘How can she just waltz out without asking?’

‘She asked.’

‘And I suppose you said yes?’

‘I said what I could. I’m her father. I told her she’d make her daughter very unhappy.’

‘And her mother.’

‘I said that too.’

‘So what did she say?’

‘She said she wasn’t a good mother. That some people are meant for mothering but she’s not one of them and that mothering when you’re no good at it just makes more unhappiness all around.’

‘Did you tell her that’s rubbish? Did you tell her that nobody’s good at it? You just kind of make it up as you go along. It’s not meant to be like shelling peas! If it was it wouldn’t have been God’s punishment.’

‘Why should everybody be punished just because you were?’

‘I wasn’t punished! I love my girls.’

‘So do I.’

‘You should have made her stay. You should have tied her to the damn chair.’

He goes quiet.

‘But you just let her go.’

‘I told her she was always the wild one and wild ones will run. You of all people should understand that.’

Hortense does understand it.

How free she feels when she goes and how used up and cold she is when the running is done. She knows running needs running like a fire needs wood and how there’s never enough to keep warm.

***

Esme lies back against the couch, slumps down, and Sergio slumps down with her until they are encased in a space of two. There is nobody to guard their privacy from – Serafino sleeps nose-loudly and Ivo has not returned from the kitchen – but they speak in low voices with heads close and Sergio has taken her hand in his. It’s a big hand, three times the size of hers, and it’s rough and calloused and flat with broad, square fingers and the warmth it makes it makes in spurts like the last gasps of a paraffin heater; as if the heat has had to travel a long way through his body to get to her. He holds her hand gently, however, naturally, and she wants to move her fingers inside his to better find the points of warmth in them, but is afraid if she moves he’ll let her go.

‘I came on contract and work factory in Sydney and when I finish I hear of Snowy.’

‘What do you think of Australia?’

‘I think birds and lonely.’

‘Loneliness?’

He nods. ‘But loneliness is good too.’

‘Do you like working here?’ she asks him.

‘Like?’

‘Is it good work?’

‘The first time I went down I thought I was in hell. Dark and loud and oil dirt –’ and he smears his hand across his face, ‘and some go down and some don’t come back up.’

‘The Yanks work you too hard, I hear.’

‘They are big men, have big thoughts. They are not bad.’

‘I hear there are corpses in the concrete.’

He waves his hand, nah. ‘They are just fast. Fast means more money. I work for the Aussies first. We unpack tools, then time for a smoko. Work a minute, then smoko again. Fast means less time for think.’

‘Do you get scared?’

‘What scared? It’s my job.’

‘To be scared?’

‘To work.’

‘I mean scared of dying.’

He takes his hand from hers and grabs his glass, tips his head back, swallows the last drop down. ‘I am young and I can sing.’ He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his top pocket. Pounds one out through the crumpled wrapping. Offers it to her. She shakes her head. He lights a match, cups his hand around it, and she can hear the quick sizzle of the paper. The burning smell of tobacco thread. She has never smoked but likes the smell it makes when the tobacco is first lit; how it reminds her of her father. She used to roll him cigarettes and so knows the taste of the paper too, and it is enough, she thinks, like smoking without needing to.

‘Your best friend here one minute then gone when the rock go through him. Okay? It’s big money. So that is good I say and send half home.’

‘Half of all your pay?’

‘To my mother. My sister.’

She can sense his agitation. He is sitting forward now, elbows on his knees, inhaling, staring at the fire. She wants his hand back. She wants the slumped laughter of their earlier confidence. ‘Do you miss your mother?’ she asks him.

‘Of course.’ He blows out smoke.

‘My mum’s close by, compared to yours, but she’s not the kind of mum who makes being a daughter easy . . . Though she’s kind of an inspiration – you can’t help but love her because she’s so big.’

He taps the ash into Ivo’s glass and leans back and his shoulder touches hers. He smiles and she is warmed again. ‘She is fat woman?’

‘No.’ Esme smiles. ‘She is . . . a big idea, big spirit.’ She throws a hand up as if to illustrate, lets her fingers spread like a firecracker exploding and the fire pops simultaneously and they both laugh.

He looks at her earnestly, blows smoke to the side. Touches the heart-shaped mark on her cheek with a sweep of his broad, fleshy thumb. ‘Snowgirl . . . You are bellissima.’

There is a part of her that knows he only says this because she is the only woman for miles to say it to, but her insides still expand at the sound of the words and she feels like she did the first time she saw the sea when she was ten, when she stood alone on a wide, empty beach and the whole world of her life was still before her and the space around her equalled all that was possible laid out in flat, forever blue strips of sea and sky. And it was lonely, but a happy lonely that meant, here I am.

‘Snowgirl?’

‘Thank you. I think.’

‘Thank you, you know.’

‘Not really.’

‘How old you are?’

‘Thirty and a bit,’ she lies. He raises an eyebrow but says nothing. ‘How old are you?’ Her voice quavers.

‘Twenty-four. Twenty-four in August.’ he adds.

‘Oh.’ She looks down at her hands. Wishes she could take her age back. She feels like an old maid now. But when she looks up, he is coming closer. He closes his eyes and his head looms, broad and black-haired and curly at the temples, but it disappears from sight as his lips brush her lips, as they open and press into her and she pulls back and swallows and can still feel the dry paper of his mouth and the taste of ash. Outside a violent wind rattles the glass. He leans in again and her lips go numb.

She puts a hand on his knee, pulling back. He is still holding his cigarette between his thumb and bent first finger. ‘I think I’m still cold,’ she says, wishing he would just warm her, just wrap her in arms.

But Sergio turns away. He stands quickly, squats down by the stove door and fiddles with the fire irons and the fire until all the wood inside collapses into coals.

***

Jack sleeps a wheeze away from her, but despite her exhaustion, Hortense can’t sleep. The night is full of thuds and dark crashings. It might be a possum, she tells herself, hearing a thump on the roof. It might be a branch falling to the ground under the weight of snow. She can hear the trees bending in the wind. There is a crack like thunder, like an old rod of light through the head, she feels cracked open by thoughts. How they rattle around; the loose change of the night. She wants sleep so badly; or she wants it to be morning; she wants some new kind of day to come calling and get her out into the air. She wants the truck to work again, to light a way. She wants to climb into it and take off and find some place in the heart of the world worth driving to. Away from here. From the trouble of here and the damn sad ending of it all. So much ending that she can’t seem to contain; it just keeps spilling out like water over the sides of the trough, making mud everywhere. Mud that she keeps tracking onto the good rug.

She feels sorry for herself now. It’s a remorse that’s worse than sad and less alterable than guilt. It’s that old bad helplessness, like the first taste of wrong, knowing she can’t do a thing about it. And how it can happen so fast that it doesn’t seem real. If I just take a step backwards, she thinks, if I walk backwards from this point back into the house and sit down and refuse to move from the table, all will come back. She’ll come back.

She has heard there are people who don’t believe in heaven, and she is bordering on being one. Because up until now hasn’t this world with its sunshine and snowmelt and hot toast and tulips and dirty, fast cars been as much paradise as one woman aged fifty-six in years if not heart, with two kids out of the way and a whole other half of life beginning, could hope for?

Her mother died milking a cow. Hort was ten. She found her in the shed with her head tipped against the cow’s side and her long arms at her side and the backs of her fingers on one hand brushing the ground and the fingers of the other dipping into the still-warm milk. And before she had told her brother anything, when it was still a secret between herself and her mother’s smoke, she’d lifted her mother’s hand from the milk and sucked each finger clean. The milk had kept her fingers warm while the rest of her had been quickly cooling. She had folded her hands on her lap afterwards and told her brother that was how she found her.

She knows a mother is meant to be loyal until death. She knows she has not well learned this, not well taught her daughters this. But she finds something terribly wrong with foisting continual, lifelong care on to children old enough to take care of themselves. Not Byrne, of course, but her own daughters. She’s uncomfortable with that kind of mother’s devotion. She will always help a person in need, but strangers rouse her care more than her own family does, she has to admit. Perhaps Jack is right; her blood is thin. She doubts if it would burn under duress; if it would produce enough light to see by. There’s no warm river linking her to her daughters anymore; tonight, just an angry silver thread spiralling from the suddenly cold heart of one into the heart of the next.

***

Esme wakes in a sweaty huddle in the dark room with the coals flickering to nothing. Her limbs ache from clutching them to her chest under the space of the tiny blanket. She smells Sergio’s aftershave but senses by the weight of the cushions at her back that she is alone on the couch. She turns and stretches and finds her legs quickly exposed to chill, and realises the heavy, sharp-smelling wool against her cheek is his suit coat draped over her. She makes out two shapes now on the lounge room floor, both snoring; thinks she can just discern the tousled crown of Sergio’s hair in the red shimmer. Despite the cold, she is overheated and thirsty; feels like a truck with the radiator leaking. She sits up, puts his coat on and stumbles in her stockinged feet down the hallway, feeling her way with her fingers against the wall, bumping into a stool and gasping softly, for fear of waking everybody else up.

In the moonlit kitchen she turns on the tap and the pipes beneath the house jackhammer loudly and nothing comes out. Frozen. She turns the tap off quickly, heart beating, listens to the four am house. She finds a glass in the sink half full of water and drinks it down. It is cold and sweet and not nearly enough. It would be a shocking thing to die of thirst, she thinks. This parched curling of her mouth is just the beginning. She looks for something else to drink. Dregs of whisky and coffee and one glass of water with a cigarette butt floating in it which for a moment she contemplates swallowing. She tries to think what a worse physical feeling might be than this. Hunger has never bothered her much. And whatever the name of that feeling she had tonight with Sergio; the voltage of his finger on her hairline, their electric potential, felt in her brief experience, to be an extremity you would want more rather than less of once you grew accustomed to its intensity and the disgrace of its aftermath. She hadn’t known how to tell Sergio this; he only seemed rebuked by her after their short embrace and had built up the fire and then went in search of food and had not returned until after she fell asleep. So this thirst tonight seems a new thing altogether: the body’s parchment on which fingers can write; the dry, parched parchment of her tongue now in her mouth, and her shame, needing irrigation, a wet palmful of water, another embrace. And the low pounding of her forehead; a dull thudding of drums. Perhaps only exhaustion rivals thirst at this stage. She’s nauseous with lack of sleep and wants this night to be done with so she can go back to her room, shower, check up on Mrs Nagy, boil nappies, bottle formula and put away the thirsty, deepest part of herself that tonight has opened like a split lip, like a sudden rift in dry earth.

She sits at the kitchen table, which is covered in cigarette butts and glasses, and hopes to see the moment when night turns into dawn. She suspects she has a long hour to go. Eyes a whisky glass. At least it will wet her mouth. She lifts it and swallows it down. The quenching is immediate; the re-parching follows close behind. She puts a hand in the pocket of the suit coat and pulls out a small photograph, bent at the corner. Of course. A black-haired girl sits leaning on her right arm on the grass, her white-stockinged legs tucked under her, her eyes wide and glancing sideways, her brown eyes made darker by thick circles of liner, lips slightly parted, her short hair curled over the ears and swept across her forehead. She must be twenty, and seems wild under the grapevine. Esme sets the photograph against a glass and finds another, toasts the girl in her faraway grape glory. Swallows hard. It might be his sister, his mother when she was young. It’s probably his lover, or his wife. She stands and fumbles for matches, takes a half-smoked cigarette between her long, awkward fingers. Lights the tip and inhales, coughing, covering her lips and shooting smoke between her fingers. She bends over, hoping the sweet dry fire in her mouth will dissipate quietly. She laughs and puts it out in the water she cannot drink. Tonight she will try everything once, she decides. Any initiation by burning.

She switches on the radio. Keeps it soft. The low moan of the wooden pipe music greets her, the single note sound of breath, in and out and around in complex pulse time. Music of the throat. Tribal songs of Australia, the announcer says. She has never understood how it is possible; how a hollow piece of wood can resonate like that, how strong the lungs must be to donate that song without suffocating.

Now she finds the whisky bottle. She resigns herself to amber. To the hot silk unfurling down her throat like the music unfurls up his. To the loneliness of this music. She stands and greets it again, each note she meets with a matched sway, a clumsy hip still tentative in its forays into space and reaching. It is not a music she would choose if she had options, but tonight she finds it as solo as she is, an accompaniment to the wind outside, to the bare, exposed rock of this night in the last tenth before dawn.

Little does she know that this night will shine like a strange lighthouse beam over all the nights of her life. A one-way beam of brightness. Going out, crossing the water, going out, crossing the water, the tempo of music and snow and light until dawn comes.

***

Hortense wakes from metal dreams to find Jack leaning over her. And the pale blue light.

‘What time is it?’

‘Seven thirty,’ he says.

‘Is that all?’ And turns over.

‘Get dressed,’ he says. ‘I wanna show you something.’

‘No horse riding,’ she yawns. ‘No weird dawn schemes.’

‘Just come out front.’

She stretches in the soft bed and then remembers last night with leaden dread. Her argument with Jack. The snow. Pictoria. She doesn’t even remember finally sleeping. She should learn to keep her mouth shut until she gets her head around a thing, works it out. She’s always too quick to shout if the whole world’s not singing for her birthday. And yet, everything she said last night was right. It was not kind, perhaps, but it is how she felt and feels still. She thinks of little Byrne in the next room; thinks for a moment, for once, of that warm child who loves to hold her mother’s hand, and moans out loud. Then moans again just for the good, guttural sound of it, deep down, like gargling hot salt. She has to think on this one carefully. She swings her legs over the edge and dresses quickly. There’s got to be some perfect answer to be gleaned from this unexpected arrangement of bodies on the page like a row of black numbers with a hundred kinds of solutions you can’t begin to see or imagine or sort out. There’s got to be some equation.

She shuffles into her boots without bending, leaves the laces flapping. She opens the front door to find a bank of snow and no world, no sky to be seen. Jack has dug a blue tunnel into the snow bank that must have drifted over the front of the house and verandah by midnight.

She bends down a little, steps into it. ‘Jack?’ Its walls are solid, compacted wet snow; it breathes in and out like a ghost and it’s the last thing she wants to feel right now. It’s like stalking herself up the iced veins of her own heart. She breathes in deep, lets the chill enter her lungs. A few steps in and the tunnel constricts and Hortense peers ahead but sees nothing.

She calls again.

‘I’m here,’ he answers. ‘Keep coming.’

She bends down and shuffles a few paces. ‘What the hell are you up to, crazy man?’

She squeezes into a large, round chamber of snow. ‘Bloody hell, Jack.’

Jack looks up from the little fire he’s trying to get started and grins at her. ‘Welcome.’

She stands up in the snow blue room and wipes her cold hands. The sun delivers its light through the small hole chiselled into the roof. The snow crystal glitters like shards of glass. The fire smokes and sputters and chokes out.

Jack sighs. ‘Welcome to another winter.’ He rises to greet her, eyes shining. Tears or snow, she doesn’t know.

‘I feel like a dunderhead.’

‘You are a dunderhead, Hort.’

‘Jack . . .’

‘Come here.’ He pulls her close to his chest, his arm wraps around her back. She leans into his shoulder, finds a bit of skin between his collar and his scarf. She goes there, breathes as if she could fog up his skin, suck down his warmth, and sees that his silver hair is sprinkled with snow.

‘What happens if I take her and regret it for the rest of my life?’ she whispers.

‘What happens if you love somebody more than yourself for a second? You’ll never know.’

‘I know, I know, but –’

‘I don’t want to talk. I want to dance.’

‘Do we dance?’

‘No, but we know how to.’

‘We’re not dancing kind of people.’

‘This morning, we are dancing.’

And humming some long-lost tune into her ear, whispering her secret name in the glistening silver morning with nothing but winter coats between them, Jack swings her like her father might have if he’d ever lived to dance with her, shows his age in his turn of the century twists and steps, and if they were in a pub she’d be embarrassed – not by him, who is suddenly so graceful inside movements she never knew he owned, but by her own clunky attempts to match that grace.

‘But you could die tomorrow, Jack.’

‘Exactly. Dancing.’

‘Then I’d be all alone in this.’

‘I don’t remember any guarantee.’

‘Or I could go tomorrow. Spectacularly.’

He puts a hand over her mouth.

‘Where would she be then?’ she mumbles. She pries his hand away. ‘Jack? I’m serious.’

‘It’s your life, Hort.’

Her hat brushes the roof of the icy cave and she is showered with loose flake.

She thinks, This man: he is my friend. He is my family.

He spins her again and she catches on the low bulk of his sleeve and feels like she’s inside the torso of something: a white bird or horse in its quicksilver heart. She closes her eyes and feels the chamber open up. Imagines dancing inside a heart of a bird as the bird flies: two miniature human people with human heartbreak spinning in the red pump. She can see the whole of her snowy land below her in the bird’s eye, all the roads she wants to follow, and that desire is metallic in her mouth, like the taste of snow.

Hortense needs to weep suddenly and turns her head to keep her throat from closing over, because if she does, she’ll never stop.

***

Esme is still bent close to the radio when Sergio and Minnie and the others begin to sift back into the kitchen from their various beds and dens. She has finished the whisky but does not feel drunk. She feels awake. Minnie remembers not much of last night, after the dance, so is shocked to find herself in a house of strangers, but says she never slept so well. Sergio remembers enough and he keeps his eyes averted from Esme’s like a child, before joining the loud ruckus of the men digging out the drifts over the doors and bringing in buckets of snow to melt on the wood-fired range for coffee. At the table, Esme listens to Angela read a letter in Italian out loud to Ernie. From her mother, she tells them. Esme understands nothing of the words but is lulled by the song alone. She wonders what kind of mother Angela has to make her voice so calm and constant and steady. She wonders if the music of language, of voices, might be capable of telling more than words can; of telling all that really matters.

Sergio says he might try to call in when he’s next at Happy Jacks.

‘Only if you sing for your sister,’ Esme teases, handing him back his coat and the photograph, trying to make all that is awkward okay.

But he looks up once, his forehead creases, as if his brain has come into an inheritance of great, stabbing pain. He offers his hand to shake, and so she shakes it.

Ivo drives them back in a jolting open bulldozer. The morning feels as if the whole world’s been pressed down like a jack into a box. Birds chase and warble, the bright crimson patches on their necks like throats slit in the whitewashed sky. Esme cherishes the loud engine; after a few moments of yelling over the top of it, nobody bothers to speak.

She tips her head back and watches the black shapes of empty trees under stripes of white bump by, a thousand fine filaments of branch and twig like tangled lacings of vein. When they descend the steep, slippery mountain road, Minnie squeezes her arm tightly.

A few days later, Esme receives a telegram from her own mother.

ATTENTION ESME WINDLE STOP YOUR SISTER HAS BEEN TAKEN BY STORM STOP IT SEEMS SHE WAS UNABLE TO REFUSE THE TRINKETS OF ONE SERENA DING ALPHONSO ANGELO DI SALVIO OTHERWISE KNOWN AS ‘LUCKY’ STOP SHE HAS ELOPED WITH HIM TO QUEANBEYAN STOP YOU MUST RETURN HOME TO CARE FOR YOUR NIECE STOP I HAVE BEEN TAKEN WITH A PROTRACTED STOMACH BUG AND CANNOT BE ENTIRELY RESPONSIBLE FOR HER AT PRESENT STOP YOUR LOVING MOTHER STOP

***

Byrne sits cross-legged on the verandah, peering between the wooden rails at the rising water rippling in the wake of the truck’s wheels, her hands full of flowers picked from the last of the abandoned gardens.

‘There goes Frying Pan Creek,’ she says as they pass a steaming twenty-metre-deep expanse of grey water. A shoe floats by. Wooden planks and bricks waver at the dark edges of water, caught between old land and old fence lines. Long ranks of pines wade out to their waists in the wet rubbish and Christmas rain. There’s a puff of white dust in the far blue distance and the delayed boom of the explosion’s shock. Blasting open another mountain for another tunnel.

Esme grips the railing with sweaty palms and can swear she feels the distant tremor rocking her lifeline. She is earthquaked; knows the constant shift and rumble beneath her feet will not end any time soon.

‘Damn them,’ her mother mumbles and Esme can’t help but giggle, despite everything.

‘What?’ Hortense frowns. ‘What now?’

‘Nothing. Just nothing.’

‘I don’t see what’s so funny.’

‘No.’

‘You of anybody should be tense.’

‘Why would I be tense?’

‘Or so you keep implying.’

‘I’m a mother suddenly. I’m a mother with my mother.’

Hortense snorts sardonically, but can’t catch Esme out, because she is now all eyes and ears to the climb.

Up in the distance, a petite Alesandra rides a green bicycle along the rutted, muddy road, six dogs in tow, urging a white pony along the fence, cycling, circling, wind in her long, tangled hair, whacking a blue heeler with a stick to keep it from biting her legs and singing, while Sara sits at her piano on her porch, belting out ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ to welcome them to their new home.

She and her mother stand, gripping the tilting verandah as their house is slowly inched up the hill.

She and her mother stand.

She and her mother.

ARC
2002

CHAPTER 20

ESME ACHED. IN EARLY April’s chill. The bed sheets were clawing at her. She fought them off in a battle that lasted several breathless minutes before emerging, toothless, into new air. Despite it still being not quite dawn, the sky blue-black, mid-autumn had left its taste and trace in her room. Nights were cold now. Days seemed as if lifted from the lake’s depths. And the flies kept away.

She understood, then, the way flowers felt when they withered.

Her leg was definitely worsening. It had begun taking her places rather than the other way around, she had noticed. She experienced long moments lately where she hovered in a state between rising and falling, standing and sitting, arms braced against the worn backs of the red velvet dining chairs. Sometimes she even caught glimpses of her leg leaning against the corridor wall long after she’d entered the kitchen, and once she even caught it having a lie-down in the dirt in the middle of feeding the chooks. Soon after this visionary incident, she changed painkillers for a stronger daily dose of numb.

The kettle on her bedside table shut itself off. She had recently mastered the art of pouring a cup without leaving her bed. Outside her window, in the slowly bluing sky, a couple of plush rosellas were picking at a seed cake she’d hung from the now leafless apple tree. She could see birds between the leaves and the reflection of the laundry swinging in wind to the exact beat of the seed cake after the birds had clawed into it.

A bird gasped. Or so it seemed. Then gasped again. Then moaned. Faintly at first, then much louder, though it was still a hushed kind of loud, the kind of sound you would only hear at dawn, when everybody is meant to be sleeping, if you were in fact awake. Esme thought maybe the birds were fighting, but no, their silhouettes pecked happily, and besides, the sound was now more groan than song.

Perhaps her mother had at last woken up to her actual age and was quickly discovering that a one hundred and one year old body was an ancient system indeed, one more suited to the glass shelf of a museum alongside the stone tools and clay beads; one rather unsuited to breathing. Esme’s heart thudded at the possibility. A good daughter would verify. She’d ensure her mother was all right.

Esme put down her cup of tea and forced herself out of bed.

It was faster to check (though she realised ‘fast’ was a bit of adjectival funnery in her case) without first stopping at the bathroom to pop her teeth in, but if there was something that needed yelling about, not having the teeth in could prove to be a liability.

As she stepped into the corridor, the moan continued, though it seemed quieter now. She passed Byrne’s room. No noise from in there, not even the slow sigh of a turning page. When she reached the door to her mother’s room, the noise stopped. Maybe she had had a heart attack. Esme pushed open the door. Her mother lay on her back, mouth wide. Definitely breathing. Snoring. Hortense was known for her occasional sudden, loud snuffle. That must have been what Esme heard.

Hortense rolled over. Her face was soft with sleep. Esme remembered the first time, as a child, she had seen her mother sleeping. It had seemed somehow wrong then; mothers were not meant to be unconscious, not while their child could watch, anyway. In sleep a mother has no voice, no control, her hands fall open, manage no strings.

Esme shut her mother’s door and was about to shuffle back down the hall when she heard the sound again. She turned her head.

There was only one room left.

She crept to the end of the corridor until she was directly in front of Lucetta’s door.

Yes, there it was. A low moan. Doglike; a sort of whimpering.

Esme thought of the time she’d heard Lucetta whimpering at three am and found her weeping, shattering Joe’s watch with a hammer. Nadia had given it to Lucetta after the funeral. Lucetta said it just kept ticking. Ticking all night, keeping her awake, keeping her alive.

So it was understandable that this moaning now conjured an old woundedness that needed an auntie’s healing. Esme almost knocked, but on some level she knew Lucetta was actually okay. On some level she knew in what way she was okay. On some submarine level she knew she should just walk away.

But she couldn’t.

What did she expect as she leaned her body over as far as it would lean (some advantage here in her recent shrinkage) and, bracing herself against the door, pushed her left eye to the keyhole? Later, she didn’t know if it was what she saw that made her knees buckle or the unbalancing weight of her torso over them, but once her eyeball got a flash of what dawn’s blue had to offer, she quickly found herself on her knees, unable to turn away, though she couldn’t bear it if the word ‘ogle’ came to mind.

Lucetta was on top of her doona, completely unclothed, her legs stretched out, her toes pointing and flexing, her back arching, and Rhett had his mouth between Lucetta’s legs. Esme’d been right about the canine sound and now thought (she couldn’t help it) of a dog with a hot spot, moaning as it licked and chewed itself endlessly, reaching places a tongue should not, on this earth, be able to reach, and it seemed in the sunlight that broke through the window at that moment, onto their naked skins, that Rhett and Lucetta were one glowing beast. Esme experienced a twitching curiosity that she would not, until much later, class as pleasure, and a simultaneous wave of revulsion.

Then Rhett lifted his face, lips wet; his chin looked as if it had been buffed and oiled. She saw his buttocks reach back, the stretch of his spine as he descended once more. Lucetta gripped his whole head in her hands and moaned so deep and long that Esme thought the house might start chanting back.

Esme fell onto her hands (she couldn’t stand, she couldn’t walk) and quickly made her way down the hall on all fours. Back to bed, tea, doona, Pride and Prejudice, warm cat.

She spent the rest of the morning under the covers with a bottle of brandy.

Of course, she told herself, she should have known. The sensation she’d had lately, of some new humidity, of molecules altering in the air, coupled with the smell of rising damp about the house. She’d taken to sniffing about, trying to locate the mildewed towels she was sure were hidden under somebody’s bed.

One day, still half-asleep from an afternoon nap, she’d been sure she’d seen Byrne squelching down the corridor in gumboots through three centimetres of water. Occasionally, there was the distinct sound of sloshing as they moved about. Lucetta’s skin appeared to be glazed like a pot. She shimmered through their worn-out rooms.

Esme had thought the house was leaking, but in fact they’d been wading knee-deep for weeks in a terrarium of love.

It wasn’t that Esme was jealous. How could she be? She loved Lucetta, wanted only for her to be happy, yet by midday, after Rhett and Lucetta had gone out, Esme found herself coughing up her heart into her hankie, a deep, grieving hack that wouldn’t end until she’d brought up all of her secret shames, regrets, and every other kind of emotional obstruction she had accumulated during her life.

Byrne came running. But even the nebuliser, even her calm touch, couldn’t silence this. They soon discovered that Adaminaby’s lone ambulance was attending to another emergency and there was nothing to be done, no way to stop the asthma long enough to move Esme into the car and drive her to the hospital.

Even Byrne seemed to think Esme was finally signing off, and like the pipe from tank to kitchen sink that brought up only damp dirt and air until you kicked it, kept encouraging her to lie down and be booted. ‘Lie down, Auntie, close your eyes, just rest.’

But Esme – and this surprised her as much as it did Byrne and Hortense – refused. She perched on the edge of the bed, pressed her palms into her thighs, and fought that graveyard bark. Like Sara’s house in passing storms, she rattled and groaned, but stayed relatively upright until the ambulance finally arrived. Lucetta had galloped across the paddocks as soon as she saw its spinning, crimson pulse.

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ Esme heard Byrne tell Lucetta, ‘that woman’s will to live. There must be something she’s waiting for.’

‘She just says she wants to die, Mum,’ Lucetta replied. ‘Of course she wants to live. Otherwise she’d never get out of bed in the morning.’

They huddled in the kitchen as the drivers whisked Esme away. Her finished white silk pillow lay puckered with stitches, feather bursting, in the top drawer of her bedside table. She hoped somebody would find it, if the time came.

‘You’re not going to die, Auntie,’ Lucetta assured her, squeezing her hand. Esme couldn’t look at her without seeing her neck arched back in pleasure.

‘You have to wait at least until I get my own vet practice, okay?’

‘I’m waiting to see you married. Then I’ll die happy.’

Of course Esme would live. The universe was designed to play out her own contradictions: nearly killing her when she had unfinished business crowding her chest, and forcing her to live just when she was sure she couldn’t possibly survive another morning’s routine.

She lived, though from then on there would be more of a tilt to her torso, as if she were constantly battling heavy winds when she walked.

CHAPTER 21

SHE NEVER WORE ANYTHING but solid colours, loved clean sheets on bare feet and liked to be kissed in the morning. She slept on one side without turning, and didn’t want Rhett to hold her during the night. Often he watched her sleep, her toes crunched up, lips slightly parted, and remembered that day of pancakes on the hill when her sleep first startled him.

After their first kiss – he couldn’t believe it was their first, he had imagined it for so long – it took two agonising days for them to find their way back to each other. To catch up where the edge of the gum trees met the fence line on top of the worn brown hill.

For the rest of that week, they met casually, as if their meetings were mere coincidence, while Lucetta looked in on a dying lamb with corkscrew and grass seed burrowing under the skin, or dressed a mare’s wound with honey and stitched it neat with a pale thread of silk, or attended one of Byrne’s cows with a prolapsed uterus.

They were made shy by their new knowledge of the other’s lips, so did not speak. But unlike their earlier reticence, this silence pulsed.

Rhett lingered as Lucetta laid the sick cow down facing downhill, spread-eagled her hind legs and sat astride her haunches, and it was with a lover’s awe, though they were not yet lovers, that Rhett watched her place the uterus on a tray like a meal she was about to serve and flood it with litres of warm antiseptic to wash away the sticky twigs, sand, seeds, dirt and then, to his amazement, start to feed the red fleshy sac back into the cow’s body like a magician’s scarf.

One night, he sat up with her as she held a hot-water bottle to a comatose dog that might have been bitten by a brown snake, feeding it fluids, and feeding Rhett her adventures since childhood, until dawn.

Then they unfolded their stories like wings from damp pouches.

It didn’t matter what they said.

Everything they said mattered.

Soon, he was following her on horseback to neighbouring farms. He watched shamefully, turned on, as she carefully inserted her hand, wrist and forearm entire up the rear of a male horse, closed her eyes and felt its body from the inside.

He was spending less and less time in the house, less time in rooms he didn’t know what to do with (if he stood too long in the kitchen he kept seeing his mother bent into her hands and weeping, could still feel his brother Jason’s anger like a stain on the wall where Bruce had slammed him during some argument, his hand wrapped like a vice around Jason’s neck). Rhett got to the point where he would just dash in, grab what he needed to eat and retreat again, quickly, without really letting his eyes rest on any shapes in the room.

He and Luce soaked up the last of the summer, getting to know each other again; limbs, swimming, fishing. Their first kisses were greedy and could be fed for hours on themselves. Standing in the freckled shade of a gum or in Rhett’s garden against the back wall of the shed, or leaning across to each other from the backs of their horses, going limp in the legs, pressed against each other, trying to get closer, always deeper. Feeling her back, her bottom tight beneath her shorts, her ribs arched with inhalation. When she tickled the tip of her finger along the edge of his jeans, at the button, he groaned. The whorls of her fingerprints so close to the head of his cock, he could already feel their grain.

Exquisite pink pain.

They searched and found all his old childhood stashes in the high bush: buried cans of baked beans and beetroot, the silver rusted, the labels eaten away, but inside, still okay.

He taught her that you could drink a can of peas.

They fried eggs and bread in wide slabs of butter on his little stove and let the yolks run over their fingers, down their arms. Then sat back against the big log and let their forks hover in the air, mid-bite, watching the shifting clouds over the valley.

If they cried the first time they made love up on the hill it might have sounded like a currawong calling.

Rhett’s throat was unlocked; now breathing. No longer the constricted chest he realised he must have lived with for most of his life so that his voice had issued from the depths of a narrow channel: a watery, shifting echo, like old floorboards under the lake before they tore away and turned to driftwood. His voice now seemed to resonate, so altered it attracted strange birds to him. People looked at him differently, too, the way they did at adolescents newly hatched to manhood, their voices groaning and churning through the cogwheels of sound until they found the right gear to stay in. His voice now matched his face, the tree-trunk weight of him. He was a being that had finally found equilibrium in his various parts, so that even as autumn wheeled down its cold air, there was still a summer’s expansion within.

For two months and two days they lay in the honey of their bodies.

The day after Esme nearly coughed to death, Rhett and Lucetta were trying to make love. They could hear Byrne and Hortense in the kitchen, the clink of the spoon against the china cup, the half-shouting of Byrne to make herself heard, telling Hortense about the new cows she wanted to buy. Then they talked about the state of the ute, which Hortense insisted needed a good dose of diff oil. Lucetta, whose eyes had been squeezed shut in concentration, opened them suddenly. She looked at Rhett with none of her previous longing.

‘It’s not working.’

He rolled over, frustrated.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t concentrate with them talking.’

‘Don’t listen, then.’

She got up and started to dress.

‘Let’s go to my house.’

‘Want a cup of tea?’ Pulling her jeans up over her knees.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her back, off-balance, onto the bed. ‘You don’t just get to end this.’

‘Rhett . . .’ She squirmed, laughing.

‘Shh . . .’ He clamped a hand over her mouth. Felt strong and dangerous. Her eyes narrowed, grinning, daring him to go further.

He held her by the wrists and pulled the blankets over them. The weight of the wool muffled all sound but their breath. The air was soon moist with breath, muggy with darkness. Lucetta’s face was visible only on one side, briefly illuminated as she wrestled against him and the edges of their cotton cave creased open.

The hot, heavy atmosphere made his throat swell.

In that dim spell he found her lips. Lips interspersed with breath, for there was something wonderful about listening to another being inhale, exhale, over and over through such close quarters of darkness.

Letting breath determine desire.

Soon her body followed the rhythm of lungs and she filled. He was leading her deeper, into the darkness of his need, to the very edges of their skin. Towards a kind of asphyxiation; unconsciousness; his throat felt bruised, hollow, he let her in. But never in all the sun-flashed seconds of shifting as they removed their clothes did either lift the heavy blankets from their heads. Because the fever being blown between them would, they knew, vanish with the light.

So they fucked in the swollen cave, their two bodies blind, entangling, and the sound of it echoed back at them.

Afterwards, Lucetta lay naked, a curled fern on the bed. The house had resumed quiet as if in sympathy with their seeping stillness. Rhett could hear the curtains from an open window billowing over a scattering of papers on the dining table. He could hear the distant barks of the dogs as they followed Byrne out to the sheds. The cuckoo clock called out eight.

Rhett rolled her over and straddled her, let his hot hands rest on her waist and stared at the weave of muscles under her skin, the broad band of her back, her shoulderblades pushing out like wings trying to get free, and the dimples on the small of her back just above her bottom. He thought of the first time he saw it finally unclothed. Round but not perfect, it had that particular sweet droop, just slightly, where it met the upper curve of the thigh. He could watch it move all day. Why was it that women guarded their bottoms so carefully, as if they would give something away about them that couldn’t be guessed at otherwise?

‘What are you doing?’ She tilted her head and her hair fell away from her face for a second before flopping back down, so that one eye was watching him between the burnt buttery reeds of her hair. He noticed how her eyes had aged; now were dashed with more flakes of brown than green. Her face was flushed with the closed, sunlit morning and the heat of the room. The windows, too, were beaded with dew.

‘I’ve just realised your back’s like a kite.’

‘What do you mean a kite?’

‘It looks like a kite.’

‘Can I see?’

He was in the middle of setting up an elaborate arrangement of mirrors when there was a knock on the door.

‘Luce?’ It was Byrne.

‘Jesus, Mum.’ Lucetta wrapped her body in a towel and cracked open the door. ‘What?’

‘I’m going to visit Auntie in a minute. Are you coming?’

‘Can I get dressed?’

‘Is Rhett in there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good morning, Rhett.’

He exhaled, chuckled. ‘Good morning.’

‘I’ve left a new pack of condoms for you on the dining table.’

‘Mum!’

‘Just in case you run out. Ribbed? Is that the right kind, Rhett? I think they’re ribbed. I didn’t know what size . . .’

Rhett shrivelled.

‘Oh god, Mum.’

‘Well, I’ll be waiting out front in fifteen minutes. Rhett, would you like to come and visit Auntie with us?’

Lucetta slammed the door. ‘Remind me never to have sex here again.’

‘Come and see,’ he said, reaching out.

Lucetta kneeled on the mattress, craning her neck down to one side to peer at herself. She could only make out the base of her neck and her shoulderblades and quickly gave up. But Rhett could now fully see the line of bone-dressed buttons, the bumps traced down the length of her spine to the dimples on either side of her buttocks that formed east and west of the diamond, and the cleft that strode between her cheeks was the tail of a kite. A skin corsetry stretched over a scaffolding of bone.

‘Is it a kite?’ she asked over her left shoulder.

‘It’s a kite, all right,’ he said, admiring.

She tried to see herself again. ‘Joe thought it looked like a dinosaur’s backbone. He used to knock his teeth against them. He wanted to debone me.’

Rhett didn’t say anything.

‘I don’t know why I brought that up.’ She turned around to look at him, her face soft, but he put a hand to her neck, nudged her head away until he had a perfect pale hollow of skin above her collarbone. Rhett held Lucetta down against the storm of that faraway but nagging fear that he’d be the one, in this case, to get torn apart. Because he had a feeling that loving a person was just a great big exercise in getting ready to lose something.

He felt his teeth touch down through Lucetta’s skin to the edge of her bone.

‘OW!’ Lucetta yelped, her hands fluttering towards the angry red circle on her shoulder.

The fear was like a hot clamp to his heart.

CHAPTER 22

ESME’S HOSPITAL BED in New Adaminaby looked out onto a small green park where occasionally a mother and child came to sit in the sun or play. The room was more like an extension of the hospital’s main corridor than an enclosed space, with only heavy white curtains to separate the six beds (four of them empty) from the sound of carts and trays rattling past. The nurses pulled the curtains open and closed at different times of day, clattering the rings along the length of a silver pole.

When they flung them open in the morning, it was with the flair of a stage manager, and Esme had the distinct sensation that she was a character lying on a set, spot-lit, ready to deliver her monologue. Though usually it was Mrs Pratt, her bedside neighbour with a shattered elbow, who spoke the play’s first lines – ‘I’m not a bit of trouble, not one bit of trouble . . .’ – as the nurses came with trays of breakfast.

They had hooked Esme up to a tank of oxygen when she’d arrived, and the clean, new flow of air had finally eased the dreaded cough.

Sometimes, in recent years, Esme booked herself into the hospital just for a change of scene; to allow herself, under the excuse of ill-health, a much-needed break. The scrubbed, colourless rooms of the hospital comforted her beyond her actual need for them. The shaking of red and green jelly was restorative. There was a curative predictability of nurses in sandshoes and starched white skirts. The routine jokes of doctors that began and finished each brief check-up. Esme liked to chat with them about The Birthing of Babies in the Age of Modern Medicine. She liked to say that she might as well have been a nurse in the time of leeches, so strangely changed had medicine grown since her day. She liked to say that she had seen the best of things. She liked to say, I wasn’t brought up to complain. After all, she had never joined a union.

This morning, the day after she’d arrived, Mrs Pratt was telling Esme that coughing was an emotional thing.

Esme had spent hospital time with Mrs Pratt before and, though she usually ignored much of her ramblings, there seemed some truth to this one. She thought of the bronchitis she came down with immediately after her night in Sue City, after the telegram came from her mother. How for weeks it had seemed she was hacking her lungs with a machete while spinning in the whirlwind of her irrevocably altered life. How one telegram, one singing Italian boy, had transformed the world so thoroughly. She thought of Sergio, her whisky-inspired recklessness, and how it almost seemed that she’d been given a taste of something, something she might have had in another life, as another person, and how that taste and other life had been taken, transferred to her sister via Alphonso Angelo Di Salvio, the olive-skinned man-strong tenor with sea-blue eyes. He was gorgeous to look at and, apparently, gorgeous to love, although her sister as a rule went for men with more fun and form than function. There was no good explanation for why Pictoria couldn’t have left Charlie for Al and taken Byrne along too. Except that Alphonso was eighteen at the time and Pictoria seemed hell-bent on becoming a teenager for a second time.

Even now, at seventy-six, her sister seemed more debutante than dowager, more minx than materfamilias. Pictoria had danced and travelled while Esme had been escorted with a firm squeeze to the elbow from the state of single, independent, babybirthing, roof-fixing, wood-chopping monarchist (albeit with dreams of love in the snow) over the border of no-return to become guardian-mother of her five-year-old niece, sharing her flooded childhood landscape and house with her own mother. Esme was never one for melodrama, so the move into her new persona entailed no outward signs of distress, but inside she cried privately for her lost freedom, and out of a powerful fear that she alone would somehow ruin Byrne for life. She imagined their portrait done in oils, like Owen Swan’s Men Burning Cow that had hung behind the dining room table for forty years at least: Spinster Ruining Child. A virgin mother, though without the blue dress, without the pious demeanour, nor the all-forgiving eyes, Byrne in her firm grip, scowling, and Hortense somewhere in the background, with two rabbit-ear fingers open over Esme’s head.

Byrne and Lucetta sat at the hospital with Esme all morning, though Esme couldn’t quite bring herself to look Lucetta in the eye. Instead, she answered Lucetta’s questions indirectly while watching Byrne chatting with the nurse. Byrne kept saying, ‘Auntie’ this and ‘Auntie’ that, and Esme wished that, just once, Byrne would call her ‘Mum’.

She was hurt that Hortense hadn’t come with them.

‘I think she’s a bit depressed,’ Byrne said.

‘Well, I’m such a bright spark she would feel better just looking at me,’ Esme answered tartly.

When, later, Byrne touched her purse as if to leave, Esme croaked, ‘Just five more minutes, Byrne.’ Coaxing out love like marzipan from a tube.

It was another hour before the nurses came with morning tea, and Byrne and Lucetta managed to steal away. They promised to be back the next morning.

That evening, Pictoria rang. Esme had been waiting all day for the call, but once she actually heard her sister’s belated and only mildly concerned voice on the phone, Esme told her she was too weary to talk and hung up just to punish her.

Esme rolled out of the hospital bed that night. So the nurses hoisted the bars until Esme was a caged bird, a nightgown’s gauze fluttering over her bones.

The next morning before work, Hazel Rey came bearing pink gerberas. The flowers were hot happinesses on their stalks, but it was Hazel herself Esme most savoured. Esme clung to their moments, remembering with some satisfaction the look on her mother’s face when Hazel had stood on the back verandah with her bucket of snails.

She and Hazel had had many moments together over the last couple of months, cups of tea at home and in town, and in her company Esme had felt herself brighten, experienced a complicity of forces with this young, bespectacled and seemingly lonely woman.

Hazel sat beside Esme’s bed. The sunlight filled the room in clear, wide bands. The flowers were open pink faces delicately sipping their water from a glass vase the nurse brought over.

‘I read an article in the paper this morning,’ Hazel was telling her, ‘about an elderly woman who said she was so eager to grow up as a child that she didn’t do the things a child does – so that when she got old and had some time, she was eager to do these childhood things.’

Esme understood that. How quickly she’d tried to reach beyond her years in order to greatly impress her mother whom she was always, back then, trying to reach.

‘What things would you do?’

Hazel had long stopped bringing her tape recorder on their ‘dates’ and she didn’t seem to write anything down anymore. Nevertheless, Esme occasionally had the distinct sensation that Hazel was slowly dusting her for clues.

‘I’d make a snowman, Hazel,’ Esme said simply. ‘And I’d take a trip to Birdsville.’

‘What’s Birdsville?’

‘Oh, a place. A wonderful place. I’ve always wanted to see it.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I’m not quite sure. Queensland somewhere. I don’t rightly know exactly.’

‘Birdsville . . .’ Hazel said, thinking about it.

‘Nobody believes I’ll ever get there.’

‘But speaking of snow, Esme, you were in the middle of telling me about the blizzard – how you ended up asleep with Minnie in the house with all the Italians?’

‘Was I?’ Sometimes in alone moments she pictured a wall of Hazel’s museum, covered with clippings and fragments of talk and with a small typed sign that read ‘Donated By Miss Esme Windle’. Or even better, ‘The Life and Times of Esme Windle’.

‘You said you woke up and they made you a plate of spaghetti by the fire. And you met Ivo there.’

‘Yes . . .’ And here Esme drifted. While Esme knew that Hazel was perfectly poised, by the nature of her own sorrow, to be receptive to Esme’s wounds, Esme had, so far, kept the secret of her sadness to herself. For she didn’t feel strong enough to tell the true rest of the story. Or moreover, she didn’t think it was a story one was capable of telling. How to explain to another the way a heart once knocked and pounded, as if with the heel of a hand, asking you to open its door?

No, it was impossible now. Wholly embarrassing.

Perhaps, too, since meeting Ivo again, Esme now wondered whether she’d made the wrong choice that night by the fire. She might have followed him into the kitchen to make coffee and kissed his poetry-spouting lips there. Who knows what those vowels might have inspired afterwards?

‘That’s about it, Hazel. Minnie and I got a lift back down to Happy Jacks in the morning.’

‘Did you ever see Minnie again?’

‘Oh yes. She came through Adaminaby about six months later and phoned me for a chat . . .’

Minnie and Esme had met for coffee in the new town, took a table at the Alpine Cafe. In addition to what Esme had quickly surmised was Minnie’s usual vague, loopy self, she’d brought some bad news and presumably a cold, both of which she’d left on the table for Esme to pick up, for Esme had come away with a second bout of ferocious coughing she hadn’t been able to silence or still for a good week afterwards.

She and Minnie had looked through the plate-glass windows with the backwards NEWSAGENTS and MILK BAR stencils out to the new wide street and the Snow Goose Hotel, and stirred white sugar into their tea.

‘That man, Sergio Del Santo . . . ?’ Minnie’s voice rose to a question.

‘I don’t know his last name. That’s how short our encounter was. I barely know him, Minnie.’

‘He was killed.’

Esme nodded. She lifted her spoon, plopped it into her cup of tea and stirred some more.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I barely knew him, as I said . . . Anyway, Minnie, isn’t that how it’s all meant to go – man a mile? I’d be worried if they weren’t dying, that would suggest insufficient progress. That would suggest they’re not going to finish the damn thing two years ahead of schedule. Because that’s what’s important, isn’t it?’ Esme took a deep breath, then looked up to see Minnie staring at her, eyes wide. ‘Sorry, I’ve raised my voice. I’m not by nature a voice-raiser. And you’ve come all this way, too.’

Minnie reached out and placed her hand on top of Esme’s. Her palm was sweet with warmth, like a slice of hot bread.

‘At least a fine town has been created,’ Esme gestured out the window, spitefully mimicking the Snowy Authority’s propaganda reels, and thereby relinquishing for all time her old enthusiasm for Australia the Nation of Industry.

Minnie giggled uncertainly.

They’d spent the day together. Esme hid her shattered spirit beneath a barrage of cold wit. It wasn’t so much Sergio that saddened her, although the loss of his charming self and his life certainly did, but the sense that the moment they shared was of a kind that would never again come her way. But Minnie didn’t seem to notice Esme’s wound. She was flushed with the excitement of having found an amusing friend, and Esme did like being amusing, and so from that moment on a friendship had been cemented over the loss as fast as one of the newfangled concrete lawn ornaments all the residents of the new town were busy erecting in their new gardens. Their friendship was sculpted to show off Esme in all of her dry, winking brilliance and Minnie with her head tipped back, hand on Esme’s shoulder, her mouth open in uproarious laughter.

‘And so, this man, Sergio?’ Hazel asked. Despite her old-fashioned spectacles, Hazel had very acute eyesight. She seemed determined to pick apart the seams that held the plates of armour around Esme’s heart.

‘Was a friend of Ivo’s,’ Esme answered briefly, though her throat contracted, causing her voice to warble. ‘He had a mother, back in Italy. He sent her half of all his wages. Can you imagine anybody doing that today? Oh no . . .’

To her relief, Byrne came in at that moment with clean nightgowns and a cardigan.

‘Hazel!’ Byrne cried on seeing her. ‘Your mum rang last night. I meant to come tell you this morning, but here you are.’

‘Rang your house?’

‘Apparently she got the number from Meryl – you know, at the post office? She rang at 2:26 am. Luckily, I was awake, worrying about Auntie.’

‘Oh, god. I’m sorry. She never knows what time it is.’

‘Oh, it’s fine. I didn’t mind. She’s very nice . . . She said she was so glad she found a way to keep you posted. It makes her feel much better.’

‘And this despite my father being a clock maker. The ironies of parents astound.’

‘Hazel, listen. She has to have surgery and she needs you to go home.’

Hazel stood. ‘What? What happened?’

Byrne shook her head. ‘She broke her hip. I don’t know how.’

‘Ohhhhhhh, my dear, my dear . . .’ Esme shuddered.

‘Is she in pain? Is it . . . very painful?’ Hazel began looking around for her bag.

‘Hazel, painful? It’s the most pain!’ Esme exclaimed.

And here Mrs Pratt let out a long, low moan from the next bed, for she had had both hips done in her lifetime – in fact, one hip done twice.

‘Ohhhhh . . .’

‘Worse than giving birth?’ Hazel inquired palely.

‘Ohhh, heaps worse!’ Mrs Pratt gasped.

‘Not that I’d know, dear,’ Esme offered. ‘At least giving birth there’s something lovely at the other end.’

The known and imagined pain of their lives was a song the women all sang in the antiseptic room.

CHAPTER 23

LUCETTA STOOD NAKED IN her bathroom, studying in the mirror the exquisite intricacy of black indentations along her shoulder and down her left arm. All day yesterday she had touched the marks with her fingers.

Tattoos of black and blue, perfect circles of tooth.

She had whimpered from the power of Rhett’s bite, her body clenching, but lived for the moment he let her skin go.

Afterwards, he washed her with kisses, rubbed his lips across the wounds, saying Who would do such a thing to you . . .

Before clamping down again.

How he was quietly and comprehensively dissecting her.

She was wet with him then. Felt the thrill of remembered unfamiliarity; when what had once seemed entirely impossible was now bolting through her thighs and groin at regular intervals.

Aftershocks, she called it, lying on his bed, shuddering.

Lingerie, he called it, pronouncing it linger-ee: state of post-coital lingering over the object of desire.

The hot shower stung her. The ovals from his mouth swelled into indistinct patches of blue.

Whereas Joe had revelled in his own body and what it could do and how it would move when it touched her, Rhett would hold her face close, his triceps bent at chest height, a thirsty man receiving a bowl of water, so gently, while his elbows, like a vice, enclosed her.

Likewise, she didn’t remember ever being so fascinated by a man’s body before. Maybe it was being older; maybe it was the fact of having lost Joe’s body – and not remembering, for instance, whether that brown spot had been on his left hip or his right – that made her so carefully catalogue Rhett’s. Like that smooth stretch of skin between his balls and his anus that seemed to be where the seam of a man was perhaps first joined, in the beginning. It was a place that she wished she could unbutton. Or the way his cock grew and arched away from the flat base of his belly. Her hands clenching his waist, cupping the weight of his balls.

She loved that the man who had the strength to hold her down was the same man who lay curled naked like a child on the bed afterwards, sticky and used up. That he slept then, just like that, his breath coming and going from between parted lips.

She watched him secretly, her eyes curling in circles of scrutiny across him, like smoke grabbed by a breeze. She took in his sweet knees, his bulbous toes, his stubbly neck, his thighs. She had grown captivated by watching the lines around his eyes when he laughed.

Now, bruised Lucetta bolted from the bathroom in a flurry of aftershocks and crashed straight into Hortense in the corridor: the hare colliding with the tortoise.

‘Ah, bloody hell. At last, somebody’s home,’ Hortense said, regaining her balance with Lucetta’s help and squinting to confirm who it was she was speaking to. ‘I never thought I’d be one of those old people who can’t stand my own company.’

‘I’m just going out again,’ Lucetta said. She was going to Cooma, to the movies. Alone.

‘Should we have a cuppa?’ Hortense suggested. ‘Though I can’t find the tea bags.’

‘They’re where they always are, Gran.’

‘I looked. I’m not blind.’

Lucetta hoisted her towel across her breasts and hurried to the kitchen. Hortense followed slowly, leaning on her new cane, then plopped into a dining chair.

Lucetta found the tea bags exactly where they always were.

‘Milk and two sugars if you don’t mind,’ Hortense hinted from her chair. She was attempting to rest her mangled, stockinged feet on the back of Esme’s cat.

Lucetta sighed.

‘What’s this cat’s name again?’

‘Minnie.’

Minnie hissed and dashed away.

Lucetta delivered the tea and attempted to keep moving towards the bedroom.

‘Always out.’ Hortense sighed.

The house closed in.

There was a noise Lucetta had been hearing lately as she moved through the dim morning rooms, or upon returning late at night from Rhett’s, that seemed to be emanating as if from within the walls. It had started indistinctly, but was building its layers of sound daily. She didn’t know if her body was sending out long bars of notes, but there was a dull apprehension in the sound. A symphony of dread.

‘I’m so happy for you, darling,’ Hortense was saying. ‘As long as you don’t forget the rest of us who brought you up. I was in love with your great-grandfather, but I still managed to raise your mother. I didn’t see enough of Jack sometimes, but that was what was required. For the family. Who do you think will look after Byrne when she gets old, if not you?’ Hortense flung her arm out as she said ‘you’ and knocked her teacup over. ‘Oops.’

The seep of hot milk through the leaves of the table.

Lucetta rushed across with the tea towel.

‘By the way,’ Hortense continued, as Lucetta soaked up the mess, ‘can you drive me to town later this arvo?’

There was a dull ache in Lucetta’s left breast.

Was it any wonder she sought Rhett’s silent company? The grasp of his fingers across her bicep was just a faint brushstroke next to the unspoken grip of domestic expectation, the walls of her house slowly, undeniably contracting. She thought of Auntie, spending most of her life in this house. Then she thought of her mother, escaping at twenty-one only to return at twenty-five, pregnant with baby Lucetta and no father in sight.

Then she thought of herself.

Every night she could hear Esme and Hortense and her mother turning in their worn sheets. She could hear them cough and breathe and snore and sometimes it felt as if they were in the same bed, tugging at a single blanket between them, with only enough wool to keep one of them warm.

Byrne had recently discovered that Hortense had begun wetting the bed at night. She hadn’t said a word to Gran, just dutifully, quietly, changed the sheets in the morning.

Winter was coming. The snow.

Twenty minutes later, Lucetta was still itching to leave. She and Rhett pressed against her car. The day, bright and cold. High tugged strings of cloud. A car bearing Hazel pulled up, her kelpie Josie hanging out the window, ear blown.

‘I’ve got to go.’ Lucetta pulled away from Rhett’s mouth, from Rhett’s hands attempting to tug at her shirt. ‘I’ve got to go to work,’ she lied. She was still haunted by the man and his sick dog yesterday, lying on the kitchen floor. After she’d inserted the syringe, she’d positioned it in the man’s hand, told him to plunge it slowly. She’d left him kneeling there, on the hard lino squares, and the dog knew, it knew somehow, sensing the grief in his owner, how it filled the room. The dog’s big wet eyes watched Lucetta as she shut the door. She walked down the hall and out into the garden. She knew that when she went back inside the dog would look exactly the same and it would make no sense how a body alone could house such a spirit. Still, after all these years, it gouged her. After all these years, she didn’t know what death was.

The lake below, a bowl of blue. Lucetta had put her hands over her ears and pressed hard, tried to press out all sound.

Still, it came: the man’s howl, a sadness that blew like a bomb down the hallway and burst the hinges on the door, encircled her. She had had a swirling sense of return, standing there above the lake, only it was she and nobody else who was dead, and she was deeply unsure, for the rest of the afternoon, whether she could ever be happy again.

Lucetta straightened her top awkwardly, while Hazel, politely, kept her head down, fumbled with her bag.

Rhett waved. ‘G’day, you. How’s the museum business?’ Then he glanced at Lucetta.

Lucetta had never asked Rhett about Hazel, but knew that something, however small, had passed between them. She knew because he’d stopped calling her ‘Miss Romantic’, something Lucetta had overheard him say often in the beginning, through their open summer windows.

Hazel frowned as she got out of the car. ‘There’s this site I found on the internet . . . it’s this index that helps people find old lanes and things in London, lost places. I had an idea about making one of those for this place. Listing all the lost streets and things. You know, look at the index and find the road you grew up on.’

Josie, released from the car, tore across the shore with Scout.

‘How can you find it if it’s under the lake?’

‘It’s symbolic, Rhett. It’s just an idea.’ Some new furrow of worry had replaced her usual pleasant but wholly dispassionate tone in Lucetta’s company. Hazel took a long drink from her water bottle, then she turned to Lucetta.

‘Your mum said to tell you she’s running some errands and will be back this evening. And that Esme fell out of bed last night.’

Lucetta shook her head. ‘If it’s not one thing . . .’

‘If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother,’ Hazel answered, but her laugh was stretched and hollow.

The three of them toed the edges of their lopsided triangle then, moving pebbles of small talk with tips of their boots until Hazel finally went inside.

A sulphur-crested cockatoo made a long, low, smear of white.

What was it that tugged her, that wouldn’t be quiet?

‘What’s wrong, Luce?’ Rhett’s eyes were flickering across hers in quiet desperation.

Paris leaned over the barbed wire fence. Her wide, black almond eye watched Lucetta. Wayward tufts of bone-coloured mane stood up with her ears, which twitched, picking up the conversation. Billy stood close.

‘I can’t stay here,’ she admitted finally.

All shapes love made in that light were ominous.

CHAPTER 24

THE DARK PENINSULA MATCHED Hazel’s mood. A hard, red expanse of shore and flat, grey, lapping water. The birds dashed through the burnt drafts of air. Hazel was crosshatched with their nearly visible filaments.

Could afternoons be this cold already? It was unavoidably autumnal; even wintry by night. Mandarin season. She kept seeing the first pale orange curls of sweet peel stripped and lobbed on the ground. Tiny dried saucers of vibrancy, threads still clinging, on the shore and by her door, like a message left by somebody.

Next door, the windmill spun its blades, creaking with each revolution.

Inside, the floor of her humpy, as Hazel had taken to calling it, was covered with dried leaves, the sloughed off boats of gum bark blown in through the window frames, dried clumps of pine needles, bits of paper come from who knows where, glossy junk mail with promises of cheap grapefruit.

Hazel felt icy draughts float up from the gaps in the floorboards. She didn’t mind being cold outside, but to be cold inside was so lonely. It took her back to her first July in Sydney. Such a shock, how arctic the houses got, how ill-prepared for the reality of the season they were. The first year her mother visited her Pyrmont worker’s cottage, Hazel found her sitting up in bed wearing a woolly hat and scarf and down coat and mittens, drinking her morning coffee. ‘Good morning. Though I nearly froze to death.’

Hazel had purchased a phone card from the post office as soon as she left Esme and Byrne at the hospital.

Her mother’s voice on the answering machine chirpily redirected her to the hospital room as though she were departing on an exciting holiday.

‘Oh my god, it’s the snowbird,’ her mother yelped when she answered the bedside phone. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

‘I’m here.’

‘What day is it?’

‘Mom, I’m calling about you. What happened?’

Why this resistance? Why this inability just to have an exchange of words and ideas with the woman who’d carried her, brought her into the world?

‘I broke my hip. It snapped. I was dancing.’

‘Oh, Mom.’

‘I know, how embarrassing.’

‘Who cares about embarrassing? What’s going to happen? Was Dad there?’

‘It was a girls’ night. The gals and me. At this new little club laundromat place. It’s the newest thing. It’s called ‘Wash and Wag’. I actually felt for a minute dancing like I was a washing machine and then I heard this loud snap. I had to be carried out on a stretcher. They had to transport me by ambulance through a late snowstorm. They almost put me in a helicopter.’

‘Oh god, Mom . . . that’s not good.’

‘It’s much worse than “not good”, I’ll tell you.’

‘So when’s the surgery?’

‘I’m already here, half goofy with painkillers. Big piece of the bone’s split open. I’m booked in for the weekend, but it depends on the doctor’s schedule. I want my own doctor.’

‘Are you in pain?’

‘Oh, you know. I’m on the morphine. I’ve got a roommate who collects X-rays. Did I tell you that? Joyce. She says she hangs them in her windows, heads, backs, the lot. The light comes through. She was hit by a car on her way to work. Nearly died. Can happen at any time . . .’

‘But what’s going to happen to you?’

‘I’ve got two weeks in rehab. But it’s after rehab that I’m worried about. I’ll be on crutches for six weeks. This is where you come in. The slow healing.’

‘What do you mean that’s where I come in? What about Dad?’

‘Your father has a big horological convention in Hamburg coming up. He’s presenting a paper on his clepsydra. It’s been booked for three years. I can’t ask him to stay.’

‘Mom, I’m worried about you, I am. But I can’t just come back at the drop of a hat.’

‘You’ve got about three weeks. Plenty of time to sort yourself out, book a ticket. I don’t want you to feel excluded.’

‘I don’t. I mean, I’d love to jump in, if it were possible, but it’s not.’

‘I need my daughter with me. I want you to jump in. Notice how I have to track you down all over the world?’

‘I thought you were meant to be relinquishing attachment or something?’

‘Oh, that’s cute. You should hear my daughter, Joyce, how cute she is.’

‘I have a new job, Mom. I’ve got an exhibition coming up.’ Hazel leaned her forehead to the cool metal of the coin slot. She knew what her mother was thinking. ‘If I thought you were going to die, of course I’d be there. But I don’t think you’re going to die. Please don’t think I’m being horrible.’ She felt hysterical. Why did her voice do that high-pitched squeaky thing, why did she hear only the scrape, scrape of a trowel slapping cement against the bricks whenever she had her mother on the other end of the phone?

‘I really do care, it’s just more complicated than you think for me right now, okay? Mom?’

It was silent on the other end.

‘Mom? Hello? Mom!’

There was a bustling and scratching as the phone was picked up. An unfamiliar woman’s voice on the other end.

‘Your mother fell asleep.’

Hazel stood on a chair and nailed half of her stash of blankets over the two empty windows, while the charred frames splintered and groaned and coughed black dust. She’d bought a new hoard of long yellow beeswax candles from the general store and now, quickly, before the sun disappeared behind the mountains for the afternoon, she tore off the old drip-castled wax sculptures and lit the wicks and let buttons of pale honey drip onto the saucers and fastened the new candles on top. Some wavered and extinguished as they fell and had to be glued and lit again.

Then she gathered an armful of kindling from outside, a couple of hairy chunks of hardwood, and using the blown-in leaflets attempted to provoke, however badly, the fire within them.

The fire seemed to burn for a second and then just smoked. She looked over at the wood-fired range in the corner of the kitchen, its lettering promising SLOW/MOD/HOT/V. HOT. She wanted hot. She wanted V. HOT. Perhaps that small box oven would be easier to coax into flame?

Hazel was standing halfway between the smoking fireplace and the range when she heard a light rap on the black-burned back door. She exhaled audibly, relieved. A person. A person to distract her from this cold house, from the night she couldn’t stop from descending.

She flung open the door.

Hazel was expecting Rhett again, Byrne, Lucetta even, but not Hortense. Hortense leaning on a cane, chewing a mandarin, a bit of peel at her feet.

‘Good evening.’ Hortense shuffled in, squinting, as if nothing bitter had ever passed between them.

Hortense and Hazel had never properly exchanged words, only snails, though Hazel had eventually given up returning them. She let them fall, she let them sup on the last of Sara Plowman Flood’s spinach. Finally, the snails had stopped coming. At first Hazel thought perhaps that Hortense had at last understood the error of her snail-crushing ways, but when she peeked through the fence she’d seen two dozen light-bending, beer-laden water bottles with little doors cut out sprouting from Hortense’s garden like UFOs.

Now here Hortense was, waiting in a winter parka that seemed to hover around her bones like puff pastry. Her unusually long hair had been cut into a perfect and very elegant bob that curled under her ears.

‘I dropped by this morning.’ She spit a pip out the side of her mouth. ‘But you weren’t here.’ She gripped the doorframe for support and turned her head as if looking around, though her eyes glazed over. ‘I’m going mad over there. The house of four entrances and no exits is what I call it.’

Hortense moved into the room. Then glanced down at the black smudges on her fingers and seemed to sigh down in the tremulous depths of her. ‘This was my best friend’s house, you know.’

‘Sara?’

‘I’m surprised you haven’t seen the ghost of her, flitting around, trying to sweep up all this dust. She’d be berserk about the dust.’

‘She’d know by now there’s no point. It just keeps falling.’

Hortense took a slow turn and quick drop onto a chair. ‘You mind?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Everybody dies. I just keep on living, for some reason. Fine by me.’ Hortense looked at her and smiled, a wide, toothy smile Hazel had never seen. ‘Let’s start over. You and me.’

‘Okay . . .’ Hortense still made her jittery for some reason. Maybe it was the discrepancy between her age, the fragility of her frame and the iron plate of her mind. Hazel always felt small and young and very expendable in her presence.

‘The snails will soon be hibernating anyway,’ Hortense added, like an afterthought, like a punchline.

‘That’s good. For their sake.’

Hortense grinned, glancing at the fallen ceiling moulding Hazel had hung on the walls like picture frames, the plates of burning candles, the blanketed windows.

‘Heh heh . . . nippy in here, isn’t it?’

‘A bit.’

She eyed Hazel’s woollen layers. ‘Hazel? You seem like a smart girl.’

Hazel shrugged.

‘So I’ve been meaning to ask what the hell are you doing?’ She hit the table with her hand when she said ‘hell’. ‘Do you know how cold it gets here?’

‘I’m realising.’

‘You’ve realised nothing. June first. June first and you’ll be running for our rooms with walls. For our heater. I’ll put a hundred and one dollars on it. One for every year of my life I half froze to death and wished I’d been born in Townsville or somewhere.’

‘I guess I’m hibernating or something. Hope I’ll hatch come spring.’ Hazel tried to laugh. Because what she hoped was simply to survive this year.

‘You’ll be hibernating, all right. Curled up and frozen like a damn snake in a hole.’

The air vibrated like guitar strings plucked. Hazel took a step back. ‘Sorry if I’m mistaken, but why are you upset?’

Hortense looked up, surprised, and slapped her hand against her thigh and hooted. ‘Now nobody said anything about upset. You just remind me of my old wayward Jack.’ She pointed her cane in the general direction of the fireplace and sniffed the air. ‘What’s going on there with all that smoking wood?’

‘I obviously can’t make a fire.’

‘Now, Jack could make a fire . . . Push me closer.’ Hazel pushed the chair until Hortense could poke at the logs with the end of her cane. ‘Get that outa there.’ She knocked the smoking log off its perch and it rolled across the floor, its hairy crust pink and singed; it went out instantly. ‘You get down there and start over with kindling and paper. Not this waxy stuff – real paper.’

Hazel ripped some pages out of her notebook, and then knelt on the hearth and began cracking twigs.

‘Pile it up like a little tepee packed full of fuel. See, the key to making a fire is, one: setting up properly, and, two: trusting the fire. It’s good at something – it knows what it’s doing. You got that?’

Hazel nodded and struck a match, placed it under the edge of the white paper, let it catch.

‘And don’t you dare touch that log for at least a good twenty minutes,’ Hortense ordered. Her cane finally stopped its poking and pointing and settled back on the floor. ‘People always put the big wood in too fast.’

Hazel sat back on her heels and watched the burning build. Then she wiped her hands of floor dust and bark dust and stood. ‘Thanks for that.’

Hortense slowly pushed herself out of the chair. She seemed unable to settle to anything; unable to let her quick mind succumb to the resting her body needed. ‘Now, tomorrow sometime, I don’t suppose you’d be available to supervise the taking of me to town?’

‘The taking of you to town?’

‘To Cooma. Specifically.’ She sneezed and her body seemed as if it might implode from the power of it. She grabbed the table for support. After a moment of snuffling and throat clearing she continued as if she’d never stopped. ‘You know, old woman troubles. Between you and me.’

She crept to the door. ‘I plan to drive. And I plan for you to watch me drive and jump into the driver’s seat in case a copper comes in sight. And don’t say a word to my family about it.’

‘Sounds dubious.’

‘Oh, it’ll be right. So you in?’

‘I guess . . .’

‘Right then. Come over at noon.’ Now that Hortense had what she wanted, she seemed bent on getting out of this house of old ghosts as soon as her shaking legs would let her.

‘Do you need help getting back?’

‘Don’t worry about me. You just keep your eye on that fire, child. Remember – twenty minutes of kindling first.’ Hortense sneezed again and her eyes trickled. She wiped them.

‘I remember.’

Then she was gone. Hazel watched her hobbling across the lawn, over the sleeping nests of snails. The night sky was huge.

A sky was a museum too. Every star had already happened.

CHAPTER 25

ESME RETURNED HOME THE next morning, and it was immediately clear that things had unravelled in her absence. The air in the house, so recently damp and sticky, had thickened to fog. Hortense carried around her person a new kind of cloud. A grey, weighed-down listlessness too big to get out the door. Trapped inside, around the periphery of the house, with no licence to take her anywhere, hers was a fog of tedium. There were only so many days you could look at the same faces, the same walls, without wanting to slit your wrists, she complained.

Byrne dragged a short, sharp cloud like a pointed handbag. Lucetta’s increasing absences meant that the burden of caring for two old ladies and a zoo of animals was increasingly falling on Byrne’s shoulders. She hadn’t read more than a page of a book in a month. Her head was full of sprawling lists instead. Today’s list: pick up Esme, speak to Esme’s doctor, cut Hortense’s toe-nails, change the wet sheets, cook tea, vacuum the house, feed the dogs, call about getting the cows impregnated, iron about a million baskets of laundry. When she picked Esme up from the hospital, Byrne was wearing her old SHIT HAPPENS T-shirt, something she pulled out from the bottom of her cupboard from time to time to remind herself that something worse could happen at any moment.

Byrne wasn’t looking forward to dying, she told Esme in the car on the way home, but it would be a great relief not to have to make lists anymore.

The first thing on Esme’s list was a double brandy. Then she would help Byrne by making some lunch. She crushed two painkillers into the brandy and drank it straight. She seemed to have less than four hours these days. If her calculations were correct, she had about two and a half hours before she would have to crawl back to her bed like a lizard to its rock.

Esme would make spaghetti. Byrne would like that. She might even think to herself what a help Esme was. Esme was hoping that one taste of the spaghetti and they’d all relax and maybe Hortense would get out of bed and Lucetta would come home from Rhett’s and they’d all share a meal again. Like a last supper that was really the first. The beginning over of love. If Esme could just manage this one meal.

It was important to keep moving, Esme told herself. After she moved for a couple of hours, she could rest.

Already the spaghetti was boiling over the blue gas. Esme stood staring into the fridge, trying to remember what she was looking for. Maybe she’d invite Pictoria over for this meal. She was her sister, after all; they had shared a childhood and Esme had every right to invite her to stay. If Byrne didn’t like it, if she still wasn’t speaking to her mother, if it caused a ruckus, well, Esme was too old to care.

‘What’s burning?!’

Before Esme could turn her mind or her face from the lulling hum of the fridge, Byrne had already dropped the ironing board she’d been lugging into the dining room, hauled the spaghetti off the stove and lifted the lid.

‘You nearly burned it, Auntie. There’s no water left. The spaghetti’s all stuck to the bottom.’

‘I’m sorry, Byrne, I got carried away in the fridge.’

‘If you leave it open all the cold air gets out.’

‘I was looking for mince. I’m going to make spaghetti bolognaise, Byrne. For you.’

‘There’s no mince, Auntie. I can get mince tomorrow. There’s bacon.’ Byrne opened the ironing board with a loud creak. It very nearly resembled the sound Esme’s hips made when she swung her legs out of bed.

‘Mum likes spaghetti, you know.’

‘She can barely eat spaghetti anymore, Auntie. Unless I cut it. Why don’t you make your specialty?’ Lifting the hot iron from the table onto the board. Crucifying the arms of a shirt.

‘I guess I’ll make my specialty.’ And Esme carried four potatoes from the drawer to the sink to wash them.

‘Mm-hmmm . . . Just don’t lift that camp oven. Here, I’ll get it.’

‘Did you give a paper to Owen Swan while I was away?’

‘I told you already, I delivered one the other day.’ She thumped the camp oven down on the bench.

‘I’m just asking. There’s no harm in asking, is there?’

‘There is when you ask the same thing twenty-three times.’ Byrne resumed ironing in fast time like she was scouring a black-ringed bathtub.

‘I’m getting that bad, am I? Pardon me, Byrne, I just got home . . . I didn’t realise I was such a burden already.’

‘Oh, Auntie, you’re not! But just sometimes I would like a moment’s peace. Just a moment!’

Esme loved Byrne, she’d raised Byrne in a way, but she couldn’t help feeling that she was eternally in Byrne’s way. The more she felt that it might be true, the more in the way she seemed to put herself, the more she repeated herself, the more she seemed to forget all she knew, and the more Byrne snapped.

‘I’m sorry I prevent you from having peace, Byrne.’

‘Auntie, it’s not you. Look at this house – it’s filthy! And laundry up to the ceiling. I’m exhausted just looking at it. Does she think the house is just going to clean itself?’

‘Who would that be?’

‘Lucetta! I mean, she’s never here. I think I saw her yesterday or maybe it was the day before, I don’t know. So they’re in love, great, but the world doesn’t stop for love.’

‘You need a break, Byrne.’

‘Tell me about it. One of these days I’m going to lock myself in my room and not come out until I have read a whole book without interruption. A whole book.’

‘Not that I’ve ever been able to tell you anything . . .’ Esme sounded like her sister, she knew. Didn’t mean to, but sometimes it just came out that way, pinched and resentful. She sprinkled macaroni over the bottom of the camp oven. She wondered if they’d had macaroni that night of the blizzard with Sergio, or spaghetti. She had been sure it was spaghetti, but now she wasn’t sure at all.

‘I mean, there’s only so many times you can have sex.’

‘What would I know about it, Byrne? There’s lots of things I don’t know about.’ But she grasped the bench to steady herself, just in case.

Hortense came in wearing her town frock and a wide floppy hat, though there was no sun to speak of. Days in bed had seemed to age her body immeasurably, though it housed her spirit just the same. ‘She’s twenty-four. At twenty-four I recall your mother went hightailing off too. It’s what kids do at twenty-four, apparently, though I had to wait until I was sixty-six.’

‘She was thirty-one, actually . . . Pictoria, that is,’ Esme corrected. ‘When she left.’

Byrne whipped the shirt she was ironing into the air. ‘Old enough to know better, it would seem to me.’ She threw the shirt down onto the chair: discarded, broken.

‘Anyway, your whole life has been one hightail, it seems to me, Mum,’ Esme said.

‘I took care of Byrne, didn’t I?’

‘Auntie took care of me.’ Byrne wrenched the iron up. It hissed.

‘I set the rules. Esme gave the hugs. A mum sets the rules.’

‘A mum gives the hugs,’ Byrne snapped.

Esme swelled with pride. She cut the cheddar cheese thick, laid the slices down over the macaroni. After the cheese, she’d boil and slice those potatoes, add chopped onion and as much bacon as she could fit into the pan and cover it with water. The smell of it alone would lure any lovers for kilometres to the table.

There was a knock at the back door.

‘That will be Hazel Rey,’ Hort announced.

Esme lit from within. ‘Oh! My friend Hazel’s come to visit me!’ Perhaps Hazel would even stay for a hot slice of Esme’s bacon macaroni.

‘She and I are going to town,’ Hort said, and Esme looked at her. ‘Byrne, I thought I should get out of your hair, out of everybody’s hair. Hazel was so kind to offer.’

‘Mine could use a trim, now that you mention it,’ Esme offered, touching her sunken white mop. She didn’t want to be left out of the cosy chat of the car, the windows steamy with questions and talk, riding up the dry back roads and hills to Cooma. She and Hazel could have their cuppa at the little cafe by the hairdressers while her mother did whatever it was she needed to do.

‘I think you’d better not risk the trip just now. You only just got back,’ Hortense said as Hazel came in.

‘Good afternoon.’ Hazel flicked off her shoes at the front entrance and padded in, leaned over and gave Esme a big kiss on her cheek. ‘How are you? Ohh, it’s nice and warm in here.’

‘I’m getting along . . .’ Esme started.

‘We have these amazing contraptions called walls and windows?’ Hortense’s face turned cheeky. ‘You might have heard of them?’

‘Don’t tease her, Mother,’ Esme said, squeezing Hazel’s cold hand between her own. ‘I’m managing, thank you, Hazel. Just fine, just fine, dear.’

Byrne put on a used-up smile. ‘Don’t mind me.’ She lifted the iron. ‘If I stop for a second, I might fall into the basket.’ She had stacked the folded, ironed laundry on the dining table and the pile was tilting, threatening to tip over. ‘You haven’t seen Rhett or Lucetta, by any chance?’

‘Not since yesterday afternoon. But he did ask me to look after his dog for a few days.’

Byrne huffed. ‘She usually leaves a note at least.’

‘We’ve got to be going,’ Hortense broke in. ‘Hazel’s driving,’ she announced to the others, nudging Hazel towards the door with the tip of her cane.

‘Oh, sorry . . . I didn’t realise . . .’ Hazel stood and kissed Esme again, this time on the other cheek. ‘For balance,’ she said, smiling.

‘Don’t forget to go to the chemist, Gran,’ Byrne added. ‘I’ve had the doctor send over your new prescriptions.’

Hazel returned to the foyer and bent down to put her shoes back on.

‘I guess you want to ask her things,’ Esme sniffed, feeling betrayed. ‘My mum’s got lots of stories.’

‘Hazel knows I don’t take to answering any prying, impertinent questions,’ Hortense answered, then grinned. ‘But we are very alike, Hazel and I. She reminds me of myself when I was young, didn’t I say that, Hazel?’

‘How is this museum going?’ Byrne asked, changing the subject.

Hazel shrugged, still pink. ‘This morning’s idea is that I could make a bunch of little metal plaques with words inscribed on them and I’d attach them all over the shore so everybody could read them. In all the places where something simple or monumental had happened to somebody. Like a revelation. Here on September such and such, I kissed him in the lightning . . .’ Hazel looked at the three women, their faces clouding with remembering, with revelation. Her own face reddened. She looked up at the ceiling and opened her mouth a little, held her breath.

The room was full of the smell of potatoes and steam and suspension. The cuckoo clock rang out twelve times, the wooden painted bird pushing into the silence of the house. Byrne’s iron sizzled as water evaporated on the cloth. The bird retreated back into his hut, shutting the door. If the lake could make a sound as it slowly dried, surely it would be just this sound, this whisper, a faint hiss, a slow exhalation into the air.

Then Esme was alone with Byrne. She pulled yesterday’s newspaper towards her. ‘I should have told them to take Owen today’s paper . . . I wonder how he’s going in the cold?’

‘He’ll be right, Auntie. If it’s too cold, he’ll go in.’ Her voice held the loneliness of laundry.

Esme opened the pages randomly. She tried to remember if she was ever really happy here, in this house. She thinks she must have been. There were seconds of pleasure, she knew. Tea-hot seconds of being where all the edges aligned and the light shone perfectly through the window in sharp, delineated golden beams, like one of Byrne’s early drawings, the sun’s rays so hard-fisted they broke the yellow crayons on the page. Back then, Byrne coloured. Esme ironed. Now Byrne ironed.

Esme read. She blurred at the edges.

‘An elderly British tourist was rescued in Germany after he became lost while using a ninety-year-old guidebook . . . Charles E. Beadle, 75, wandered through a forest for two days using a book bought by his father in 1914. He had held on to the book for years, practising the German words and studying the places mentioned in the copy of Beautiful Bayreuth. He became lost trying to find sites that had long since vanished.’

‘I might go lie down, Byrne. Will you finish the casserole for me?’

But Byrne had just found a note peeking from under the phone. ‘Oh, Lucetta,’ she sighed, reading it.

Esme followed Byrne’s eyes through the window to the penned yard. The doors of the horse shed were flung open and, except for loose nests of hay, the stalls stood empty.

CHAPTER 26

A KILOMETRE DOWN THE road from the house, Hortense asked Hazel to stop the car so she could take over the driving. The lake was choppy through the sticks of trees. Hazel had circled around the Holden to the passenger seat, as Hortense had crept, left foot always leading, leaning on her cane, to the driver’s seat. Hazel had to help her adjust the mirrors and the seat and buckle her seatbelt for her.

‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’ Hazel asked. After all, it turned out she was taking Hortense to her annual optometrist appointment.

Despite the opaque wash over her eyes, Hortense had looked at Hazel directly. ‘Have you ever had something taken from you, Hazel? Something that previously was the way you knew yourself? Something that was freedom and security all at once?’

Hazel nodded. A relationship was that.

‘Wouldn’t you have done just about any little thing to get it back, even a piece of it, even for one day?’ Her cataracts twinkled.

Now Hazel couldn’t quite get over the hands that gripped the wheel. The skin hung around the bones in pleats and the pulsing veins tunnelled fast and high underneath: blue rabbits under a sheet of earth. Hazel’s hands seemed almost alien in their infancy, the skin stretched rubber-like, waxy, plasticine.

The car skimmed a small tight bend, rattled over a cattle grid and landed in a cloud of dust. Hazel clutched the door handle to keep from sliding across the seat into Hortense’s hunched, phone-book-raised frame and possibly crushing her. She turned around to make sure Josie was okay and found her pulling herself up off the floor back onto the seat like a man from a deep hole.

‘This country should be seen at this speed,’ Hortense said, the window open, the air fluttering the edges of her hair, peering through glasses with lenses so thick they doubled the size of her pale blue eyes. Her nostrils flared wide. The winds were infused with a bite of the coming high mountain snows.

‘Not quite so fast is my preference,’ Hazel said, but then tried to qualify it so that her complaint seemed not so much about Hortense’s driving but about the mode of transport instead. ‘Maybe not in a car at all . . . Or maybe in a car that’s lost third gear,’ she mused. ‘Kind of crippling along.’

‘A car that’s lost third gear can zip right along just fine if you know how to work it,’ Hortense answered.

‘My mom’s having surgery. This weekend,’ Hazel said suddenly, before asking tentatively, ‘Did you ever have to care for your mother?’

‘My mum died too quick to care for. I would have been glad to care for her.’ Hortense switched on the radio. ‘Have you ever noticed that Snowy FM has only two CDs?’ she asked.

Hazel shrugged.

They drove on in silence while Snowy FM recycled its songs.

That morning, as Hazel had attempted to secure, as a test, some photos and text to the newly painted walls of her museum room (she was quickly discovering that she lacked the carpentry skills the boys in Exhibitions had had), another note had come via the post office email and Burchill’s pale, buttery hand. He had folded it discreetly, but looked sheepish all the same when he passed it to her.

SUBJECT: Help

Hazel,

The help I need is getting groceries in the house (1 block away), taking a walk w/me 1-2x per day (20 min), drive me to water aerobics 2x per week (10 min away). I’m so excited you’re coming!

Hazel excused herself. Hid in Burchill’s bathroom, stacked with the yellow spines of National Geographics going back to 1970. About the time her relationship with her mother had become so muddy and muddled. She sat among the stacks and cried. Then composed a reply in her mind.

‘Dear Mom, I regret that I won’t be able to make it . . .’ Though she realised the polite expression of sorrow was misleading. It allowed the real structure of regret to hide in false time. Didn’t she hold herself hostage in the present to future endings she seemed to have no intention of changing, while knowing all the while how much she’d regret her decisions down the line? Because if she really already regretted that she wouldn’t be able to go to see her mother, then surely, in order to undo her regret, she’d choose a different outcome now. A non-regrettable outcome, like visiting her mother in her hobbling time of need. For eventually, the moment would come when something happened to her mother. When her mother’s maths was up. Most likely, Hazel would be here when it happened and not there.

When they got to Cooma, Hazel helped Hortense into the optometrist’s office and waited in the tiny foyer, flicking the pages of magazines. She could hear the optometrist through the open door of the darkened room.

‘Why didn’t you come here when you first noticed you couldn’t see?’

‘Things get in the way, doctor. Life.’

‘Well, macular degeneration gets in the way of life, Ms Windle. We could have treated it. But it’s too late now. I can book you in for the cataract operation, but otherwise, there’s nothing I can do.’

‘But what about driving?’

‘You can’t drive, Ms Windle! My god!’

Hazel ducked back out quietly before they’d finished. She leaned on the still-warm bonnet of the car. Josie lay in the middle of the footpath staring at an empty plastic Coke bottle she hoped Hazel would throw.

‘What ever happened to sticks?’ she asked. Josie’s eyes didn’t stir from the bottle.

There were a couple of teenagers outside the ski shop next door, a young girl eating a pack of salt and vinegar chips chatting up a boy with a puppy on a frayed bit of rope. The girl finished chewing; she stepped forward to kiss the boy. Hazel turned away.

When Hortense came out, she avoided Hazel’s gaze.

‘Shall we drive?’ Hazel called to Hortense, who had already set off on her cane down the street, left foot first, dragging her right up to meet it. ‘I can drive you.’

‘It’s a beautiful day, love. We’ll walk.’

It was one o’clock and the main street was busy with mothers and tourists and swaggering Akubra’d men in buckled jeans. Hazel was sure any minute a herd of wild horses would charge down the street, leap over the cars like fallen logs, and the fat woman in the pink shirt and hat would stand up from her cappuccino and crumbled muffin, step out from the cafe, and fling a whip in lazy circles above her head. All of this was possible in the town that had hosted the eighth wonder of the world.

By the time they reached the chemist a block away, Hortense’s legs, thin as the trunks of poplars, trembled. She dropped heavily to the bench to wait for her prescription. When the pharmacist approached her, he told her to stay sitting, but Hortense pushed herself away from the high cushioned back of the bench and, rocking forward, finally stood up to meet him.

The pharmacist gave her a hand. ‘Remember, Ms Windle, your medication causes some dizziness.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ she croaked.

Hortense seemed to Hazel so frail suddenly, all the spunk and bravado leached out in a flood of mortality, listening as the pharmacist talked her through her new medications, as though her entire diet would consist of small red and white pills.

‘. . . This will cause more dizziness, light-headedness . . . nausea, perhaps a headache, some cramping in the lower legs, in the calves. Just watch your posture, don’t stand up too suddenly – it lowers your blood pressure.’ Hortense had one hand on the drug which somebody had determined she needed; the drug which would make everything in her body go wrong while making one particular thing go right – did she actually need it? Was it like all the medicines Hazel had been prescribed over the years that she hadn’t bothered to take, or did Hortense’s life actually depend on it? Was it actually the one thing on earth that could save her? What is save anyway, when you’re one hundred and one?

Hortense stood still, listening, but betrayed an anxiety even Hazel in the far corner could feel, a silent sickness inside, as if a younger woman inside her body were saying, Get me out of here! Let me out!

‘So that’s that one,’ he said, putting one bottle aside. ‘Three times a day with food. Got that?’

Hortense nodded. ‘But what about driving?’

‘I told you last month, you can’t drive. Certainly not with this one your GP’s prescribed.’ He held up a small square package. ‘Inderal. For the cardiac arrhythmia. This will control any fast “fluttering” you might be having but it will also cause you to feel a sense of doom.’

‘Doom?’ she asked.

‘Doom.’

‘You mean like I’m dying Doom?’

‘Yes.’

Hortense nodded and her brow creased. ‘Is there anything you can give me so I don’t feel the Doom?’

‘There is, but not with the other things you are taking, I’m sorry.’

She seemed to think about it, her bottom lip pulled in under her teeth and chewed for a moment. ‘Doom, eh?’

He nodded. ‘It will be fine. Just go about your normal daily business and remember that you are not dying, you are just experiencing a side effect of the drug. It will pass.’

‘A Doomsday.’

He laughed and patted her on the back. ‘That’s good. Keep that up, Ms Windle. You’ll be right.’

Hazel felt worn out, a new kind of tiredness had entered her from hands on wheels and doomsday bottles of pills and a museum she’d never ever begin, much less finish. She was worn out with ex-lovers and mothers whose hips snapped like twigs and a loss of time that was as much the absence of anything approximating a family as it was the ever-creeping forward date of exhibitions, exhalations, expirations. It was as if death were accumulating in her, like library fines.

She wondered whether the moment before death would be not a slowed-down movie of your life, but a stroll down the dark museum corridor that housed all those lost selves, floating in jars, lined up on shelves, left behind and wasted with being, childhood selves and selves that inhabited different countries and all of those leftover, jettisoned parts of yourself, and whether a good life, a life well lived, could be measured by how much love rather than hatred or regret you had for each of them.

When they stepped outside, Hortense shrinking in Hazel’s guiding grip, they both moved more slowly across the footpath.

‘I got you a souvenir in the chemist,’ Hortense said when they reached the car. Her fingers fumbled with the sticky tape on the paper bag. She handed Hazel a postcard. It was old Adaminaby under billows of snow: Adaminaby, 1946: In Winter’s Grip. Hazel could see how, even then, the white strap of road through the town already resembled a scar.

‘If you haven’t revved a Monaro you can’t call yourself an Aussie girl, I reckon,’ announced Hortense bravely, hobbling away from the driver’s seat, from the door she’d always called her own.

CHAPTER 27

SOMETHING HAD BEEN TAKEN from her. Or perhaps loss was the wrong way to think of it. Perhaps in the fluorescent light of that moment, her hand on a bottle of bright pink digestible circles, something new had been added instead. An acceptance of things. It had surrounded her all along, this threat of infinity, but now it brought a nostalgia that held no regret.

It was not a homesickness for her old self Hortense now had, no longing for things past; she usually resisted the soft look back. Her eldest daughter did that for her and for anybody else within a ten-kilometre radius, keeping the blue flame burning, feeding the tired fire clippings and snippets of her life’s snapshot moments. Esme had become a needle that jumped a record’s grooves, skipping half the verse before starting over again at the end; a friend with one finger permanently between pages of the photograph album, ready to crack it open at a place marked ‘prawning’.

But to Hortense, who’d always sat on the bright side of the bed each day and had never listened to the blues much before, past moments were neither so vividly memorialised for the bliss they’d brought nor as firmly fixed for being occasionally less than blissful. Most days were much like the rest. But yes, she’d been happy, was happy, she realised now. Somehow the pink bottle of pills with their promises of doom and the true end of her driving, their confirmation that the heart was just a muscle, had given her this, a chance to look back and see there was nothing to hide from.

So as she sat in the hot light of her car driven by a girl who slept each night in Sara’s clay-speckled remains, when she turned back, even reluctantly, what came first like a paper boat down a river? Beyond the passing hills, the scarred green and gold land of her life, came the first face of Jack, at his high tin shack among the snow daisies. Standing on the porch in his bent hat and open leather jacket worn at the elbows, hands cupped at his chest, still clutching his lighter after he’d lifted his head from the flame, cigarette gripped between his lips and already blowing the first smoke out into the bird-loud day. He was looking up, just then spied her watching him from the ajar door of the loo. She was nineteen and was beginning finally to understand what the world meant when they said in love. She was in it all right, wading around up to her thighs in the fast wet river of it.

There were people for whom career or motherhood or painting was their greatest achievement, their whole opus – love was hers. Her taste for the pink beads of grapefruit, blue ski suits, summer thunder, the shine of a degreased engine and the feel of the wheel in her hands, all of these she’d give up for a single look again at Jack. And she had loved her children, she did still, but mostly because they were made of him. Some nights she pretended he was out camping somewhere and not years buried and she’d dwell instead on the fire he’d be making by the river, the snap and smell of it and the rough, nail-bitten strength of his hands cracking branches.

It was only when she’d turned eighty that she began to drift from him, grew older than he’d ever been, twenty years now older and a bit, though still she spoke to him after that, of course; she just tried to teach him things instead. About the Queen’s letter at one hundred. The inevitable passing of everybody you once called a friend.

‘Turn right down this road here,’ Hortense instructed Hazel on their way home.

Hazel turned. They slowly bumped down a small back road leading from the Snowy Mountains Highway to the lake’s eastern shore.

Hortense felt her eyes grow wet, her throat hot.

‘See there?’ She pointed out the window. Hazel stopped the car and looked. ‘The bones of that big tree trunk in the water?’ Hortense rolled her window down and poked her nose out and, eyes closed, took in the autumn smells, mud and mushrooms and mandarins and roasting trout skin. Those old days. ‘It was once a willow. It sat on the edge of the Eucumbene River where we used to splash in the summer, Jack and me and, later, all of us; Esme, my youngest daughter Pictoria . . . though it was bloody cold even then. Just below the water line there, a fair way down, there used to be flowers, every year tied to the trunk; every year at the same time, about this time, in fact, the flowers would appear. One day they wouldn’t be there, and the next they would, but we never saw anybody put them there. Anyway, beside his mountain shack, Jack had one special place. Under this willow on the bank of the Eucumbene River. I like saying that to myself – you should try saying it too: under the willow on the bank of the Eucumbene River. Isn’t that nice? When I say it like that it’s a phone number and I call him up exactly as he was on the day I realised what I’d give up for him. I was only nineteen when I met him, you know, and he was my first and only love and it took a few years just to get what loving might mean down the track – and by that time, there’s no going back . . . I was about twenty-one, on this day that I’m telling you about, which would’ve made Jack about thirty-six. Esme was sleeping in a laundry basket we always carried her around in and we’d left her under the willow – have you ever lain underneath one? They swish like hair, all green light, and my Ez always slept like a log under them. We’d done some fishing, and Jack and I were lying in the long grass with our bare feet, I could feel the curl of his toes around mine, and we were talking low and close and so quiet probably only the ants could hear us. We didn’t want to wake the baby; we wanted more minutes of the day, like this, under our hats. We’d been drinking Jack’s home brew. Half of it had exploded under the house and he reckoned the rest could go any moment, so we were springing them open warm, drinking the froth. I was lying with my chin on Jack’s shoulder and I was part drunk, I think, and felt like crying because I suddenly realised he would die first. And then I heard a cry from under the willow, but it wasn’t Esme, that I knew, and at first I thought it was me, that I must actually be crying not just thinking it. Except that Jack sat up to listen. Then I knew it wasn’t me either. I bolted through the willow branches and found a woman kneeling at the base of the tree with Esme in her arms and kind of choking with crying. Esme hadn’t even woken, the woman was so gentle. So soft. And I didn’t even yell because I still didn’t want to wake her, I just said, “What are you doing?” and she looked up so surprised to see me and she said, “It’s mine,” like the baby was a coin she’d found first, but then she realised and just put her down. “I thought . . . I’m sorry,” she said and then turned around and fastened her flowers to the trunk of the tree. “My daughter fell into the river here, hit her head and I thought God had given her back, given me another, in a basket, like Moses.” But she was embarrassed to admit it, you could see. Fair enough. And then she left. But there was a part of me that almost said to her, You can take her – not because I didn’t adore my daughter, mind you, but because it seemed to be making this woman so happy to hold her and I was drunk on love and sun and warm beer and I thought maybe I was too young to have a child in a laundry basket. It’s silly, I know – it’s just something. But that was there . . . that tree there. So much happened . . .’

She sighed. ‘Oh, Jack . . .’

Once she was drunk on warm love and sunny beer.

He called her Tenny by the river, her secret name.

He’d called her that on his last night.

‘When did he . . . pass away?’ Hazel asked. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Oh, Hazel, so long now. He’s been gone thirty-six years and we were only together forty-six so it’s catching up, but it gets no easier, really. I mean, it does . . . you think you’ll just die together, then you kind of hope you’ll go first, you know? You don’t want to deal with it. I think life’s ludicrous without hope, but there’s two things you can pretty much count on – the death of your parents, and the death of your husband. You’re not getting around those. But you get to a point finally when you realise you have to say, “It’s okay. You go first.”’ She stared out the window, because she wanted to cry and crying was not something she did well, especially not in front of a girl who chopped wood for fun. By the time she was twenty-three she had grown tired of being a mother, but she had never, ever grown tired of being with Jack, so she had never left him. He was the one who finally, absolutely, had to leave her.

At the end, he rested more than not. He had insisted on being up the mountain, though breathing was such an effort it kept him awake and then he’d be so tired from breathing, from being awake all night like the white face of a clock, his heart all rasp and tick so close to the chest, so loud he could hear it hammering in his ears, that he’d just doze off, a skeleton of worn bones. He slept in a single bed under the window because he kept her awake otherwise. She didn’t mind being kept awake. But he insisted. That was what she regretted most. Those last nights spent separately.

She got up about midnight; Jack was awake. Her nightgown strap had torn – she hadn’t had time to fix it, she was so busy taking care of him – and the strap was just hanging down around her breast and as she went past him on her way to the loo, he’d smiled, with difficulty, and said, nodding to the strap, with a mischievous smile, ‘Tenny . . . Did we have fun?’

When she got up two hours later she thought he was resting, but when she put her hand on his chest it was already cold. The source of the most fierce sadness known. Not just that she hadn’t been with him when he went, but that she’d missed the end of his warmth like steam spiralling from a cup of tea; there was none left to take with her. She still crawled into that single bed with him. Tried to warm him up one last time, to hold the body she knew better than her own. Who had she looked at her whole life, but him? Certainly not herself or why would she get so shocked every time she caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror? It was him; his face she knew, his face she watched change and grow. Him she caught in the biggest grin she’d ever seen when he’d done some work he was proud of. He’d never admit in advance that he didn’t think he could do it until it was done and then, there he was, grinning and thumping the pillow with his fist, I did it.

Afterwards, after the cold hug all night in his bed, feeding him warmth just to get it back again, she realised that the thing she was meant to do with her life was him. Out of all the changeable faces in the world, all those faces passing her by on the street, in the shops, somehow she managed to find his. It was all him and she did it.

‘I got mine, Hazel . . . He was mine and sometimes I didn’t hold on like I should have, I let things slip – got old and selfish and wanted it like this and wanted it now – but I never let him slip far enough that I couldn’t catch him again like windblown apple blossom. You can’t catch it all, you can only catch one if you’re lucky – one pale frail petal . . .’

And Jack had thumped his fist on the pillow, grinning and loving and she had thumped along with him, her boy, fifteen years older but he was still her boy and later, cold in her arms that were growing colder by the second trying to take the cold from him, hers was the only heart thumping and he was still her boy, and oh yes, they’d had fun.

CHAPTER 28

RHETT AND LUCETTA HAD saddled up the horses just after they ran into Hazel, packed a tent and warm clothes, and had filled the saddle bags with all the supplies and equipment they’d need up in the mountains. They’d ridden the back roads north until they met the Snowy Mountains Highway and then rode slowly west along its edge, passing the odd car.

As soon as they could, they left the highway on an unsealed trail, crossing the dry groove of the Goorudgee stream and up into the treeless Nungar Plain where Rhett’s father used to graze the cattle long before Rhett was born. Rhett felt the need to ride these mountain routes, walk the scars that were only visible if you knew where to look. Mostly, the alpine grasses had covered over the diggings and ruts of the past. The bogong gatherers were long gone. The explorers were gone. The miners were gone. The graziers were mostly gone. The high lease plains had been abolished. The National Parks and Wildlife Service had just begun mustering the last of the wild brumbies from the heights of Dead Horse Gap, luring them with salt into pens and transporting them out of the park.

Instead, tourists. Masses of skiers descending each June and staying until early September, by which time they’d have worn down the fresh white fields and mountain passes to long gouges of mud. Blazes of colour, in matching parkas and snow pants.

But the path Rhett wanted to travel couldn’t be so easily marked or packaged or sold.

He and Lucetta rode across the bare, dried plain and over the knolls and the brittle grasslands and saw the stark circles wild pigs had scoured into the ground, and then rode higher, out of the frost hollow and into the woodlands where, in spring, pea flowers, buttercups and violets bloomed. Alesandra once told him that Count Paul Strzelecki, the Polish explorer of Mount Kosciuszko, had sent an alpine flower home to his secret love Adyna, petals pressed between the thin, folded sheets of a letter, though Rhett couldn’t remember how the story between them had ended. He had a feeling it ended badly.

They rode and watched as the golden afternoon light sifted down over the low-lying stretches that offered them a world far beyond their tiny peninsula, north all the way to Canberra and south along the coast to Eden, and felt themselves stretch too, with the view. They picked their way around the sprouting rocks and through sparse patches of forest and leaned under the low, twisting branches of gum and caught wind bursts of leaf and bark in their hair.

Black cockatoos and currawongs warned of coming wind and rain that never came. Only the occasional raindrop fell, as if lost from the fold as a cloud swam over, disappearing beyond the mountains.

They rode higher, into a wave of horizon and sky stretched with strings of white cloud until the lake was a luminous blue puddle in the shape of a jewelled hand beneath them, and then it disappeared entirely, as if sucked down into the valley floor which might have been the past, hidden from view by the eastern ridge that gradually formed as they rode, rising up between where they were and where they had been.

They rode slowly over the eastern slopes for nearly two weeks under a waning moon. Sometimes along the rocky slopes they felt perpetually tilted, riding towards the forever-receding V where one slope met the next in a replenishing wave of hills, cut by lengths of valley creeks that appeared only to vanish at the next bend.

At night, the blue dispersed and the black swept down around them until they could not see each other’s faces. They played cards by firelight – go fish and gin rummy – and Lucetta always won. They drank rum straight from the bottle until their lips were dry and then they splashed cold water over their mouths and slid their mouths together.

But their days were slipping like fog through their fingers.

Tonight they were sleeping back down at the windy western base of Mount Nungar in a grove of alpine ash. The low, grey afternoon clouds before them were brushed with pink. The birds dashed through the trees and seemed to pull the heat from them, because soon after, the temperature dropped abruptly. The quiet twig-cracking time came on, raking away the ground’s debris, raising against the brown and grey wooded tones the fluttering, nylon blue dome of their tent.

Nearby, a kilometre beneath the ground, was the sixteen-kilometre long Murrumbidgee–Eucumbene tunnel, diverting west vast quantities of water, a quick, rushing secret whose vibrations they might feel if they pressed their palms to the ground. Horizontal waterfalls.

Once these flats had been scattered with work camps, rows of white tents like teeth; now, no trace was left. There had been a debate, some time back. The men had wanted to mark the sites of the construction camps with some kind of plaque, some small engraved sign to say we were here, but National Parks and Wildlife had said no, there’d been enough damage already. But the ground didn’t hold these men’s footprints as the moon’s surface had – though maybe the earth would keep them, Rhett thought, in the private reaches of its ice-scratched slopes, like the rainforest fossils found in stream sediments under the basalt. The tread of a boot. A crushed hand bone. The hot, cherry guts of a punctured torso that burst beneath the ground and mixed with the mud and oil and soil and ooze and flowed onward.

They made a little fire in the lean of a boulder. They shed clothes briefly by a circle of coals, shed the night. Afterwards, Rhett was squatting, re-dressed, by the flames. He watched as Lucetta turned naked in the light, grinning, arching her back, and the flames glowed red, then orange and pink around her, her illuminated skin. His cock twitched again. He put his arm out, in a gesture of come here, wanting to hold the hot flickering of her.

‘Why is it that as soon as a guy gets laid he starts making lame sex jokes?’ she asked suddenly, shivering, quickly donning her jumper and thermals.

‘I didn’t make any lame sex joke. I didn’t say anything. Did I say something?’

‘I could feel one in the air . . .’ she teased. She said these things. She said these things and he never knew if he’d overstepped some invisible boundary; some unspoken line that men were meant to know about. Something he hadn’t been told that would ruin every thing for having been broken. He didn’t know on some level how true he could be with her; they were at times – especially night times when any drinking had been done – still playing their games of retreat.

The temperature of hers, when it came, sent him half crazy.

‘Remember that time you took me camping – how old were we? Ten?’ She sat down beside him.

Rhett kneeled before the fire, pushed a stick into it and the coals shattered. ‘You were ten. I was twelve.’

‘How hilarious was that?’

He shrugged, sitting back down beside her. ‘Was it funny?’ He lifted his fingers through the ends of her long hair.

‘You were so cross. When you couldn’t get the fire started.’

‘The matches were wet. Anyway, we got one going.’

‘It was like the world’s littlest fire. And we forgot the jaffle iron.’ She laughed. ‘I got hungry and took the boat home and you wouldn’t come with me.’

‘I said I was going to spend the night and I did.’

‘Stubborn.’

He shrugged, still absentmindedly tugging at her hair. He didn’t say how small he’d felt when he woke up shivering and alone beside a fire that hadn’t even burned. His brother Andy had to come across in the boat to collect him.

‘When we get back, I want to take you diving.’

‘Oh.’ She was quiet.

‘Oh?’ he repeated.

‘I can’t go underwater,’ she said determinedly. ‘No, Rhett.’

He nodded. The white smoke rose into the black.

‘Don’t be upset about it. It’s just part of my past.’

‘It doesn’t feel like it sometimes.’

‘I’d be fine if you talked about old girlfriends,’ she said.

‘But why would I? I’m over them.’

‘And you don’t think I am?’

He shrugged. ‘You talk about him a lot.’

‘I do. I talk about him. I think about him too. In the beginning, I used to compare you, even. I kept saying to myself, Joe was this or that, Joe’s body did this, and now I’m still comparing you, but you know what? You’re coming out ahead.’

He almost smiled. ‘Well, I’d hope so, considering I’m the one that’s here.’

She gave him a teasing punch in the stomach. Her jaw clenched. He grabbed her wrists and held them away from him, gripped them tightly, dared her to doubt him and felt the thrill of his body, his living body, what it could do, what it could do to her and how she laughed like a child again when he held her. Wrapping his arm around the back of her head, pushing her mouth towards his. He felt bold. He didn’t know any other way to keep her but to make his body her haven and her habit.

The next day, they headed south, and soon crossed the low, ankle-deep Eucumbene River, and Lucetta led him onto the open ridge and found a fire trail that led them south-west towards Tabletop Mountain. ‘It’s this way,’ she said, studying the map. They followed the path for a long while before it snaked east, down the hill and through the clumped, snagging brush.

‘Up here,’ she said, peering along the steep arch to where the smooth, pink biceps of the snow gums snaked from outcrops of dark, almost black rock.

The horses scrambled uphill while Rhett and Lucetta lowered their faces into the bristly manes and breathed the rich, damp coats and kept their heels close to the ribs, letting the afternoon sun stow away on their backs until they neared the summit, when it flew up into the branches of the trees.

At the top, they found it: Jack’s hut, near the eastern ridge, in a triangle of wind, painted in the afternoon light with the long shadows of snow gums. It stood in a clearing the bush had almost taken back. The place he had lived and dreamed and ate the occasional black cockatoo and died in his sleep. A mud slab shack, built in 1942 according to Hortense, with a stone chimney and sheets of corrugated iron for a roof.

Nearby, Jack’s old, lonely apple trees covered in lichen.

The wind scrabbled at their hats and the back of their hair.

They hauled their gear off the horses. Inside, Lucetta found the initials carved into the splintering window sill, just as Hortense had told her: H W + B J W, the B for Brumby. So many other initials had been added since then that Hortense and Jack’s seemed but the smallest ring in a tree that had lived a thousand years. They found the old wire above the fireplace that Jack might have dried his socks on. A draughtboard with playing pieces made from stones and corks and bottle caps and gumnuts sat on a shelf under the bubbled window glass next to a neat row of black and clear and green bottles. The walls were papered in torn yellowed newsprint. Above the wooden bench that ran along the wall to the left of the door, next to the fireplace, Lucetta read a 1955 article that claimed Australia was hoping for a population of one hundred and twenty million by the middle of the twenty-first century, in order to properly defend itself. A column next to it announced a great campaign to celebrate the arrival of the one-millionth migrant.

Nearby, splintery slabs housed the fireplace, forming a series of shelves and cupboards across the wall. Another shelf, this one of stone, had been built over the hearth, a place to rest the pan when it was hot. A series of hooks had been hammered into the crossbeam, one still pierced the handle of a cast-iron frypan and another an old rag of a tea towel.

It seemed strange, Lucetta said, to find the handmade stools and side benches Jack had hammered together, knobbly gum legs still standing in shallow tin mining pans, presumably once filled with water, to keep the ants off the food. To know Jack sat there, having a drink of tea by the fire while it rained outside; that Hort and Esme and Pictoria visited on summer holidays, and all four of them had sat in this very room, scraping their forks against the tin plates.

Lucetta built a fire to bake sweet potatoes while Rhett fed the horses pellets from a nosebag and watered them before tethering them to the ground for the night.

‘I wonder what happened to the table,’ Rhett said, looking around as he came in.

There was a story Lucetta knew, and by the fire she told it. Later, it seemed as if she had ridden all this way with him in order to tell it.

Hortense didn’t come down for three and a half days after Jack died. Somebody might have pulled her away from his body, if somebody else had been up there, but she was alone. She lingered over him the next morning, she tidied his house and made a pot of coffee just like Jack would have done, and the smell of that coffee brewing on the fire nearly killed her. Afterwards, she just sat quietly among birds, as he had so many mornings of his life, and tried to get inside the feeling of it. She carved their initials into the window sill with his knife and threw the knife and yelled and retrieved it and carved a big, fat bloody heart around it and left the knife stuck in the wood. But the main thing that preoccupied her was what the hell she was going to do with him now. She was digging strong – even at sixty-six she could still mend her own roof – but knew she couldn’t bury him without his daughters seeing him one last time. It was spring already, and the mountains were leaping into flower, which meant into heat. There’d be no time to go down for help and get back before Jack decomposed. No, she had to take him with her. Yet having figured that out, she realised she had no idea how to get him down the mountain.

She could slump his body over the back of his horse, but that old bitch hated her and Hort couldn’t guarantee, once Lady Charlotte worked out that the only one she had any inclination to answer to was no longer leading the way, that she wouldn’t just up and leave, back to her wild brumby roots. Jack would like it better, anyway, if Lady Charlotte were just let free.

Hort could lay Jack down on a sled board and wrap him up like a mummy and hitch a rope to Chester, the stockhorse she’d ridden, and glide him gently down, but somehow the mountain just brought to mind all sorts of mishaps, with the sled sliding out over worn, wet tree roots and down the slopes, breaking the rope and sending poor old Jack plummeting. Even if she managed to find and lift a fallen tree trunk to use as a dray drag to keep him from sliding, Hort didn’t trust any scenario involving herself atop those four skittish legs and a sled with her dead husband on it. Four wheels she liked, but four legs?

Which gave her an idea.

She set to work at once, dismantling the legs from the kitchen table and gathering every strong old paling she could find around the place. These she assembled into a low-sided coffin with the tabletop as its floor. She sawed four rounds from a log whose smallest rings had decomposed and chipped holes with the morticing axe and cut axles to fit those and put the whole wobbly contraption together until it stood, relatively level, outside the shady back door. It was nearly evening, so she went in and cooked some tea and talked to Jack, while Lady Charlotte galloped from one end of the pen to the other all evening, snorting and itching to make a break. When Hortense got up at dawn, the horse was long gone, had broken right through the sliprail fence.

Hortense padded the inside of the coffin with hay and leaves, wrapped Jack’s body in the sheets and eiderdown, and, with some difficulty, carried his body to the coffin and laid him down inside. She covered him with more hay and packed the edges. She had already cut two small holes at the front, side by side, and through these she threaded a long braided stockwhip. She removed the hay shed’s door and hinged it to the top of the coffincar and closed the door gently. She secured it with a drop latch and attached both ends of the stockwhip to Chester’s saddle horn. These she would hold, one on each side, like steering reins. The horse would have to cope. They’d go slowly, but hell if she wasn’t going to drive Jack down the mountain in style.

She took the cleanest way she knew. Back down the grassy, gently sloping eastern side, avoiding the creeks and mud and most of the rocks, and then turning, backtracking almost, to head north-east on the plain down towards where the land would eventually meet the Eucumbene River. The coffin had no brakes, of course, but she had secured a small log to the back with a rope, and the wheels were wonky enough not to get carried away. She kept to the fields of new thick grass to prevent him from speeding off. More often than not, the wheels got bogged and tugged on the whip, causing Chester to stop in confusion. In particularly tricky spots she had to get off the horse and gently cascade Jack down a slope by hand, like navigating a little boat through a rocky river.

Hortense rode into a smattering of rain and then out, through the dripping, ribboned trees. She rode into a cloud of fog and the fog seemed to hover just beyond them, a pocket that obscured the land ahead but didn’t hide a twig or stone in close proximity.

The fantail cuckoos sang woo-pa-ooo-po.

The currawongs replied ahh ahh ahh.

She rode the pale misty path in a haze of green and plum pine and soon came upon a gate. An old, decayed orange gate set into the middle of the path. The gate was latched to a gate post. There was this frame around the gate and the gate itself, but no fence on either side, no house, nothing else to spell out a human presence. Hortense tugged the horse’s reins to the left.

Chester wouldn’t budge.

She tried to steer him around it to the right.

He wouldn’t budge.

She looked at the horse and then at the gate for several minutes. Then she sighed, climbed down, undid the worn latch and pushed the gate open. She climbed back on the horse and directed him through perfectly, though one of Jack’s wheels got caught on the edge of the frame and she had to climb down again and realign him before pulling him through. On the other side she closed the gate again and she seemed to hear the final, dull echo of a large door shutting somewhere inside the mountain and the birds heard it too, for they flew out of their trees, crying ahh ahh ahh.

She continued down the path a little way until she came upon a red and white road sign that had been positioned against the trunk of a tree: PREPARE TO STOP.

Just behind the sign, and beyond the blue vapour of fog, a small party of Snowy Authority workers had parked themselves in a patch of sunlight. They sat in a circle of deckchairs, using coolers for tables, enjoying their morning tea.

‘Am I to stop?’ she asked.

‘Huh?’ One of the men looked up, his mouth flaked with pastry.

Hortense pointed to the sign. ‘It says prepare to stop. I don’t see any roadworks around here, so I take it I’m free to proceed?’

‘You might prepare to stop for a cuppa,’ said one.

‘I’ve done more stopping than starting, if you ask me,’ she answered curtly.

‘Whatcha got there?’ Another worker had lifted his chin in her direction.

‘My husband,’ Hortense answered, and didn’t elaborate.

A couple of eyebrows went up, but if the men were disturbed, they didn’t show it, but continued draining their Thermos cups and sucking their slices of milk sponge.

‘Aren’t ya afraid of riding all alone up on these plains?’ one young man asked her. ‘That something’ll happen to ya?’

Hortense answered that things had been happening to her for sixty-six years and she didn’t expect them to stop happening now. She said all fear, anyway, was fear of death and they were all going to die sometime, so why be afraid of what they already knew would occur?

‘It still takes you by surprise,’ the man said.

‘It tries,’ Hort answered. ‘It tries.’ And continued on her way.

Occasionally, then, as she wove down the mountain towards the sapphire lake, eyes closed, letting the horse just lead her home, letting the wind hold her up, Hortense would turn and almost grin at the sight of Jack bobbing through the waving green grass and the beads of purple sarsaparilla, the little cart squeaking along, its wheels turning so earnestly, and she had to stop herself from getting down and flinging the door open and expecting to find him there grinning too. She knew that, whatever he felt about the brumbies, he had been the last grace in those mountains.

When Rhett woke by the fire’s crackling pink coals, Lucetta had already gone to bed, though her story still hung in the air like Hortense’s fog. Outside, the wind pierced the trees around the shack, determined to uproot them. Rhett could see them waving through the window in the luminous dawn.

There was something bubbling beneath his happiness. The thing he’d wanted for as long as he could remember wanting anything was here before him, pulling his hips into hers. They were banging hips and open lips and the sound their teeth made when they came together nearly shattered the darkness in him. But sometimes he had to quickly turn away or risk breaking down into pieces too small ever to be gathered up again.

He watched Lucetta sleeping. The rise and fall of her chest. He knew you could try to make what you felt separate from the world and untouchable to outside forces, but you couldn’t stop the birds flying loops around you, their paths like ropes tightening, tightening until you couldn’t breathe.

There would always be a beginning and always annihilation somewhere, and an end.

So it almost didn’t surprise him when, as they were leaving later that morning (two and a half weeks now gone by his hazy reckoning), Lucetta, having taken one last look around her great-grandfather’s shack, had stepped out into the wind, had yelled I love you! and, having heard it fly past him on a raft of birdsong as Billy started his descent down the worn path towards home, Rhett had turned to see Lucetta on the doorstep, her hair lifted upwards by the sky into a great, yellow halo, and Billy, skittish in the bluster, had stumbled on a tree root and, unable to right himself even with Rhett’s sudden yank back on the reins, plunged himself and Rhett down the slope.

The currawongs, never flinching, cried ahhh ahhh ahhh.

CHAPTER 29

‘OF COURSE, MY MOTHER would have all the good stories.’ Esme touched a finger to the bent white edge of the old photo.

Her throat was bitter.

She was hunched against her pillow and Hazel perched nearby, on the edge of a chair. The porridge that Hazel had carried on a tray lay untouched on the bedside table. Its steam had long curled away into the room’s upper reaches.

Hazel had found the album in the back of the wardrobe when she was looking for another hot-water bottle and had brought it to Esme on the tray with the breakfast. The plastic casings between the pages stuck together and Hazel helped her to unpeel them. Hazel thought it might have cheered Esme up, but turning through dozens of tiny black and white and late sixties colour photos of Hortense in some far-flung town, or next to her baby-blue Valiant on the side of a highway squinting into the sun, seemed to have had the opposite effect.

Under each photo, Hortense had scrawled not where she had been, but what car she was driving. The album began with 1962 S Series Chrysler Valiant, though, further in, the Valiant disappeared and was replaced with 1971 Ford F100. All of her previous cars seemed to have been blue.

‘She left us after Dad’s funeral, but I’m sure she’s told you that. About all her travels,’ Esme remarked. She had been distressed to find there were almost no photos of herself over the last thirty-five years taken anywhere other than inside or outside their house. ‘She’s had a more interesting life than I have. I’m sure that’s why you enjoy spending so much time in her room.’

‘I enjoy spending time with both of you,’ Hazel insisted, but Esme had already shrunk. ‘I think I’ll try to rest, Hazel,’ she said, and her voice faded, taking the cool note of bitterness with it, as if her body didn’t have the strength to begrudge another thing.

‘You think the world is so big when you’re young, but as you age, it shrinks, doesn’t it?’ Esme added quietly.

‘I guess it does.’

When Esme didn’t say anything more, Hazel added, ‘I’ll leave the porridge here for you, shall I?’

‘Thank you, dear.’

Esme’s head was turned towards the window. The overcast Wednesday morning was restless, blustery, and the corridor, once Hazel stepped into it, lightly shutting Esme’s door, was heavy and dim. As her feet padded down the carpet all the breathing in the house was, for a change, conducted at mezzo piano.

Hortense was sleeping, still propped up in her bed with the little portable TV only centimetres from her nose. She had nodded off in the middle of a Jerry Springer rerun, her favourite new television discovery.

The Doom was taking its toll. She looked older each time Hazel saw her. The other night, when Hazel had been helping her to change her nightie, Hortense had said, ‘I was thinking, Hazel . . . I was thinking who I’d like to have with me, when I’m dying, and I realise now, I’d want my mum.’

Now she lay, with her mouth hanging slightly open, her breath, once Hazel switched off the TV, audibly jagged-edged, windblown, steaming from between her parted lips, a bead of spittle caught in the creased corner of her mouth.

Outside, through the window, Byrne was in the process of wrestling with a tangle of sheets she was trying to drape over the Hills hoist, which spun away each time she bent to the basket. The cotton was explosive in the wind’s hands.

It had happened gradually, Hazel knew, over the last couple of weeks, but now in retrospect – as she hurried down the hall and out the back door to help Byrne with the sheets – it all seemed so natural, the way she had shifted, drawn slowly but palpably – snail-like, she’d even have to admit – into the house with Esme and Hortense and Byrne.

At first she came over to hear more of their stories, thinking that their words would somehow help unfold the stubborn exhibition from her body. That if she just had the right slant from those who had directly witnessed that world, it would all come together. Because all the photos she had carefully stacked and labelled into their appropriate shoe boxes at Burchill’s were really just so much stuff. She had the distinct feeling she was just pushing it from corner to corner, shifting from floor to drawer, book to box to floor again. She was putting off the inevitable reckoning in the service of ever more ‘research’, hoping to gather the pearl that would make it all shine.

Even Burchill had begun to crinkle his brow, inquiring ever patiently as he stuffed his lamb sausages with rocket and chives when she thought it would be finished.

Hazel found her answers to be increasingly vague. She stuffed her mouth with food, then went back to stare at the room. Instead she thought of the word ‘drowning’ and how it infused the language of love. Saturated. Engulfed. Submerged. Flooded.

‘Just something simple, Hazel,’ Byrne said when Hazel panicked. ‘Nothing fancy. Something that ordinary people can understand.’

For a few days, Hazel avoided going to Burchill’s altogether; she told him she was collecting more of the town’s oral history, and instead ended up next door over cups of tea and Anzac biscuits and talk. But after Esme caught Hortense’s flu and then Hortense caught it back again (only this time with a bit of stomach bug added in), sickness became a ball mother and daughter threw back and forth to each other, before lobbing it once, hard, at Byrne. One afternoon, a few days after Hazel first drove Hortense to town, Hazel went over and found Byrne almost in tears with a chest infection, trying to feed the chooks and, after putting Byrne to bed, feeding the dogs and making them all some lentil stew, Hazel ended up staying the night on the couch next to the wood stove.

It became a house of perilous inhalations and uncertain exhalations.

Though Byrne had been too sick to read, she was not too sick to worry incessantly about Lucetta, who, she was sure, despite the note saying that she’d gone camping with Rhett, had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

Over the next few days, Hazel continued to help with the dogs and the cows, the laundry and the vacuuming; delivering soup to the sick rooms, propping up pillows, filling hot-water bottles and going to town for more painkillers and prescriptions.

She felt some great, unexpected pleasure in putting herself entirely in the hands of these women, rushing from room to room and checking on her charges. Even after Byrne had finally crawled out of bed, Hazel hung around the house, helping her, and eventually Byrne made up Lucetta’s bed for Hazel to stay in.

‘It’s much too cold over there for you, Hazel,’ Byrne said firmly. ‘We want you to stay here as long as you like.’

Hazel thawed. She marvelled at the return of heat to her life, while by night they called and chatted through open doors until the hall was filled with sound and even the low, wet twist of a cough was a kind of welcome music.

‘Does my coughing bother you, Hazel?’ Esme would call out.

‘Oh no, but if you need me, just holler.’

‘Does my coughing bother you?’ she asked again.

‘No, but if you want me to bring you a drink of water, I will.’

Like electric points of light that flashed through the black spaces of her brain, Hazel found herself continually preoccupied with Esme, Hortense and Byrne. Esme, Hortense and Byrne. The four of them were becoming laced into some pact of which each would have their own memory, their own eventual understanding.

Meanwhile, ever since discovering another way to keep Hazel ‘posted’, and perhaps attuned to the thoughts that kept drifting her way, Hazel’s mother had begun to phone, her voice arriving at odd, unpredictable times, keeping Hazel up to date on her dubious recovery, until it seemed some days that there were five, rather than four, women spinning their choked and crippled circles through that house. Sometimes Hazel found herself watching the way each woman did things and thought to herself how mothers were nothing and everything alike. She caught herself thinking, My mom would never . . . Or setting the table in a way she knew would make her mother proud.

Sometimes, Hazel woke panicked in the middle of the night with dreams of fallen, injured women and couldn’t remember which mother in her life it had been.

Then the sound of the house returned to her, the crash of a spoon against china, the currawongs screaming above the trees; Esme and Hortense with their crisp talk in the kitchen, their conversations like sets of perfectly formed waves that only hinted at the deep force of the undertow beneath them.

But four days ago, Esme had refused to get out of bed, caught in her more familiar, bitter sulk, claiming the flu had taken every last ounce of goodness out of her, though Hazel secretly blamed the bottle of brandy she had begun to keep stashed under her pillow.

This was the state she was in when Hazel delivered the photo album to her bedside, hoping to ease a small patch of her misery, and perhaps in the process deliver herself from her own. For earlier that morning, as she delivered a copy of the Adaminaby Gazette to Owen Swan in his car, compliments of Esme, Hazel noticed with horror a large ad on page one which Burchill had placed without telling her: An Exhibition of the Drowning of Old Adaminaby, to be opened the following Monday.

Hazel had five days. There was no taking it back now. No time for useless dreams. People wanted facts, anyway, she told herself. She would have to give up on her vision of the heart of the thing. Thank god she’d already painted the walls. Tomorrow she would fill the room with found cabinets and shelving. She would haul in her assets. She would assemble and order and label; these things she knew. These things she was good at. Pin photos to low, movable walls, type captions. It would be fine. It was all anybody expected.

‘My exhibition opens on Monday,’ Hazel told Byrne when she reached the creaking, sheet-flung Hills hoist. It reminded Hazel of some wayward ship.

‘Oh, Hazel, I didn’t realise you had finished,’ Byrne exclaimed.

‘I haven’t started really,’ Hazel admitted, and got whipped in the face with a pillowslip. ‘Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s painted.’

‘It’s too bad your mother won’t be able to see it, Hazel. It really is.’

Hazel didn’t say anything. She knew what was coming; how easy it was for somebody else to say, Love your mother, love her better.

But instead Byrne said, ‘I love your mum. She’s so American. We talk about you.’

‘Of course.’

They carried the basket back to the house and, for a moment, there was only the wind between them. Then they shut the door and all was quiet.

‘My mother and I don’t speak, Hazel,’

Byrne said finally. Byrne dropped the basket and pulled out a chair and flopped down into it. Her hair had not a trace of grey yet, but her eyes were already old.

‘But I thought having a child made all the difference to your relationship with your mother?’ Hazel asked, sitting down beside her. ‘That’s what they say.’

They began to fold the laundry.

‘It didn’t help mine,’ Byrne replied.

‘Of course they don’t say what that means when your child is a dog,’ Hazel added, half in jest, glancing down at Josie and Scout.

‘It means she won’t leave you,’ Byrne said seriously.

‘She’ll die,’ Hazel answered matter-of-factly. She guessed there was a part of Byrne that, as much as she loved Lucetta, had felt strangely blessed by Joe’s death; it meant her daughter had not yet left home. Now, without Lucetta around, all Byrne saw was herself, aging quickly, two old ladies shackled with chains to her ankles, dragging them along the windy shore.

Byrne looked away. ‘Anyway, she’s free, she’s off riding, in love. You know, I can’t even get on a horse without feeling sick to my stomach. The last time I rode, Hazel, was the day my mother came back for her dad Jack’s funeral. I was fourteen, hadn’t seen her in nine years. I was out riding in that yard there, and then there she was, and I just went to pieces on the horse. She was near the house, watching me ride and I heard her say, “It’s a pity she’s such a plain thing.” I’ll never forget that. I don’t think I could sit on the back of a horse to this day if she was present. But that was just her way.’

Byrne tried to shrug the weight off. She stood and quickly busied herself in the kitchen, banging on the kettle and putting a cinnamon bun in the microwave and rummaging through the fridge.

The smell of doughy cinnamon quickly filled the room and Hazel thought of all those Saturday mornings when her mother got up early to make cinnamon coffee cake so that its scent could wake her; so that Hazel would know the exact temperature and smell of her mother’s love.

‘You know, when I was a teenager,’ Hazel said, ‘I once asked my mom how could the Buddha have been enlightened if the first thing he did was abandon his wife and child? “He wasn’t enlightened then,” she told me. But still, he embodies the man of enlightenment, and this is one of the things the man did. Named his child “The Obstacle” and then left. Can you imagine the issues the child probably had? Nobody ever thinks of that.’

Byrne laughed. ‘It’s true, Hazel. But it’s that first time you see them again, that’s what really sticks with you, because you kind of don’t remember when they left.’ Byrne sat down with her bun on a saucer and cup of tea.

‘It was 1966, did I say that already? It was the year they changed all the pounds to dollars, I remember. Everything you thought was worth something turned out to be worth nothing, that’s the feeling I got that year. You had to start all over, learn everything again. The houses had all been moved onto Bruce and Alesandra’s land and Sara was living next door. Oh, she was lovely. She made me a cup for each birthday . . . like this one here . . . Anyway, Bruce and Al had one five-year-old son, Andy, and Jason was on the way, though we didn’t know that yet. Rhett wouldn’t come for another ten years. Totally unexpected, that one. I used to babysit Andy after school. I’d put on records and we’d dance, although I never let Bruce see that! He was the first child I ever loved, like a little brother. It broke my heart when he died, but I only cried privately, because a mother, well, she has first dibs on sadness, I reckon. So, after Bruce found Hortense coming down the mountain dragging Jack’s body, Hortense kind of went into a slump. We all did a bit. She’d always been the one who set the rules in the house and Jack was the only father figure around. My dad, Charlie, said he couldn’t manage a kid on his own and went up north and I never saw him much. But after Jack died, Hortense stopped setting the rules and spent all her time working on her car. It was a Valiant . . . I don’t know if you’re familiar with Valiant drivers, but it’s a whole lot of tinkering and polishing. She said she was retiring and planning on setting off up north herself. Heading to Darwin. She would drive around Australia, she said, and nobody was going to stop her. If the car broke down, she’d get a new one. So there was some talk, and I know because I overheard a lot of it – I was a sneaky kid, you had to be – between Auntie and Mum about who would take care of me. To this day, Mum insists that Auntie cried and cried and demanded she have me and that Mum couldn’t resist Auntie’s strong will. That she threatened to kill herself if Mum took me away. Auntie says that Mum was possessive of me but didn’t actually want me, which makes no sense. Because how can you not want to possess what you’re possessive over?’

‘But you had Esme, right?’ Hazel asked. ‘I mean, did you think of Esme as your mum?’

‘Of course. And Auntie used to dress me up and take me into town, I guess to pretend I was hers.’

‘You were, in a way.’

‘Yes, but there was always this figure, this other person, invading my mind. Poking at me. When I got pregnant, my mum said, “Well, now you’ve made your bed.” But I wouldn’t lie in it. Not with him, anyway. I came back here. So then she said, “Of course, who would want you?” I couldn’t win.

‘But anyway, one night, during the week of Grandpa Jack’s funeral, I heard them shouting. Hortense thought that maybe it was time Mum took responsibility for her own daughter, that Esme should have a last chance to live her own life, she might still meet somebody, and Auntie seemed to be in agreement. They had taken care of me for nine years. I was sure I was going to be packing my bags then. I thought maybe I could go and live with Sara or with Bruce and Alesandra. I pictured myself as a potter’s assistant, glazing the pots, carefully setting the trays into the kiln, removing the fired cups . . . I thought about just leaving in the night on my bicycle so they could all lead their own lives, since I was obviously so difficult. But then Owen Swan announced he was finally getting married, at the ripe old age of forty-four, to Diane Clews, who was only twenty-six, and that there would be a small fireworks display near the tip that evening to celebrate the engagement. I mention this because up until that point in my life fireworks had always terrified me, because you never knew what to expect, loud or soft, you never knew when the explosions would come. But that night Auntie and I walked up the hill and she told me to keep my chin up and don’t ever let them see you cry. She held my hand as we lay on the picnic blanket and told me that my mum had left again that afternoon, and a second later the first firework went off and I didn’t flinch a bit, and I didn’t flinch once that whole night, because I knew from then on who loved me and who didn’t.’

Byrne’s blue eyes swam. Her cinnamon bun lay in shreds on her saucer.

‘And Esme never met anybody after that?’ Hazel asked. ‘I mean, to fall in love with?’

‘Oh no, Hazel, though we don’t talk about it.’

Hazel felt the concentrated force of a mother’s love burn through her. She looked up to find Esme standing behind Byrne in the doorway, in her house dress and cardigan and slippers, gripping the doorframe with swollen knuckles. She looked at Hazel, then she turned and, without saying a word, padded back to her room.

Hazel instantly excused herself, telling Byrne she was going to take the dogs for a walk.

She found the dogs far up the road, barking at the new postie, who was doing his best to fend them off with a stick. He thrust the mail at her and hurried off.

On the top of the pile was a small envelope addressed to Hazel, Museum Coordinator in an unfamiliar hand. She turned it over.

Mr Ivo Martinelli, Queensland.

Hazel had prodded Ivo the night of Joe’s anniversary barbecue to please send her anything that he could bear to part with that might be useful for the museum, but at the time he hadn’t seemed the type to follow through.

Now she tore open the envelope.

Inside was a single photo without any corresponding note. Hazel would be the first to admit that, being desperate for material, she was highly susceptible to suggestion. For now she lifted the glossy square that held two faces, and when she tipped it towards the light it seemed to melt into liquid reflection, a hieroglyph of paper and snow.

She turned it over. The scribble on the back read: Sue City, 1957.

CHAPTER 30

WHILE IT WAS TRUE that Esme loved Byrne like a daughter, that she had sacrificed many things for her (mostly nebulous things, for who could ever calculate what might have been?), it was also certainly true that, the day she heard Owen Swan was finally to be married after years of family jokes and hints in her favour, after years of secret, wayward, hopeful dreaming, Esme felt her last-chance door had at last slammed shut, and resigned herself to all that meant, dedicating herself to the double art of spinsterdom and martyrdom.

Soon afterwards, she noticed that her birthmark had faded. Really, her face had at last produced smatterings of the telltale brown spots and patches from years spent in the sun and the chocolate mark, by comparison, seemed pale and newly tired.

Esme had been on her way to the kitchen to poke around in hopes of another bottle of something alcoholic when she’d encountered Hazel and Byrne and her old humiliations sitting around with their elbows propped up on the dining table, deep in story.

She’d had another chance for a life seven years later, when Byrne, then twenty-one, finally left home. But no sooner had Byrne boarded the bus to Canberra, and then to Sydney, than Hortense bumped down the road in a blue Ford pickup truck with stickers plastered across the back from all the places that she’d visited, announcing that at seventy-three it was finally time for her to settle down and that she was moving back in with Esme.

Byrne returned anyway, pregnant, four years later. Esme helped her give birth to a baby girl that Byrne named after a piece of graffiti she’d seen scrawled on a wall in a Sydney lane-way: I love you Lucetta.

Esme removed her slippers and crawled back under the doona in her skirt and blouse and hose and there she lay. So much for getting up today. Her head was so heavy. Her old, familiar room was weighted down with objects, the dumb thud of things, her framed photographs, her clothes on hooks, immobile. She tried to imagine another room in which her dresser sat, long after she’d died, for furniture survived, could survive a long time; another room, in perhaps the year 2070, perhaps in a corridor somewhere by the sea.

She could hear Byrne in the next bedroom changing the sheets. She could hear the tap dripping in her little bathroom and knew she should get up and turn it off but couldn’t muster the energy to move again. She felt weighted as wood against a wall. Who am I? And where have I put my life? The drawers around her couldn’t possibly contain it all.

The flu had knocked her flat. Then something else had. How she longed for something.

Esme dozed. She didn’t sleep nights anymore. Preferred to creep and sip tea and brandy and starlight while Byrne slept with her door open, causing the dog to growl in annoyance from Byrne’s bed every time Esme made her way past. Occasionally, the phone rang at three am and it was Hazel’s mother. Esme didn’t mind taking the call. Hazel’s mum loved to talk weather just as well as Esme did. Here it is dry, one said. Here it is wet, said the other.

Now, in the dull, noon light, she dozed and the dripping tap punctured her sleep and she dreamed the house was drowning, drop by drop, filling with water and light and she was a child again, or at least she stood in the company of children, scuffling through the dirt in school uniform. When she woke, startled, sweating in a patch of sun that fell across the bed, her body felt not the slightest bit younger.

There was no point, it seemed, in going on, and no way to force a conclusion to the matter of a life. You couldn’t just throw down your cards and declare yourself out. Although it was true Charlie Crimson’s second wife had actually died of starvation recently, lying in bed and refusing to eat for months, in Esme’s opinion it took a lot of drive and dedication to depart this life like that. It took a strong woman and Esme didn’t feel herself, anymore, to be that strong.

Owen Swan seemed that strong. She still remembered the last time she saw him before he retired to the front seat of his car after Diane died of breast cancer at the seemingly infant age of sixty-two. Four years ago now.

Owen was old even then, as old as she was, in fact, his hat sloped down to one side, his trousers no longer hitched to braces although they needed to be. Even as an old man, he was still wearing the same shirt and hat and trousers, only his body had shrivelled inside them. She had watched from a distance as Owen had tried to move with an attitude of youth, and there was sadness in it, a refusal to abandon his boy waddle. Or maybe there was grace in it, a man whose compass would always point a certain way. He couldn’t undo the charge of his particular magnetic field, and why should he? Why should the outer contours of one’s inner self – one’s essential personal nature – be forced to alter with age just to suit or match the judgement of those who were still in the process of discovering their own?

Esme felt a lost stirring in her chest. A cloud melted away, leaving a lovely smear of light on her dresser.

Or perhaps it wasn’t a denial of Owen’s that she was determined to see in his old swagger, but rather some kind of recognition of inner strength; after all, she might appear similarly out of touch to somebody else and just as stubbornly herself. Esme was perhaps just an old body to be dealt with, a body to minister to, and placate, and eventually discard. Because she knew, if she knew anything, that Lucetta would soon be gone (Esme already tearfully feared she’d never see her again) and then Byrne, like Hortense before her, would pack up her car and go in search of the world.

All Esme had was herself. Her very particular but personal Esme nature. She had to make the best of it.

Hazel stuck her head into the room. She regarded Esme strangely.

‘What is it, dear?’

‘Esme, I just wanted to say I’m sorry we were talking about you. But it was all good. I mean, what Byrne told me. I think you’ve had an amazing life.’

Esme blinked, but turned her head away towards the window. ‘Oh, dear, I’ve not had it too bad, not too bad . . . It’s just been my life.’

‘Well, I think you’re an inspiration,’ Hazel continued.

‘I don’t know about that.’ She felt a cough clambering up her throat. Outside, the surface of the lake was ruffled in tiny, white-peaked, wind-lifted waves. There was a boat on the water. Esme wished she were on it.

‘Do you think –’ Hazel began. ‘Do you ever wonder if you might have been able to have both things, a career and a marriage, if you’d been born in another time?’

‘I don’t know, Hazel.’ The bone-dried shore out her window never changed. The dead trees stayed dead. The mountains shifted colour but that was all. It wasn’t fair for the weatherman always to say ‘fine’. It was not fine. Here it is dry as bones, she imagined herself telling Hazel’s mum.

‘These days, you don’t have to necessarily choose,’ Hazel continued. ‘But I guess in your day, you did.’

‘Yes, Hazel.’ Esme shifted in her bed. Felt as if tiny insects were crawling up her skin.

‘Sometimes I think there are certain things you can’t control,’ Hazel was saying, sitting herself down on the edge of the bed. ‘But things happen in orbits, I’ve decided. There’s a term in astronomy for when a planet is at its furthest point from the sun, the slowest point in its orbit. It’s called aphelion. I guess it’s the darkest point. Earth’s aphelion happens every year around the fourth of July, which is funny, being America’s Independence Day. But the thing about being in that darkness and shadow, at least for me, is that because it’s an orbit you’re always going to come back out to the light. Then there’ll be the opposite point, hopefully, eventually – the most concentrated brightness, speeding up, coming back to the sun.’

Esme didn’t say anything. She remembered the blizzard, the Fourth of July blizzard.

‘So I’m just saying, Esme, to you, but to me too, that you never know.’

‘When you get to my age, Hazel, you know exactly what your orbit looks like. You’ve been around it one too many times.’

She had felt for years now that her life was at its end.

Now, most keenly.

Hazel seemed about to open her mouth, her lips parted, then she shut them again. Her forehead constricted. ‘Anyway, this just came for you.’ Hazel proffered an envelope. She stood up.

Esme took the envelope from Hazel’s hand and gently tore the side of the white paper. Inside, she found a glossy brochure for the Birdsville Hotel.

‘Oh.’ She gasped with surprise.

‘What’s that?’ Hazel asked.

‘It’s Birdsville.’ Esme gazed at the image. The picture looked exactly right, so promising, almost like a Mexican cantina. It had the dying air of a last stop with its cracked red earth and feral dogs and the late, low, gold glow of a star that seemed to be perpetually setting, hovering just above the horizon in sundown mode.

‘Ah, so this is the famous Birdsville.’ Hazel smiled. ‘It’s pretty.’

‘Yes, I knew it would be. I just did.’ Esme clutched at the glossy paper while Hazel picked up the tray with the barely eaten porridge and headed for the door.

Then she looked up at Hazel suspiciously. ‘But where did you get this?’

Hazel shifted. ‘Like I said, it came in the post. Just then.’

‘But I didn’t send for it, Hazel.’

Hazel looked down, adjusted the tray in her hands. She shrugged. ‘Somebody must have.’

Esme looked back at the brochure suspiciously, but the beckoning, red sand soon swamped its dubious origin. Because she knew that while she lay in bed in a sulk and sipped her brandy and wandered the night corridors, watching her old films over and over, wishing sweet Minnie would come back, the clocks were ticking down. The moments were passing; the moment for anything ever to change was slipping away.

Meanwhile, this place, so long imagined, imaginary, lay there, just across the horizon. This red, dusty, true, reachable world.

CHAPTER 31

SHE’D BEEN GIVEN A second chance. That was her first thought. Not a repeat performance.

No, the world was not that unkind.

In that moment when Lucetta saw Billy stumble, Rhett yanking the reins, as Billy tumbled, throwing Rhett over his head, something strange had happened. While part of her body dropped out, as she stood there on the step and that cold inner rain fell, another part of her felt a great relief, too, that she was on time, not too late as before, that she had got herself to the right place when death, that ventriloquist, came down the mountain, ringing its bell from the mouths of birds.

Because this time Lucetta would prove herself worthy.

Still, she screamed. It was only natural. She quickly tethered Paris to a tree and sprinted towards the edge of the path where Rhett and Billy had dropped from view. She saw Rhett about twenty metres down, flung from the horse and now lying on his back, legs splayed, in a tangle of lichen and leaf. He was not moving. Her heart beat like a bird caught in a fist. She did not see Billy anywhere.

‘Rhett!’ She scurried and slid down to him, knocking her knee against a rock, and as she got closer, she saw that his eyes were open.

The rain ran through her body again in cold lashes, and when she reached his side, she was already crying.

His eyes blinked. Once, slowly.

‘Oh god, I thought you were dead.’ The flats of her hands lightly touched his chest, not wanting to put pressure on him in case anything was broken, yet wanting so badly to fling herself down on him, to hold him, to cry for days.

He lay motionless, eyes blinking, taking in the canopy of trees above him, the fluttering red smiles of gum leaves, still in shock.

‘Ahhhh . . . fuck,’ he finally said and lifted his right arm, looking at it distractedly. His hand limped forward and he moaned. ‘I think I’ve broken something.’

‘Put your arm down then.’ She carefully guided his arm across his chest. She was thudding as the cold adrenaline slipped away through her legs and out of her body; as she became The Girl Who Would Save Her Lover. She stroked the damp hair off his forehead, because he always hated it there.

‘Where’s Bill?’ He tried to sit up. ‘I just heard him.’

‘Just stay there. Don’t move for a second.’ Lucetta stood up and searched with her eyes through the heavy, striped red branches, the brown grasses and grey speckled rocks, and then she too heard him squeal.

Billy was directly up the slope and a bit to the left of Rhett and out of his view, lying on his left side in a bit of a ditch, and Lucetta could see the trauma from where she sat, the slick dark fur rising and falling heavily.

‘Stay there,’ she told Rhett as she scrambled back up the hill.

But Rhett had heard too. Now she could hear him rolling over in a crunch of twigs and bark and debris. She turned back and he was pushing up on his left elbow, and then onto his good hand, lifting himself, and the look in his eyes when he saw the horse . . .

‘Oh, fuck . . .’

Rhett was pulling himself up by a tree trunk, unsteady, trying to follow her, slipping in the leaves.

‘Fuck!’

‘Rhett, just stop! Jesus! Just let me look at him. Then I’ll come and get you.’

She knelt near Billy’s head. His eye was a black berry in a wide, white dish. His nostrils flared, his doughy dark lips pulled back each time he inhaled to reveal pale bluish gums.

‘Mate, mate.’ She touched the flat of her hand to the creamy patch of fur on his forehead. Then she slowly reached down with her other hand and felt along as much of his left front leg as she could access, the long bones and strings of sinews and muscle knotted with pain, and knew by the angle that it kinked out from his chest that it was fractured in a couple of places. Though she’d known anyway, in her heart, because a healthy horse didn’t lie down and squeal like that. He must have come down onto his left leg with a snap.

She reached under his jawbone and felt for his pulse, closing her eyes, counting.

The wind torpedoed through the trees; that and her concentration must have masked Rhett’s scramble up the slope. She turned, startled to find him behind her. He knelt too, his face pressed up against Billy’s nose, breathing him in.

‘It’s broken, Rhett. He’s in shock. Pulse is over fifty.’

‘Shhh.’

He didn’t look at her. He didn’t speak. Rhett’s breath was deep through his nose and for a moment, those two brown heads merged, trying to contain two kinds of pain.

Lucetta got up. She walked back up to the shack, leaned her face against Paris and whispered to her calmly.

She rummaged around in her bag for her kit. She pulled it out and looked at it. She was just glad she didn’t have to blindfold Billy and shoot him. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and cried.

When she returned, Rhett was lying on his left side at a right angle to Billy’s muzzle; they were nose to nose, eyes wide.

‘I’m sorry, Rhett.’

‘Can’t we just stay here, put a cast on it or something, rest him?’

‘Rest him?’

‘Yes, Lucetta. I’ve heard they sometimes make artificial limbs and things.’

She looked at him with disbelief. ‘You’ve been away too long, mate. He’s got a compound fracture. They get infected. Anyway, a horse doesn’t make a good patient and they don’t mend well. He’ll get fucking sullen if you try to keep him restrained. And even if I thought I could do it, which I don’t – I mean, what do you think I carry with me? I’ve got bandages, I’ve got antiseptic cream, I have wound powder . . . and it’s the middle of April, which means roads are going to close. I’m not going to stay up here all winter, eating rabbits, in order to save Billy. As much as I would like to,’ she added. ‘To save him.’

‘So you bring the means to kill the horse but nothing to keep it alive?’

‘Well, what do you suggest? You’re going to try to explain to him what’s going on? Why he’s in so much pain? C’mon. You’re being ridiculous. Think of him.’

‘I am.’

‘No, you’re thinking of yourself. Listen to you! You were the one happy to leave him for five years.’

He looked at her, but didn’t say anything. ‘I’ll get it ready, and you can do it.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Then I have to.’

Afterwards, they stood looking down at the body. Lucetta thought of Billy then, running, without pain. She saw him gallop past with Lenica and Thunder and Maisie and Bobby and Indie and Angel.

‘Do you want me to take a look at your hand?’ she asked.

‘In a minute.’

Lucetta left him and went back up to the shack and unpacked and broke kindling and built a fire and put the old cast-iron kettle on.

From time to time, she’d look out the window to see him sitting cross-legged, his back to the horse, looking down over the mountain. She understood his ache. When Lucetta’s first horse was put down, she’d stood in the paddock, hands clamped behind her, feet firmly planted, and would not close her eyes when the vet lifted the shotgun to Lenica’s forehead. She felt it was her job to carry her very first love over into the light through the force of her eyes alone.

Later, Byrne had touched her first two fingers and thumb to the back of Lucetta’s neck and gently squeezed. Both proud and perhaps astonished that her ten-year-old had such unseen stamina.

Lucetta had her cup of tea alone in the shack, listening to the wind.

When he finally came in, she was lying on the bed. He stood in the doorway and looked at her.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘There’s nothing that can be done about it now, so there’s no point.’

‘In feeling?’

‘It’s just a fucking horse, Lucetta.’

She got up and hugged him. ‘Don’t say that.’ He lifted his injured hand away. ‘Careful.’ His wrist was purpling, swollen.

She bandaged it up and made him a sling and gave him some ibuprofen to help dull the pain. ‘Sorry, that’s all I’ve got.’

‘Why don’t you just give me the green dream too?’

‘That’s not funny.’

He shrugged.

‘We have to deal with the body,’ she said.

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Don’t get stroppy, Rhett. Let’s just find a shovel.’

‘That ground’s too hard. Not that I can dig. And I’m not gunna have him chewed to bits by rodents.’

‘You can’t anyway. The poison would kill the other animals.’

‘Wind’s died down now . . .’

‘So?’

‘So, I’m gunna burn him.’

She breathed heavily. ‘Yes.’

They surrounded Billy with piles of kindling, stuck chunks of hardwood under his legs, covered him with dried leaves, and then made a tepee of long, thin gum branches which they laid across him.

‘Do you want to do anything?’ she asked. ‘Like –’

‘Just this.’ His face as blank as the day he first came back.

She nodded. Somehow, in the space of a day, they’d moved from ravishment to whatever came after ravishment. She briefly pressed one hand beneath her left breast, under her heart, as if ready to stop any spillages. She thought of herself as resilient. She knew she could calmly approach the soft, infected wounds of things and touch them gently, wash intestines that spilled out through a hole in the animal’s side and wrap them in Glad Wrap and set them in order again. She could stick her whole arm inside a horse to deliver the warm folded foal onto the cool scarf of air, the sharp hay. But she could not seem to deliver herself from a fear of alienation: his, her own, theirs.

It took ages to get the fire lit. To get the wood to burn hot enough without any petrol. Lucetta was in charge of searching out hardwood stumps and trunks and fallen branches, dragging them over. ‘I need a pile of them,’ Rhett said.

Her breath made clouds in the air and she was soon stripping off her outer layers, sweat sticky beneath.

Rhett shifted within himself, dispassionately dropped the wood into the flames with his good arm, used a big stick to move things around. The flesh roasted.

At home, if one of the calves died, Byrne saw it as a personal failure and burned it immediately to get rid of the evidence, bashing the legs with a hammer, chopping the head with a shovel, anything to make the bones disappear more quickly.

Lucetta and Rhett sat huddled all night in the icy air, silently watching Billy burn, taking turns feeding the fire, taking turns sleeping and dreaming and, occasionally, crying out.

Rhett dozed on his left side by the fire, his slung arm a hunched shape beneath the sleeping bag. The starlight wept down on him. There was no moon. She studied the fan of his lashes and the wrinkled skin under his eyes when he frowned and squinted, and the rough, black bristles of his face. She didn’t know how to touch this man and say by that touch what she couldn’t otherwise say.

How attached should she be to somebody who could make his face so suddenly cold? How not to panic the second Rhett left the room to go diving again, sinking, black-suited, under that plate of water? How to keep steady watch over a dying bird or dog or cow when she was eagle-eyed over the lake day and night; when her own muscles were continually coming unstitched no matter how much catgut or silk she closed them with?

She put her head to his chest and for a long second, caught between breaths, he seemed more dead than sleeping. A corpse called up, bound by tight rags of old feeling. She’d been fine until Rhett came, carrying Joe on his back like a friend picked up overseas, in a hostel, sharing a bunk. That distress of uncertainty. She didn’t want to have to feel it again.

The body burned for two days and two nights as they shifted the slowly shrinking carcass into smaller and smaller piles, using the bones of one part of the body to burn another, until only the head and the pelvis were left on their bed of ash. Rhett wrapped the skull in a spare flannel shirt.

So they would leave the next morning.

That night the rain came. The long awaited rain. Lucetta had risen to throw another log on the fire and stood at the window watching the distant lightning, patches of stars between low, fat clouds. When she climbed back into bed beside Rhett, she felt the shack’s draughts turn into cold wind, and all the leaves blowing, blowing through her.

Soon she heard the chilling tapping of fingers on the roof and the far call of thunder. Goose-prickled and still half asleep, Rhett wrapped his length in the sheet. Lucetta shivered and finally managed to coax the doona out from under him. He rolled over and grabbed her around the middle, pulled her close.

And it rained. It rained. She’d known all along it would.

At dawn, world dripping, the screaming birds dropping down out of the trees.

Rhett murmured and, when she glanced over, he opened one eye without expression, then let it flutter shut again. He went back to sleep, leaving her alone, though his cock stayed awake long after, watching her it seemed. She took it into her mouth, breathing him in.

The birds stopped when the rain returned. For hours it beat down.

They left later that morning, once the black cloud had moved off down the mountain, and the sun had yawned and stretched a little, leaving silver flashes of light on the gum leaves.

Lucetta saddled Paris while Rhett, one-armed, tossed stuff at her to pack and kicked at the last ashes that had been his horse. He removed the frypan and a few other items from one of the saddlebags in favour of the flannel-wrapped skull and Lucetta didn’t say anything. He hid those other things, along with his saddle, under the bed and said he’d return for them in spring.

She climbed up and he threw a leg over behind her, barely holding on to her waist with his left hand. He leaned his head against her back. She was reassured to find there was still love there, or something approximating it; a man in search of comfort, perhaps. She could feel his eyes floating closed.

They were going back.

They slowly descended the damp, lichen-blue-green mountain, taking extra care with her horse, following the inky cloud of rain they could see ahead of them. The lake in the distance, a pale lozenge.

They slept on the plain and reached the Snowy Mountains Highway by the next afternoon. The sky grew dark again, swirled around them heavy as blood, while the birds in the trees twittered nervously.

Paris’s hooves were loud clatters against the black Tarmac for ears attuned to the absorbing, thumping plain. A car passed them, headlights on for safety, travelling in the same direction. A child’s face in the window, gazing back at them.

‘When I worked in the toll booth at night, I used to wonder where they were all going to,’ Rhett suddenly said. ‘Home, I guess. Going home. I liked to think, “heading home”.’

‘But they could have been going anywhere.’ Because to Lucetta, that vision of cars, red lights streaming away from the gates, conjured only the lonesomeness of people, following yellow and black and white paths they hoped would take them some place better. After Joe never came back, she learned that all the worst places already lived inside you, so stay or go hardly mattered.

‘I was heading nowhere. Then I went to Anafi. My island. I’d reached the point of maximum distance. Fuck my family. Fuck everybody. I used to think that.’

They were riding back towards the jags of light, thunder. The trees waved in the stormy air.

‘And then this terrible tug, pulling me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to come back. But I’m back. And you’re back. But there’s this thing. It’s always in the way. Maybe it will always be there.’

‘It might be,’ she agreed.

‘I don’t know if I can handle that.’

‘I know. But he existed. I’m sorry if that hurts you. I’m sorry that he loved me first.’

‘Yeah.’ He chuckled kind of derisively. ‘Whatever.’

She stopped the horse and turned suddenly and looked back at him, but he was already swinging his leg over and climbing down, holding his bad arm aloft.

Heat radiated up Lucetta’s spine like an arrow through her. ‘You’re going to walk home?’ she called to him.

‘I need a walk. It’s okay. I just need a walk.’

It was not okay. She felt like ripping her hair out. Maybe exits were always like this. Going back. Lives. Chores. Families. How did people manage to make love fit into all of it? She wanted to be dazzled again with the light he carried. She wanted to be chucked on the bed and chewed up and swallowed.

‘Come on, you idiot,’ she called, following him along the road. The horse, its burden lifted, proceeded to trot. ‘Let’s at least get home. Then you can take off. Do whatever it is you need to do.’

He kept walking. ‘I’m serious. Just go away.’

‘Maybe it’s hard to take you seriously when all I see is a boy who used to hop down the road doing some worm dance,’ she yelled.

He turned around, walking backwards, offered her a sharp middle finger with his left hand. But his mouth twitched, holding back a sly glimpse of grin.

‘Let’s just leave our childhood out of this.’

‘Can we?’ she asked.

He stopped walking. In the distance, the hills were caught in swords of cloud-torn light and sheets of rain and seemed already to be greening.

‘Says the girl who used to wear a frog on her head as a hat,’ he said.

She swung her leg over the saddle and jumped down too, walking towards him. They regarded each other a long time. Testing the limits of their forgiveness.

‘Think of all the arguments that have happened. On this road. I bet at least one other has happened right here,’ Rhett said finally, and it seemed some neutral ground, some soft greening place between them.

‘Then it’s gone,’ she said, hoping. ‘Like a storm.’

‘What happens to the words? Where do they go?’

‘They catch on fire. At higher altitudes,’ Lucetta said, and smiled, but still they didn’t touch.

They scuffed back to the horse. Paris was cropping the new green shoots of grass next to the side of the road, casually chewing up their evidence.

When Lucetta looked at Rhett, the mountains visible in the background, a low, bumpy, blue strip, it was a photograph she knew, only now it was into Rhett’s eyes she was looking; and it was in Rhett’s eyes that she wanted, finally, to be gathered.

By the time they reached Frost Lane, they were soaked.

Strange blue mists fell over the lake. Even thicker, deeper puddles of ink moved in, and the thunder was like two palms on a bongo, welcoming the full-blown spectacle of storm. Birds taking flight, taking shelter. The pulsing bite of it, the adrenaline flashes. The rain fell like a broken necklace, beads bouncing to the ground.

As they trotted up the wet, pot-holed driveway that led to the three houses, hair dripping into their eyes, Lucetta could see in addition to the rain-blurry Monaro and her mother’s old ute, an unfamiliar red four-wheel drive, new, mud-splattered.

Inside her house, the lights flickered, threatening to blink out.

CHAPTER 32

YOU DON’T SEE EACH other for years and so you have to fit everything, all the love and all the hate and years worth of quarrels, into one afternoon. You want to feel bound to her, you want to open the door and take her into your arms. You want to whisper, How I’ve missed you, and say all the smallest things you’ve said to nobody, the stories you’ve never told. This time they will come out right; they will flow from you like water gushing from a tap. Instead, you open the door and the rain is pulled like silver string from the tip of her umbrella and it’s simply mesmerising how, in the puddle it makes on the lino, you swear you can see the reflection of her face.

But instead you say, ‘You’re dripping on the floor.’

Pictoria arrived during the heaviest rainfall in eighteen months. All that Sunday morning, soldier birds had stolen beakfuls of feathers from the ducks for nest fortification and the leaves turned up their silvered palms and every kookaburra within a ten-kilometre radius seemed to be doubled over with laughing. Trees teetered on the tips of their roots, like lighthouse keepers leaning over the edge of a cliff against the updraft, their coats billowing.

Esme had taken twice her normal dose of painkillers and brandy at lunch and on that buzz was shuffling along with the broom, humming, two-stepping, moving dust balls. She threw a tablecloth over a tower of old newspapers. It was too late to hide them and Byrne had shown no interest over the last few days in papers, new or old, piled or fallen. Ever since Hazel had returned to Burchill’s to finish her exhibition, Byrne had been flailing.

‘Never mind,’ Byrne answered when Esme asked her what was wrong. ‘It’s my burden.’

‘Now you’re starting to sound like me,’ Esme squealed.

‘Oh, I’ll get there, don’t you worry,’ Byrne sighed. ‘I’m next in the firing line.’

But while Byrne had sunk into the rut, Esme had brightened ever since Friday, when Hazel had returned from work secretly bearing Esme’s one-way bus ticket to Port Augusta in her jacket pocket. Esme had then booked herself a plane ticket to Birdsville. Esme would be leaving the next afternoon, and nobody except Hazel knew it.

‘I’ve cleaned this house for nearly thirty years,’ Byrne said. ‘It’s time I worked out what I’m doing with my life.’

‘This is about Lucetta.’

‘Of course it’s about Lucetta. She’s grown up. She’s in love. She’ll be gone soon enough, even if it is just two doors down. That’s her life. That’s not my question. My whole life has been Lucetta and you and Gran – and now? Who am I? Do I think it’s good enough to make a living from moving hair-balls, shuffling cattle and feeding a motley assortment of stray animals?’

‘I don’t know, Byrne. You love the animals.’

‘I’m in a transitional phase, is what I’m saying. Be prepared.’

‘I was born prepared, Byrne.’

‘Because something’s got to change.’

‘Don’t think yourself special on that count. I’ve got plans too.’

‘Good, Auntie, we can kaboom together.’

‘Mine start today.’

‘Might as well.’

‘A family tea.’

Esme glanced at the clock. Though she’d conveniently failed to mention to Byrne that Pictoria was coming, it seemed too late now. In any case, the downpour interrupted the telling, came in cold, sudden fat drops that clattered on the roof like nails.

Esme and Byrne stood together at the window; soon Hortense joined them and together they marvelled at the rush of gutter water pouring into the tank and Byrne even clapped and sang a little rain song she’d loved as a child. They watched raindrops pound the dirt, forming rivers that snaked down the hill to the lake, until the windows steamed, closing them in.

‘Now the snails will think they’re destined to take over the world,’ Hortense said as the doorbell rang.

‘Are you expecting anybody?’ Byrne asked Esme, surprised.

‘That’ll be the chief snail,’ Hortense continued, ‘with his list of terms and conditions.’

‘Auntie?’ Byrne was staring at her. Esme didn’t say anything.

‘Uh-oh,’ said Hortense.

‘A family tea,’ Esme repeated.

Byrne rubbed the window with her hand, trying to see out. In the distance, a sharp knife of lightning broke the sky open.

Esme hobbled for the door.

Hortense smiled, deep and crooked, like an over-excited child. ‘At last, something to dispel the Doom.’

‘I’ve got a book!’ Byrne called over the roof-rattle. ‘Hazel lent me a very good book, and I’m reading it. Right now.’

‘Just an hour, Byrnie.’

‘It’s about a woman who gets cut off from the world. Just her and her dog and her cat and her cow. It’s a life I dream of.’

‘I’ve made Anzac biscuits. We’ll have tea.’

‘I’m warning you – I’ll go to bed.’

‘Humour us,’ Hortense urged. ‘We’re dying.’

‘Well, and who isn’t?’ Byrne exhaled deeply. Looked down at herself. Pulled up her crestfallen jeans zipper. Glanced in the mirror and fluffed her hair. Then flopped down on the couch and opened her book.

The lights flickered.

Pictoria stomped her boots. Sent an artillery of grit across the foyer. ‘It’s a shocker out there.’

Drops of rain flew across Esme’s face as she battled the door. ‘Welcome, Sook.’

‘I’m here. I told you I’d come.’

‘You’ve always been determined, if you’ve been anything,’ Esme conceded.

‘That I have.’ Pictoria leaned in and, brushing Esme’s hair aside, kissed her temple. ‘You’ve not been too bad in that department yourself. She here?’

Esme glanced towards the lounge room. ‘Nose in a book.’

‘Oh. How. We. Tried. Once upon a time.’ Pictoria shrugged and shed her rain gear. ‘She always did the opposite of what we wanted, didn’t she?’ She pulled a pair of delicate pink flats from her handbag and slipped them on. Esme picked up her coat. A waterfall of lost rain slid to the floor.

Hortense wrapped Pictoria in her arms. ‘You smell good.’

‘Do I? How are you, Mum?’

‘Ensnared. Did you hear they took my licence?’ Hortense reached for Pictoria’s hand.

‘It’s about time,’ Pictoria winked. Even at seventy-six, Esme noticed, Pictoria still wore her jeans tight like a teenage girl.

‘And I’m on medication that makes me feel Doom,’ Hortense was rubbing her thumb back and forth across Pictoria’s wrist.

Esme stood in the doorway clutching the wet coat, raindrops spreading through her right slipper, and remembered suddenly how small she became every time she happened to pack her mother and her sister and herself into one room. Hortense seemed a new person with Pictoria, a new breed of mother, as if her molecules quickly reorganised themselves in Pictoria’s company so that she resembled a woman who loved and yearned and needed to mother. Or maybe it was just Pictoria’s perpetual absence, the novelty of her, that caused Hortense to capitulate. She surrendered to the glamour of Pictoria, though that was nothing new, most people did. Hortense grabbed and rubbed wrists. She nuzzled ears.

Oh yes. Esme remembered now. She was the raincoat hanger. The tea server to their special whispers, the haughty hair-toss of the younger sister that never failed to make her mother swoon.

Esme hung the coat and followed them into the lounge room. Byrne was refusing to look up from her book.

‘Sulking doesn’t become you, Byrnie – your face gets all scrunched up,’ Pictoria remarked.

‘Hello to you too, Mum.’

‘Shove over.’ Pictoria grabbed Byrne’s feet and lifted them from the sofa and sat down close. ‘How are you, then?’

‘You shove over too,’ Hortense said, and lowered herself next to Pictoria, breathing heavy and close.

The three of them sardined there while Esme stood, holding the teapot. ‘Would anybody like a cuppa?’

‘Is this really necessary?’ Byrne leapt up from the couch and moved to the kitchen, leaving Pictoria and Hortense alone.

They shared a look: What can you do? Hortense held Pictoria’s hand in her lap, still rubbing as if it were a coin she wanted to clean.

There was a cat somewhere in the house, yowling. Esme inhaled and coughed loudly, several times. It was all slipping, she was slipping, clawing at the mud-slick mountain as she slipped down, trying to get a finger in, a toe in, but her hands were full and soft with mud.

‘What’s with that breathing of yours, Mum?’ Pictoria asked.

Esme lifted the teapot again and her hand shook from clenching the mountain. She cleared her throat. ‘Tea . . . anyone?’

‘The Doom does that,’ Hort said. ‘Although it’s a bit keyed up at the moment, you know. It’s more like the thrill of Doom at the moment than just regular doom Doom.’

There was a crack of thunder and the lights flickered again.

Outside, clouds streamed over the glaze of sun; the mud was thickening, streaming, Esme picked up speed as she slid, toboggan quick, face-first down the slope; she was inhaling the dark paste of sludge as the room seemed to turn to twilight.

Pictoria stood up and glanced through the cleared smear Byrne had made on the glass. ‘The ducks are fucking in the backyard,’ she announced.

Esme hit an unseen lump, a kind of jump in the terrain the mud covered, and her body flipped sideways.

‘They do that,’ Hortense replied uninterestedly, though she joined her at the window.

‘Jesus, Auntie, watch the teapot – you nearly dropped it,’ Byrne scolded.

‘It’s rather violent how he shoves her to the ground,’ Pictoria went on. ‘Don’t you think?’ They were both watching now.

Esme’s body soaring and breathless before coughing, engulfed by waves and tidal waves of the thickest, the most enveloping mud.

‘I’d think you’d love that sort of thing, Mum,’ Byrne said from the other side of the kitchen partition, clinking her spoon against the teacup. ‘I’d think something like that might be right up your alley.’

Pictoria rolled her eyes. ‘Always the naughty girl.’

Esme seized the edge of the dining table, like a single rock in a field of mud, while in a spasm of sudden and deep coughing her bony fingers, her nails, scratched at the granite. She dangled in mid-air as the mud continued to fall away beneath her.

If this was what love was . . .

Byrne pounded her back. ‘Auntie, are you okay?’

Esme, hopelessly, grimly, gripped the rock, while a cough forceful enough to dislodge the most serious of fingers from their clutching rigor mortis continued its jolting assault. She wanted to put a hand up as if to say, All okay; she wanted to put a hand up, but if she did, Please, don’t mind me, her hold so tenuous; if she let go now . . . Why, it’s just a simple cough, just a simple sadness; but the idea of control was illusory, she was already slipping, dangling one-handed from an overhang of rock, Milk? Two sugars? while the dark muck avalanched below. Send her sister out into the duck-fucking day; send Hort out too; they could all go, so she could let go.

She thought of Ivo and the lost winter night. He’d said that to her: But if that’s what love is like . . .

‘Milk and two sugars, Ez, if it’ll make you feel better,’ Pictoria offered.

‘Oh, it will,’ Hortense said.

‘Are you sure you’re right there?’ Esme heard, from below, a faraway voice.

. . . what can we mere humans glean from it?

‘Auntie, sit.’ Byrne pulled out a chair. ‘You can’t just stand there.’

But as suddenly as it started, the coughing stopped, the mud slowed, it thinned, and she saw that she wasn’t hanging, but leaning, arms outstretched, on firm ground, hanging for dear life on to the back of a chair.

Esme inhaled in shudders, wiped her mouth of saliva. She’d wind back the clock. Try again. Pretend her sister had just now arrived.

Esme let go of the chair, turned casually, simply, and managed a smile. They were all staring at her. ‘I was going to buy prawns,’ she said, catching her sister’s eye and blinking away tears. ‘I wanted prawns for you.’

‘That’s sweet, Ez.’

‘Nobody would take me to town . . . Now you can see, Byrne, why I wanted prawns.’

‘You did go on about them.’

‘I thought . . . a surprise. Never mind. Remember how we used to get a bag of prawns for two and six? They were only two and six.’

‘I thought we caught them ourselves?’ Pictoria looked to their mother for confirmation. ‘Mum?’

‘We did go prawning too,’ Esme added.

‘Did we?’ Hortense asked, as if she couldn’t possibly remember.

‘Yes! On holiday, at Batemans Bay. Don’t you remember hauling in the prawn net?’ Esme incredulous.

‘Not particularly.’

‘We boiled them up in an old kero tin.’ Esme might be the coat hanger, the tea bearer, but she was clearly also the keeper of memory in their family. She had things to say. Lost things from their lost nights when they loved each other. ‘One night we put out the net, and there was a cave nearby. It was like a haunted place. You’d imagine all sorts of things happening there, unspeakable things . . .’

‘Ducks rooting!’ Hortense laughed and Pictoria laughed with her.

‘As I was saying, you and I played there, Sook, and when we came out, the sun was setting. Mum, you called us out to see the sunset. It was lovely, you know, it was a sunset. But then you turned around, Sook, and laughed so loud. There was a giant, full yellow moon behind us. Sort of towering right there behind us. Huge. We were so busy watching the sunset we nearly missed it. The moon was this giant orb rising up out of the sea.’

‘Ohhh . . .’ Pictoria and Hortense sighed in unison.

Esme felt warm. The old yellow moon was a flickering film and Esme was their projector, their telescope of light radiating through the darkness. Though if nobody noticed her short-lived bolt of joy it was only because, at that moment, a living ball of light burst in the backyard and all the bulbs in the house popped like corn.

As she was plunged into that quick, weird darkness, as if dropped again from the mountain into a deep lake, Esme felt it final proof that her grand unifying theory of life was true: a person can die of too much happiness.

CHAPTER 33

IT WASN’T THE RAIN plummeting. Or the wet earth smell of old things rising. It wasn’t just the quicksand mud that sucked up whole tractors, bogged to their axles. It wasn’t the thunder crashes. None of that was even necessary. The smallest breeze would have done the trick, would have swirled the ash in such a way that he could read new words on all the old pages.

All the rest, the wind, all the sky’s tantrums, was just for added effect.

At Lucetta’s insistence, after they put Paris into her stall, calming her with quiet words and deep touches, leaving her with plenty of oats and molasses, Rhett and Lucetta sneaked in, sopping wet, through the front door, tiptoed down the hall to her room.

He could hear the women’s voices up the back near the kitchen.

I was going to buy prawns. I wanted prawns for you.

That’s sweet, Ez.

‘They seem okay,’ Rhett whispered once she’d shut the door behind them. ‘You sure you don’t want to say a quick g’day?’

‘Hell no.’ Lucetta pulled off her wet shirt.

He thought she was stalling. Trying to prolong their encounter, or postpone another, he couldn’t tell. It had been weeks of evasions and riddles (what did it mean, for instance, when she cried after they made love? That she was happy? That she missed Joe? That Rhett was incompetent?), complications of the adrenal system. He was exhausted now. Not to mention wet and sad and slightly cross at this inexplicable concealment of their return. His wrist hurt. There was a part of him that couldn’t quite believe he was still alive. He had somehow thwarted fate. At least temporarily.

‘When Pictoria leaves, I’ll come out,’ she said, then looked around suspiciously. ‘I think somebody’s been sleeping in my room.’

He looked at the neatly folded pile of clothes on the desk. He recognised Hazel’s shirt, but didn’t say so. ‘I’d love to have a grandmother in the next room,’ is what he said.

‘You’re welcome to her.’ She stood on her heel and tugged a soggy foot from her boot.

‘I’m just saying.’

‘My family’s not like yours, Rhett.’

‘No. Yours is alive.’

‘I mean, you and your mum were friends.’ She shimmied out of her wet jeans.

Rhett shrugged. ‘I guess you have to just get to a point, Luce, where you’re either going to say nothing or everything. If I had the chance now, again, I’d say everything.’

She studied him for a second. ‘Aren’t you going to change?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You’re dripping on the floor.’

He looked down at the water soaking into the carpet.

In a far room, a woman sighed.

‘I’ll change when I get home,’ he said, and knew in that moment that was where he was going.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh. Right.’ Turning away.

He watched her cross the room, her knickers sagging sweetly, her bra pulled tight across her back. He wanted to slip a finger there, where the elastic pressed like whip marks into her skin. Take the red rose blooming under the clasp into his mouth.

On another night he might have. Except suddenly, all he needed was to find a moment in the rain watching the lake fill, without talking. He could hear his mother’s voice in the wind: just don’t bury everything.

But the lights burned out.

Bushrangers retreat under the cover of darkness. He could open the door and walk out and nobody would know about it until he was gone. Return in the light when he knew a little better how to put all the pieces together. Or just leave town altogether, try to outrun the pull of this ill-fated place.

But he could hear four women bumping into things in distant rooms, Hortense swearing and Byrne demanding they just sit still so she could find the torch, the candles, and get things lit.

‘We’d better make sure they’re all right,’ he said.

But Lucetta was already halfway to the kitchen, her voice high and panicked. All the love returning. Mum!

Oh shit! Lucetta. You scared me.

Rhett stood a moment in the dark, in her room, with the smell of her still on him, mixed with rain and Billy’s smoke. He could love her like this, quiet and alone. This he knew how to do, having loved her just like this for so long.

The love of the exhausted one. How it wavers. He thought person to person, skin to skin would be less tiring than all the efforts conjuring required. But once the novelty of her skin wore off – well, how much harder would it become? He didn’t know sometimes if he had the stamina. Though he could kick himself for letting that mote of doubt float in. Because once it lodged there, in his mind, even unused, it seemed to set to work recalibrating his system in preparation for future weary disillusionments. Or maybe that, too, was doubt’s dark work: letting him shirk responsibility for everything unlovable and callous and lazy about himself.

His heart was a red ember. It would not last.

Rhett felt his way into the corridor, taking care to keep his injured wrist close. A torch was clicked on from the direction of the kitchen, revealing Lucetta in all of her half-naked glory in the corridor and, presumably, Rhett behind her, squinting and dripping by the bedroom door.

He waved. ‘Hey.’ Felt like a teenager caught in the back of a car by a copper’s beam.

‘Lucetta! Rhett! Did you have a lovely time?’ Esme asked cheerfully from within the dark.

‘When did you get back?’ Byrne demanded.

‘Just now.’

‘And you weren’t even going to say hello?’

‘We were about to say hello,’ Rhett offered.

‘When?’

‘We were wet,’ Lucetta began. ‘We’re exhausted. We had a few problems.’

‘She might as well be nude,’ Pictoria interjected, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth with displeasure.

‘Can we just get some candles lit and discuss this later maybe?’ Lucetta’s hand was up, shielding her eyes from the torch.

She was so much lovelier by firelight.

‘It’s been weeks, Lucetta.’

‘It has been a few weeks, Mum, yes. And we’re happy to be back. But we’re wet.’

‘Would anybody like a brandy?’ Esme asked.

‘I can understand, Luce, that you’re wrapped up in your new love . . .’

‘I’m not talking about this now, Mum. In front of her.’

‘Rhett? How about a little nip? Warm the system?’

‘Thanks, Esme, but I’m right.’

‘There are other people in this house, Lucetta,’ Pictoria broke in, ‘besides yourself. Like your mother, who’s been worried sick about you.’

‘That’s really between my mother and me. You don’t even live here.’

‘My sister lives here, my mother lives here, my daughter lives here . . . I think I have a right –’

Esme was hacking up her lungs.

‘Can you two stop it?’ Hortense whomped Esme on the back. ‘You’re bringing on the Doom in spades.’

Rhett lit the only candle stub he could find, but it seemed to make the room darker. Pictoria’s eyes were two glowering beads. And Lucetta shone pink with anger.

‘It doesn’t matter, darling.’ Byrne sounded defeated. ‘I’m just glad you’re home in one piece.’

‘Yeah, c’mon, Luce.’ Rhett carried the candle over. ‘Let’s just go get dry.’ He would stay with her, he would warm her; he would postpone his aloneness.

‘I’m not finished, Rhett.’ Lucetta’s voice was steely, knife-edged.

He took a step back. The door inside him shut.

‘Oh, right. Well, I’d better . . . I’m going to go, then.’

‘Can you just wait a second?’ she demanded.

‘We used to say in my day that a woman was no good without a man. You keep using that tone with yours, Lucetta, and you’ll lose him just like you lost Joe,’ Pictoria snorted.

‘Hey, that’s not on –’ Rhett started.

Lucetta grabbed the torch from Byrne’s hand and charged her grandmother, shone it into her face. Pictoria shrank under the spotlight. ‘Go. That is so offensive. Go on. Get out!’

‘She can’t go out in this storm,’ Esme whimpered.

‘Never mind what a cruel thing that is to say to me, or to Rhett, but how’s Auntie meant to feel when you say that a woman’s no good –?’

‘I feel fine, Lucetta,’ Esme said, stifling her wheeze.

‘You don’t feel fine.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You haven’t been fine in a year! You drink, you cough, you are not fine!’ Lucetta waved her arm in Esme’s direction and the torch light staggered across the walls and faces. ‘And fair enough. I wouldn’t be fine either, I’m sure, but don’t pretend. At least for once just let yourself not be fine, Auntie!’

‘She’s just fine,’ Pictoria said coldly, ‘the way she is.’

‘Thank you, Sook,’ Esme sniffled.

Lucetta turned back to Byrne. ‘I don’t want her here, Mum. Make her leave.’

‘Your daughter’s always hated me, Byrne.’ Pictoria’s voice cracked. ‘You’ve turned her against me, I suppose.’

‘Maybe it’s just that we’re fine without you,’ Byrne snapped.

‘Nothing’s fine!’ Esme’s eyes filled with rain, then overflowed. ‘I just wanted us to have a cup of tea together before I –’ She broke off.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Pictoria growled. ‘You’re all berserk.’ She stood up, then realised there was no place to go but into the storm. She thumped down again, sulking.

Rhett gently took the sharp soft-skinned hinge of Esme’s elbow in his left palm. ‘I’ll take you to your room, if you want.’

‘I need my puffer.’

‘I know.’

He could feel the arm bone beneath her skin as he led her down the corridor. His wet feet were starting to itch. Every inch of his skin itched to get away from this.

Esme’s room was quiet and cool and Rhett’s nostrils flared with the spice of Dencorub.

‘Do you have a hankie?’ he asked her.

‘In the top drawer.’

Inside, the smell of musty old paper called up his mother’s forgotten receipt drawers. The hankies were folded like books, the embroidered corners facing out. Little ‘E’s in a stack.

He handed one to Esme. She blew her nose.

He heard Lucetta’s bedroom door shutting. Not quite a slam, just the grand pang-pang as the door came to rest firmly against its jamb, then the softer, trailing echo as the latch clicked in: Go. Most likely this was a last word to her grandmother (if it was for him, well, he didn’t want to entertain that thought), a vent of spite, righteousness, pride, martyrdom – who knew? the possibilities were endless. Except it caused such a corresponding pang-pang inside him. The slicing way she’d said the word ‘finished’ earlier, with his name following so closely behind it.

‘I give in,’ Esme was saying. ‘There’s no point if it causes a ruckus. I’m too old, too old to care. I wish they would get along, but there’s nothing I can do . . .’

‘We spend all our time fighting with them when they’re alive and regretting it once they’re gone,’ he said.

There was a closet off the hallway near his old bedroom, just long and wide enough to lie down in. With the door closed he could be utterly still and quiet. Not a word would be spoken between him and the shelves that held his childhood possessions.

Then he would sleep. Travel back to a time when he didn’t need to be always pulling the fine points of moments to pieces.

‘I wish I were dead sometimes, to tell you the truth,’ she said, starting to cry. ‘I’ve had a lovely life, I’ve enjoyed having Byrne. I’ve done some lovely things. I really have. I’m not complaining. Not really. But I have a sister who was quite possessive of her daughter but could never get close to her. I’m sorry they don’t all see eye to eye, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I give in.’ She blew her nose. ‘I’ve always given in, because at the end of the day I know what’s in my heart and nobody can take that from me.’

‘That’s a good way to look at it.’ If he could manage twelve hours of sleep. All he needed. To be knocked out cold.

She fumbled in the candlelight for her nebuliser. ‘Oh, there’s no power,’ she realised. ‘Never mind, I’ll just use this.’ She grabbed her Ventolin. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll have much longer anyway . . .’ She inhaled loudly.

‘You’ll be right.’ His throat felt coated in grit.

Esme had put down her Ventolin and was now balancing on the edge of the bed staring at a ticket of some sort. She assured him she’d be okay, she’d been coughing for years; it was he, she noticed, who was looking rather pale and unfinished.

It was true, he agreed, he wasn’t feeling at all well.

He slipped out the back door without saying anything to Lucetta. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if his voice would carry him. Perhaps, he thought, he had swallowed too many of his words for too many years, and now the day had come when he opened his mouth to find that not a word, much less a sound, would come out.

He stepped into the rain. The lake was steeped in fog. He heard tyres over gravel, turned and was lit up for a second time; it seemed the night was conspiring to keep him from hiding.

The station wagon stopped, the lights were quickly switched off. Hazel tapped on the window. He walked over, leaned down. She rolled down the window, his hair dripped on her leg.

‘Wanna ride?’ She smiled. Wearing paint-splattered men’s shirt and jeans. The two dogs in the back moaned with delight at the sight of him.

It felt years ago that he’d first seen her; that he’d first come home.

He climbed into the car and Scout jumped onto his lap, licking his face, and together they all sat, watching the rain pound the windscreen until they were entirely enclosed within it. He felt as if they’d climbed inside a beating drum.

‘How are you?’ she asked, though her own face was sunken, with black circles under her eyes.

He shrugged. ‘Average.’

‘You seem little,’ she said.

‘You seem tired,’ he said back.

‘Yes. I’ve been digging up bits of shale. I’ve been wallpapering and stencilling, carting buckets of sand and old furniture. I’m exhausted.’ Her hands were still white with glue.

‘Thanks for looking after Scout . . . Sorry it was so long. We were camping.’

He said ‘we’ and remembered Lucetta, that pancake day on the hill, her pink-cheeked skin, barely hiding her delight, you said ‘we’, and he thought of her now, in her bedroom, behind a slammed door, pink, yes, but pained; he had drained her of delight.

‘How’s your mum?’

‘She’s improving. Her cousin is staying with her. It’s all worked out.’

That was all she said, but there was some peace in her face that even tiredness couldn’t dissipate.

‘I’ve been building a room this week, you know – this exhibition, cobbling it together in the night,’ she said. ‘I place a chair here, I paste this photo there. When I look around and feel that kind of satisfaction of a photo well placed, or a vase, I can feel my mom watching me. This has been a recent development. I turn around, and it’s like she’s there, not just watching, not just noticing the photo or the chair sitting in the light or the way the jug of fir branches is placed on the table, but as if she’s busy herself in another corner, making another corner of the room. Like a phantom. I kept trying to shoo her away: go, go, this is my room, my project. But every day, when I go to work, she appears. I am getting used to it. She has some great ideas. Definitely has better design sense than I do. She’s obviously loving being there, sorting through it all, helping to define a room.’

He was confused but nodded anyway. ‘Is this a problem?’

‘No, no problem. It just is. I can see it now. And despite all its faults, despite its limitations, it’s a very beautiful room. We’ve each done half; we’ve overlapped what we’ve done. I can’t separate it anymore. It’s not mine anymore.’

‘So why are you tired?’

‘Love’s made me tired.’

He nodded. ‘I have to go.’ He was too tired for her talk.

‘If you give it out – love – you have to get it back,’ she continued, despite his need to leave. ‘That’s the thought. Or if you get it back, you have to give it out. There’s a portioning system in our brains. Like karma. But there can’t be a tally. I think love’s real karma is more subtle than that.’

‘Mmm?’ He would fall asleep in her car at this rate.

‘You will be loved. Everybody gets a turn.’

‘Hazel –’

‘Yes. Everybody will get a turn to face the onslaught.’

He shook his head. ‘Or run.’ He pulled the lever, the door opened a crack.

She sighed. ‘No point. You’ll just end up somewhere else with someone else, doing the same thing.’

‘Good night,’ he said.

She looked at him. He could not help but look back. ‘My mother says to conduct every day as if it’s going to be your last. “If I knew that the world was going to end tomorrow,” she says to me, “I’d still be planting my little apple tree.”’

‘My mother used to say, “The fog is in the fir trees”,’ he replied and pushed the door open. Rain on his pants leg.

‘Well, maybe we’ll be all right,’ she said, ‘after all.’

She smiled then, a wide, real smile and even by carlight, her eyes were the colour of her name.

He leaned back in to kiss her temple and when she turned her head, surprised, his lips touched her eyelid and sparked there.

He found the old closet much as he remembered it. After a quick shot of rum he crawled in with a pillow and sleeping bag. The smell of shoes. The faint old stench alone was comforting.

He brought with him a photo of his brother Andy, crumpled and dusty and water-stained, that he’d found in a drawer of his brother’s room and had left on the kitchen bench. Andy at twenty-five, maybe, younger than Rhett was now, knee-deep in twin pockets of snow, in his red and black checked jacket and hat, about to throw a snowball.

How the branches of the snow gums surround him, creeping in like fingers.

Rhett wiped the photo clean across his hip and propped it up against the skirting board near his face. It seemed more of a wave than a fist of snow Andy’s hand was ready to throw. That half-turned body now so much more like a glance back from a man about to disappear into thin air than a brother with mischief on his mind. As if he were calling out to Rhett, sometime hence, words of advice, still years away. Mate, if the horse wants to trample you, the horse will trample you.

Because nobody left this house, save by dying.

SUN

THE BOAT WAITED. IN THE ONE perpetually dark corner of the perpetually open shed, under a tarpaulin, the half-almond husk that once carried a boy in carousel revolutions through an underwater town suffered the shrinking fate of things untouched for years.

A family of swallows had recently taken up residence under the centre plank seat, nestling between the once elegant arches of the wooden ribs. Due to a small leak in the roof, some of the nails in the boat had rusted during the long-gone days of rain. The once glossy varnish over the blue-stencilled letters across the side of the prow had slowly cracked; hairline fractures radiated through them like a windscreen that had a stone thrown through it. The ‘L’ especially seemed to have suffered. Like skin, it had shrivelled somehow over the years, and had nearly become an ‘I’. The one time Lucetta had revisited the boat, she had been spooked by the code of letters she read into the word that had once been her name: I U C.

I You See.

Joe’s brothers had unanimously given the boat to her in the days after Joe’s funeral. It had her name on it, they reckoned, and none of them dared use it anyhow; could not fish from a vessel that had spun quantities of black water into their youngest brother’s lungs on a night they’d turned him down for fishing so they could get stoned with their girlfriend, play a game of pool, watch a stupid movie on TV, and go to bed early.

Lucetta didn’t particularly want it either, but didn’t say so at the time.

Instead, she let them unload the boat and leave it in the grass in her front garden. It had sat there for months, stewing decomposing leaves in the wet, then gathering snow and icicle spears, until the bloody, winter morning when she’d smashed Joe’s watch with a hammer and finally dragged the boat out of sight to the Davys’ industrial back shed, leaving behind a flat trail of grass, the ground scored like a track between two houses quieted by grief.

Alesandra said she didn’t mind what Lucetta put in there, as long as it didn’t disturb the shed’s swallows or her sons’ and husband’s old stuff.

Lucetta had covered the boat with a green canvas sheet and hadn’t been inside again until Rhett returned.

She hadn’t mentioned the boat to Rhett.

She wondered when, in all of his cataloguing of his family’s rubbish, he would reach the back corner of the shed. She didn’t want that discovery to tip anything between them off balance, but telling him might have had the same effect. It seemed strange to her now that she’d even kept a boat she had no intention of using; and something of an insult, even in hindsight, that she’d left it where Rhett would take her one of the first times they made love. Something for him to find later. A rival’s love-gift, waiting in the wings, among wings, ready to sully the memory of their first dizzying entanglements.

Rhett had taken her hand – ‘I want to show you something’ – and led her towards the shed.

She hadn’t wanted to go in. How fierce Joe’s presence was in there, an empty hull, discarded but not buried. But while the birds had taken over the shed, Rhett was taking over her body by degrees.

The shed was just as Rhett’s father and brothers had left it: jars of bolts and nuts and bits of pipe and tube, rusted coils of wire, tools, saddles, helmets, old bikes, desks and clocks, a pool table, and Alesandra’s old potter’s wheel under a sheet. It was all so left behind it made Lucetta feel tired the minute she entered.

The birds rested like statues in the eaves.

Rhett sat her down on the ground. ‘Lie down,’ he instructed and she did, anxious for him to lie down on top of her; to take the quivering from her limbs. Instead he walked away. She sat up again.

He came back, teasingly serious. ‘Just lie down, Luce.’

Then he ran to the end of the shed, speeding towards Joe’s boat, and she bit the inside of her cheek, until a hundred tiny swallows flew from the corner where the boat was, from the eaves, dashing across the shed, sketching tight circles in the air over her.

Lucetta’s eyes watered while Rhett sprinted up and down the length of the building like a lunatic, waving his arms, making the birds swoop and circle and dart over their heads, their tails forked, their bodies like flying fish or bats hurtling through space, and the exhilarating combinations they made seemed synchronised, yet random too.

Lucetta ran a thumb under her wet eyes. ‘I could watch them all day.’

Though it was true, what she said, it was also a lie. She wanted him close and heavy, not running and flapping as if to chase out all their ghosts. But she didn’t feel so drained anymore. The birds brought something to the space; their bodies were the exact size of thumping hearts.

A swallow of hearts.

‘My dad used to hate these birds getting in here. He’d chase them out, but Mum loved them. She loved just standing here with her head tipped back, watching . . .’ he said, and remembered it.

‘She’d leave the roller door open on purpose so they could get in and he would come back and find it open and the whole place chock-a-block with birds and he’d chase them out, close it up tight again. So one day Mum purposely backed the truck into the middle pole so the roller doors couldn’t close anymore. She claimed it was an accident, but after that, the doors had to be left open and the shed was always full of birds. Dad threatened to shoot them, poison them, but never did. He knew Mum had a soft spot for wings.’

‘And so does her son, it seems,’ Lucetta said and he caught his breath.

The sound was nearly imperceptible, like a hand reaching out to stop the trajectory of one small plush bird, and she wouldn’t have heard it except she had trained herself to know breath, when it was functioning and when it was not, and she’d noticed that Rhett held his whenever the topic of his mother came up.

That day she’d had to pull him down to the floor, the whole long muscle of him, in order to resuscitate him; so that he would take a lungful of air.

She stupidly convinced herself that Joe was watching as they shed their clothes, but that it would do them both good to know she had moved on.

I you see
I’m sorry, Joe.
come with me
No.
I couldn’t breathe
I know.
l u c e t t a
You said my name.
Lucetta, I love you.

When she came it was as if a large room were building itself around the centre of her body, as if the edges of her self were stretching outwards, outwards.

But afterwards she felt as hollow as Joe’s boat. The space around her hadn’t contracted when she did.

Nothing was flying.

She looked up and Rhett appeared high up in the eaves perched alongside the birds and the place between them was big and very, very quiet.

Lucetta was holding her breath.

Would they speak of it to their children, the place where love was made beyond the false starts and resurrections? What can you say anyway, in the end, about your life? If somebody said, tell me the story of your love, what could you say? You could say, Sit down, I can tell you everything . . . about the beginning . . .

Because the end of a love story somebody else must recount.

Like death. The end will be narrated by others.

When she was seven, Lucetta overheard her mother say of Rhett’s father after Jason’s death: He’s completely shattered. Lucetta was sure ‘shattered’ meant a body. She already believed that when somebody who had once lived under the lake died, their body was crumbled into the shelves of shale that grew on the shore. After that, whenever the water level fell, revealing deeper and deeper layers, and the beach grew wider, she’d wonder who had died that day. Pebbles of bones that mixed with the broken bricks of the long-lost town. All scattered together in the hot gold light.

She never could see the town, though she heard about it, stories that by night turned fantastical. How could it lie so perfectly below that flat page of water? Why couldn’t she see it? Why couldn’t she go down there and take up residence in the old shop, where the sherbets her mother once sucked floated now, free of jars or shelves or sticky fists? Build a boat with an elevator that went in only one direction: down, down, down. She’d wear a skirt with stones in the pockets and a tank of mountain air, or even better, a giant bubble that would hover around her, letting her breathe. She could infuse her bubble with light – letting it float on the surface collecting the sun, before it sank with the heaviness – until it had, like a battery, twelve hours of yellow to offer.

These are the stories she told herself. Ghost stories of a lost planet, uninhabited.

The breadth of the lake then was measured in terms of forever. Forever it would take to get all the way around it. Forever ago it had been a town full of people, of life. Forever it would take to escape it when Lucetta was restless with being there. Forever was how long she’d adore it when she was lying on top of a warm rock in the sun, when love was infinite.

Mum was just trying to tease him, he knew.

She’d been going on and on at lunch, telling him the story of a song. A boy and something about his crusade across the sea without oars. She knew words like ‘crusade’ could always be counted on to get him going.

How did he row, then, if he didn’t have oars?

He played his harp.

Sounds stupid. He should’ve had a motor.

He was in love. That was his motor.

Stupid.

Of course.

He saw her grin, but he threw his plate into the sink, went out as if he hadn’t seen.

You’ve got spaghetti on your mouth, she said.

He shrugged and flung himself against the screen door, his dog Trout following close. Outside, out of sight, he rubbed his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Dashed down the steps into the milky day, the lake rubbed teal and quivering. A day that looked hotter than it was.

Love was something Rhett would never admit to.

Not to her anyway.

Dog and boy scrambled across the golden dirt-pebbled beach, past where the foundation stones of old houses made good forts for wars, and the sun threw his shadow dark and long, all the way to the water. Trout was a black, four-legged shadow in a trot.

But there was more he shared with this boy in the song, Tristan, than he cared to admit. He was a boy with a boat, with an outboard engine and oars, and no matter where he went he could always hear the music that filled and spilled from his house. Not harp, but piano. His mum’s fingers following him. He bolted now towards the boat, hurling it from the shore into the water, leaping in. Trout flew. They bobbed out into the blue.

Up the back he worked the tiller. Trout at the bow, wind-flattened, eyes closed. The land around them was all hill and enclosing, kangaroo-furred and red-tufted, encircled with pale cream seams of shore. Rhett closed his eyes too. The lake was huge and quiet and so empty he could pretend it was a sea and feel it and it was all his. He could practically float around all day with his eyes shut (just peeking a little between the slits) and not hit anything. Hardly ever were other boats out on the water; hardly ever were there people at all after the trout fishing and waterskiing season had ended, and before the snow came. It was colder than it looked down there.

The engine droned through the old, floating forests of tree bones where he and Luce often collected walking sticks for missions into the bush. Tin-burying excursions across the other side of the lake at White Rocks so that there’d be supplies the night they finally got to sleep out. Their mums said they could. As soon as he turned twelve, which was soon, and it was cold enough to have a fire without worrying about bushfire but not so cold that they’d get frostbite. They’d make jaffles, baked bean and cheese jaffles, and he’d tell her ghost stories until she moved closer. He had it all planned out. How they’d sleep in swags, coiled like snakes, and in the morning he’d show her what he’d made.

It had taken him most of two months of Saturdays when she was at Pony Club.

It would be his present to her. He was nearly finished with it now.

At first it was just the feel of the knife in his hand over the worn stone he liked. It was the way he could alter it by force alone. The repetition of it. The chipping and scraping. The grey bits of stone. Getting obsessed about blowing out the dust and flicking the ants aside and moving his fingers through the grooves he made, testing their inner edges for smoothness, working the jaggedness away, hunched over in the sun for hours until his knees ached and his neck was hot against his palm. Once, leaning his face too close to the rock, his hand even shot back, taking a gouge out of his chin. He wasn’t at all interested in the quick marks the other kids made, those rough slashes on their desks or their wet concrete smears. No, he wanted his letters to have substance and style. Thick and deep, the L like a bent leg, like his mother kneeling in prayer, with enough room for the width of his first finger to lie down inside it. That was all he ever intended. Just an L. But when the L was finished, the unsaid letters in the cold, grey stone stairs beckoned him from across the water. If he stood at his bedroom window with the binoculars, he could just make out far across the lake’s bend the steps that somebody had once placed down the small brown mound leading from the house to the orchard or paddock or whatever it was had stood there when it was a town. Her entire name would rest there when he was done, the most perfect seven letters ever carved.

But soon, even that was not enough. There was so much more he wanted to say. To show her. They would sleep all night near the steps and in the morning . . . Yes, he knew now, as his boat grazed the shallow bottom and he leapt out barefoot and dragged the hull up onto the shale shore, bruising his heels on the sharp rocks. Today he’d finish the delicious curved horseshoe ring of the U for good luck, and in just three weeks he would bring her here. She’d flush shy when she saw it. Morning-scuffled, among birds, the two of them alone between the giant grey boulders, she’d be silent with love. And he’d kiss her.

RETURN

DESPITE ESME’S PROTESTS, DESPITE the heavy rain, Pictoria left anyway. She was insulted; claimed she would not come again. Esme choked when she said goodbye to her sister, and again when she watched the headlights cut out a wavering, haunted picture of the storm as Pictoria quickened down the road. She was her sister, after all. No matter what had happened or what would happen now, she was still and always would be her sister.

Afterwards, each of the four in the household had withdrawn to their private gloom to nurse and pick a wound another had caused.

Hortense had donned a miner’s cap and headlamp as if she were part motorcycle, while Lucetta brooded in the dark and Esme, child of the Depression, had fittingly appropriated the few stumps of candles for a flickering fret. Byrne had taken the torch, a year’s supply of batteries and several books, firmly asking not to be disturbed unless there was an emergency. A real emergency. One nobody else could possibly solve. She said she might be gone for some time. The DO NOT DISTURB sign – nicked from a motel – appeared on the door soon afterwards; Esme had seen it late last night when she went to the kitchen for a biscuit to have with her brandy.

Esme spent much of the night packing and repacking her bag. Today, she’d drive herself to Cooma and catch the noon bus to Port Augusta via Canberra and Adelaide. She’d get to Port Augusta late Tuesday night. The once-weekly flight to Birdsville would leave Port Augusta on Wednesday at dawn. Esme pictured herself pressed against the tiny aeroplane window, soaring over the Simpson Desert as the sun came up.

Who would know? Certainly not Byrne, who had not ventured out since her door first shut, and showed no signs of relinquishing worlds entirely populated by figments. Outside, the real world glistened, calling with morning’s bright renewal and birds, but inside their house stayed shuttered and quiet. The power had been out for sixteen hours now. There had been no sound from Lucetta’s room but soft breathing, while Hortense, a woman rarely perturbed by anything, had simply left a note: GONE TO MUSEUM, which made Esme laugh, despite her annoyance, in principle, at being left behind.

When Esme had woken at seven, she had heard Hazel’s car warming up and had peeked through her curtain to see the two bent heads, Hazel and Hortense, taking off up the road to New Adaminaby without her. Her mother might have waited. She might have knocked on the door and invited Esme to go along as well. Most likely, Hortense had climbed into the car, exclaiming that her family was a pile of nincompoops, the lot of them. No, Esme wouldn’t be coming along, when Hazel asked. For surely Hazel would have asked, even in the spirit of their conspiracy? Hazel would remember that today was Esme’s big day? But Hazel hadn’t come to say goodbye, so maybe she had forgotten. But if Esme stopped to say goodbye to Hazel on her way out of town, she risked running into Hortense and a whole lot of questions.

Well, Esme stewed, they’d all feel sorry when they came back and found her gone forever. Disappeared like a popped soap bubble into thin air. Her only worry now was for Owen, as she imagined the rest of them would be quite happy not to have to look after Esme any longer. Who would take him his paper once she was gone? Could Byrne be trusted to pull herself out of her book for long enough to consider the feelings of a man whose only happiness in this world probably depended on the gift of the day’s news? She wondered if she had time to make an amendment to her will. Two hundred dollars would be enough, she was pretty sure, to keep him in papers for the rest of his life.

These small uncertainties focused her. The packing and repacking of her bag; wrapping an opal ring and the last of her random clippings for Lucetta (who might want to browse some day through the ribbons and rubble of her old aunt’s brain); and composing her very last note to Byrne. She wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to Byrne properly, in person, for that would risk her intentions and too many tears. Yet she couldn’t, wouldn’t, leave without saying goodbye to the one person who had shown her real love.

For the real question that all of this bundling and laying out of treasures shunned was the one that had sung to her again and again over the years – so insistently sometimes she mistook it for a migraine: can you say you have truly lived if you have not once been esteemed for the whole of your self, body and mind and soul; if you have not been clasped skin to skin in a devotion so singularly astonishing that you’d crawl through the mud on your knees just to get it?

***

Lucetta had seen Rhett’s slumped figure through her window, leaving her house through the rain.

She watched until he grew blurry and small, as though he were being rubbed out. She saw him again suddenly, as if illuminated by lightning, in the approaching lights of a car.

She let the curtain drop when Hazel pulled up; she didn’t stop him.

That night she dreamed she was following his footsteps in the rain. She’d find the tread of them for a little while, pressed into the mud or grass, but then they’d fade again. She’d find only the ash from his old fires, after he’d moved on to another hill. She could just make him out across the wide expanse of lake; could see the smoke from his bonfire as he gathered branches. He wore green, blended into trees. The plume of smoke spread from his lips.

Lucetta had woken in the dark with the dread of endings. The night before like a hangover.

The trembling, nauseous ache that she had spoiled things with Rhett was worse than the fright of loss. Not irrevocably ruined, but enough to have caused his wordless retreat. After weeks with him, the quiet of her aloneness was boring through her like a worm. Even her room was so silent, it was as if nobody at all was breathing in it.

She realised it was the tick of her clock that was missing. It was stopped dead at three thirty. She pressed the lamp switch. Dead too. Lifted the phone. No sound.

She opened her bedroom door. The silence and darkness that had invaded the house made it seem as if they’d fallen into the lake itself. It could be any time of night. Who would know whether to sleep or not and for how long? She crawled back into bed and lay staring at a ceiling she could not see.

Finally, she had heard the rooster call.

Last night she had felt only righteousness, but in the lampless dawn, simply small and dirty and much too alone. The soft sheets had cupped her in their warm hands. She let them take hold of her. She slept again.

***

Burchill’s house was quiet when Hazel and Hortense arrived on that Monday morning. The sky above them was a carpet of dark, tarnished silver, flicking off its rain. Hazel reached out and took Hortense’s arm and guided her through the front door and down the unlit hallway. Hortense’s cane caught momentarily on a stuffed goat next to the coat rack.

Hazel unlocked the door to the room that now housed her museum. The engraved brass plaque on the door read:

The Encyclopaedia of Traces

All Welcome

The power was still out.

‘Perhaps nobody will come,’ Hazel suggested hopefully.

Hortense laughed. ‘I reckon the rain will bring them out in droves, just to clean the dust off their hats and splash in puddles with their trouser legs rolled up. We’ve been staring at the barometers for two years. At last, it has delivered happiness.’

The museum room had the air of a house abandoned, rather than a space newly made. It smelled musty and moth-balled and slightly of things left to rot. The objects in the room were shrouded, as if covered in dust cloth. The shapes of the past were still nebulous. The dark bodies of filing cabinets kept their silent secrets. Hazel handed Hortense a torch so that she could flick beams of light across the sleeping surfaces and over the white shale stepping stones that she had collected, circling the room, past points of interest. On each Hazel had engraved one of the words from the story of the beginning: ‘It. Began. Slowly. Secretly. As. Though. After. A. Night. Of. Heavy. Rain. The. Creek. Seemed. More. Swollen. One. Morning. Filling. With. Foam. The. Banks. Grew. Slightly. Soggy. The. Sky.’

‘Careful.’ Hazel guided Hortense across the stones, reading them to her.

‘It didn’t happen like that,’ Hortense said, ‘exactly.’

Hazel led Hortense to the overstuffed, crimson velvet chair that sat in the corner by the window. Her mother had suggested it would encourage visitors to sit awhile. When the sun finally broke through the clouds, through the hazy bamboo blinds, the room would seem like an attic library, where shafts of light would fall, spilling over the chair and onto the stepping stones and the sandy floor Hazel had created, illuminating arrangements of embedded, half-seen objects: a bent fork and broken crockery and glass bottle tops erupting from the red grains. Dim was how she wanted it, this wavering light.

Hazel helped Hortense into the chair while she went to search for Burchill. He appeared still to be asleep.

When she returned, morning was trickling through the room. Pale light shone through the drops of water on the window. A spoon in the sand sparkled. Hortense was standing next to a filing cabinet, gripping the edge and peering into one of many small cigar boxes that sat on top.

‘What’s all this junk?’ she asked, holding up the box.

‘It’s not junk.’ Hazel’s voice quavered. ‘It’s paraphernalia, you know . . .’

‘You wouldn’t get two bob at a garage sale for this stuff.’ Hortense sneezed and nearly fell over. Then her shaking fingers lifted a small pink valentine from the box. ‘Oh, I remember when we used to send these at school. To our sweethearts.’ She stared at it for a long time before carefully replacing it and moving on to the next box.

Hazel smiled.

She had filled many small boxes with all of the excess, random objects collected from the floor, or caught before they fell from lifted sheets of newspaper (every donated box had at least one ‘D-DAY’ or ‘TITANIC DISASTER’ headline as well as one from the day their first child was born). There were hair clips, cufflinks, locks of children’s hair, military badges and stamps cut from envelopes sent from Italy during the war. Though Hortense had scoffed, she too had been lured to the tiny boxes, to pick like a child among treasure.

Hazel stood back and took in the space as if for the first time. At the wooden vanities minus their mirrors whose drawers she had filled with handfuls of black and white photos of couples and families, old dockets, Snowy Mountains Authority brochures. It was Rhett’s house that had given her that idea. There was Alesandra’s 1950s red and white conical metal kitchen cabinet that spun on a single leg and contained a hundred drawers with traces of cinnamon powder and cloves in them. These tiny kitchen drawers she had filled with scoops of dirt and sand from different points around Lake Eucumbene. Each drawer was labelled: Eagle Hawk, White Rocks, Braemar Bay, Copper Mine Bay, Eucumbene Cove, Buckenderra, Frying Pan Creek . . . Donated filing cabinets in dulled, half-rusted green held the files of those who had lived in the old town, names highlighted, pages photocopied and cross-referenced with the files for other people who had lived there, a kind of who’s who of the old town. A few days earlier she’d collected some interviews on her tape recorder with the townsfolk. All they told she typed up and filed in a cabinet drawer marked Stories, alphabetised by first word with a corresponding index of first lines, beginning with: ‘Even the crows wouldn’t touch her damper’. But she also had the actual voices on a loop in the portable stereo ready to be released as soon as she pressed ‘play’.

Hazel’s mother seemed very satisfied with it. ‘Details,’ she whispered proudly. ‘You take after me.’

Next to the armchair an old tea chest with faded lettering held every letter Hazel had found or been given, those letters of love and hate, as well as the faint pencilled tributes to ordinary days. Any letters she had accidentally discovered pressed between the pages of books – along with dried leaves, the pale petals of flowers and movie ticket bookmarks – she had left inside the books. Now these books were arranged on a low bookshelf which ran along one wall of the room. Each donated book and photo album was labelled on the spine with the surname of its original owner, if known.

There was an old desk with a hole for a pot of ink on which she had left blank paper and ink and a nibbed fountain pen for visitors to record their stories and their impressions.

And tossed into one corner, haphazard like old magazines, Hazel had left a dozen coloured folders that contained all extant correspondence from the Snowy Mountains Authority to the residents of Adaminaby in the purchase of their lives and homes. She hoped that this casual treatment of papers of such gravity might evoke the tone the Snowy Mountains Authority had taken with the people of the town.

Finally, Hazel had made a kind of wallpaper of messages out of enlarged, photocopied letters. She had rolled glue mixed from flour and water onto the walls before pressing the hand written and light-fixed copies there. She loved the way the enlarged words ran vertically up the walls, the flourish of the script so individual it was at times difficult to make out. She didn’t like to admit it, for this was one of her favourite parts of the room, but this had been her mother’s idea. Above the windows, just near the ceiling moulding, ran the words:

. . .THE WATER SPREAD OVER THE VALLEY, A GREAT MIRROR OF CLOUD AND BLUE . . .

Across from the entrance Hazel had painted:

HAVE YOU LOST YOUR HOME OR YOU CANNOT LOCATE A ROAD, STREET, AVENUE, TERRACE, ORCHARD, YARD, WALK OR PLACE? THEN TRY A FREE SEARCH OF THIS ROOM.

As she worked, Hazel kept dreaming her mother and her mother’s house, remembering her mother’s way with colour and the placement of objects. She kept conjuring her childhood living room until it soon lived inside her, there in the museum. Hazel covered the top of the low bookshelf with framed photos of the residents of Old Adaminaby: before and after, then and now, young and old, just like on her mother’s mantelpiece at home.

Hazel had dreamed her mother yet again last night. She was dressed in an overcoat, hat, scarf and gloves and leaned on her crutches in the corner of the museum room. She was attempting, while maintaining her balance, to close her wet umbrella.

Mom?

How many minutes do we have? her mother asked. She pulled back her sleeve to glance at her watch. Hazel could see it only had one number on it.

Have for what?

Until this exhibition opens.

Hazel had woken startled, convinced she was already late.

***

Lucetta woke later that morning and found the house utterly still. Like a crypt.

Her stomach growled. Her pulse fluttered like a sheet in the wind. She dragged herself out of bed, padded barefoot down the hall to the bright, empty kitchen, still sore with last night’s wound, drank two glasses of new rainwater and buttered a slice of bread. Ate it with sticky red jam, standing at the sink, hip bones pressed against the cool metal edge. An icy touch. Cold-hearted.

Outside the window, the chickens roamed the refreshed grass, lifted their heads, stepped forward, bobbed their beaks, but Rhett’s house sat on its haunches and wouldn’t look her way.

She wished she could ring him, let the distance of phone lines get between them, so they could say everything without faces in the way, without the sparking of fingers touching. She wasn’t sure where all her worry had sprung from. For all she knew, there was nothing the matter.

But wasn’t the very fact that she thought something might be the matter confirmation that something was the matter? At least with her? Her very own matter? This, she was remembering, was the problem of being in love; as a physical state, as a chemical reaction, it shifted as quickly as mountain weather without warning or reason. Of course there were always reasons, if you did your homework, if you traced them back to their smallest parts. The tremors of things, deep under the earth’s skin, invisible fragments that could set a continent adrift.

Alone in the kitchen, enacting postures of despair against the cold sink, against the infinite happiness of the chickens, Lucetta wept.

Her tears hit the sink with a hollow, metal ping. Standing, neck collapsed, shoulders hunched, her hand under her eyes as if to wipe away a waterfall from the rock, Lucetta cried for a long time. She didn’t even know why she was crying but for an unexpected gust of love so fierce she thought she would split. Part shame, part guilt, part old untouched sorrow – and a new fear, now that she was certain that what she felt for Rhett was something she didn’t want to see finished until they were old and stooped over and walking into the forest to lie down together on the pine needles.

But the regret of ruining stood in the way of this romance.

Everything she had done since she met him, not just recently, but even as children, was wrong, had been wrong. She cried for every cross moment, every dismissal. Every time she’d ignored him at school; every time she’d compared him with Joe subsequently. Every time she felt like pinching him for no good reason but that he was annoying her with kisses.

***

As Rhett slept in his closet something remained a step away, just below the surface of things – it was a song, a humming, some song of longing, or like a fly buzzing at a windowpane, a futile pain, wanting out when there were no hands to free it. But then there were hands, long and tapered, his mother’s pale, piano-playing, clay-fingered hands, hovering like winged things at the window, rubbing out the bubbles in the old glass, hands in a yellow smock of sun. He saw a swarm of light on the ceiling above her head, like a thousand flies had gathered, prismatic, ever-shifting, a reflection from the empty rubbish bin left under the gutter, overflowing with rain. Rhett was outside the window, holding Billy. Billy drank from the bin, his face shattering the reflection.

His mother was lifting the sash to let in the air. Rhett wanted to call to her, to stop her. But he couldn’t speak. He had thought he’d never see her again.

His mother looked at him, a secret smile as the window floated open and the room quickly filled with rushing water. Water swallowed her, swallowed her hands, her smile and her eyes the same. She opened her mouth to speak. A bubble flew out from her lips with a word caught in it. It was the last word he’d ever hear her say.

***

Hortense was standing at the museum’s far wall, squinting up at the photograph.

‘Who is that?’ She pointed with her cane, trying to make out the faces in Ivo’s photograph. The early morning light through the blinds took only thin layers of darkness from the detail of what Hazel had enlarged and pasted there: two people bent towards each other, lips pressed together before a window of snow. The silhouettes of trees were black scratches radiating out from their heads, spears hovering as if ready to plunge the moment those closed, blissful eyes returned to the world.

‘It’s a couple kissing,’ Hazel said.

‘Well, I can see that, Hazel . . .’ Hortense kept staring, but her eyes widened. She leaned closer, then frowned. One eyebrow shot up. ‘But what does it have to do with our town being drowned?’ Hortense sounded agitated. ‘And where did you get it?’

‘It doesn’t, I guess. It’s from the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and I just thought there was something about the look on their faces, and the snow behind and the trees . . . They kind of reminded me of the dead trees here in the lake . . . But, of course, it’s not dead. The photo, I mean. No, it’s like a kiss that will never end.’

The firelight over the couple’s faces had shifted as the camera’s shutter released, Hazel saw, like a quick fish.

Hortense, unable to pull her eyes away from the image, shook her head. ‘Well, I’ll be.’ That was all she said.

The power came on then and with it the sound of trickling water. Hortense turned to see the small recycling fountain Hazel had placed in the corner opposite the armchair, behind a few blocks of stone. The blinds painted the walls in horizontal bars of shadow.

The slow water seemed to be filling the room.

‘See. I told you they’d come,’ Hortense said, as several old ladies came hobbling through the door in galoshes and gumboots, shaking umbrellas.

Hazel wanted to leave. She didn’t want to see the looks on their faces, in case she’d come up short. As she hurried for the door, she flashed a shy smile at a couple of the women but her eyes darted down and away, so she nearly bumped straight into Burchill, who had arrived and was standing in the doorway.

‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘I was just ducking out.’ Hazel tried to slide sideways past him. He filled the door.

He was looking around, blinking his wet eyes. ‘So . . . what do you think?’ she ventured.

He peered at her. ‘A real obsession with love, eh?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you mean what do I mean?’ He chuckled. ‘Your exhibition lacks inhibition, Hazel. It makes much of love. Like a chorus burned into the brain.’

‘I don’t think it’s obsessed with love,’ she replied, annoyed, and allowed herself to scan the room again. There was no more love than there was anything else in it, as far as she could see. Hazel tried again to get through the door. She hated the thought of herself smeared all over the room.

He grabbed her by the arm, stopped her. ‘Oh, Hazel.’ He chuckled again. ‘This is what we wanted, isn’t it? Something true?’ He was staring at the photo of the kiss on the far wall, his head tilted to one side. ‘It’s good to see she might have had a spot of happiness.’ He smiled, gazing at it. ‘I was never sure. Some people wear their misery so well . . .’ Then, after a moment’s pause, ‘I’m surprised she gave it to you, actually,’ he said. ‘I have always found her most private.’

‘Who?’

‘Why, Esme Windle.’

‘No.’ Hazel’s eyes shot up in disbelief. She gaped at the woman’s face, her dark hair swept off her forehead, the glimpse of pale, tight, freckled chest beneath the open top button of her cardigan, the indentation of the clavicle beneath the snug wool, the wet lips, slightly parted, the long, stretched neck, the closed eyelids shadowed by the man’s looming face, and the small heart-shaped birthmark etched into the cheek. She tried to find resemblances. There were none.

Hortense sidled up, clenched Hazel’s arm tightly.

The three of them, side by side, gazing up.

‘You spend your whole life together, but never really see them,’ Hortense whispered reverently after a moment. ‘Even I never reckoned my daughter could look so lovely.’

***

As Lucetta headed back from the kitchen to her room, she noticed at the end of the corridor the edge of Esme’s door lined with daylight, and heard a sound like breath hurtling backwards up a series of narrow steps. If there were tears in that room it was probably Lucetta’s own fault. She would apologise to Auntie for her crankiness. It had been unfair, all of it: the rain, Rhett, her sudden mood. How it had spilled over into things, old things, long untouched, until what had once been seemingly solid came apart.

She wiped her eyes and put one palm to the door, but in the place between two edges that made an ‘I’ of light, Lucetta saw Esme’s floor-length, mahogany-framed oval mirror turned sideways on elegant legs, and in that mirror the length and face of Esme, her self entire, naked. Esme was studying her body’s reflection, her cheeks wet with tears that hovered as if they might drop to that pool of silver and shatter the likeness.

Lucetta jerked back and froze outside the door. She could walk away now. She could knock loudly and let Esme get dressed. She could stand motionless in the corridor and silently cry at the sadness of it. Or she could push the door open and go in, throwing her arms around Esme’s bent shoulders, her slumped skin; the twin sacs of breasts whose nipples never browned, but remained pink, if faded; the biggest hug Lucetta could muster. As she held her, Lucetta’s fingers brushed the fluted ribs, the sunken belly; she felt the soft round curve of Esme’s sagging bottom against her thighs and saw the wide flat squares of her feet, the strongest part of her, pressed against the worn carpeted floor.

Esme had inhaled loudly when Lucetta grabbed her, her mouth rounded into a small ‘O’. She held herself away, spine rigid, but Lucetta wouldn’t let her go, while a long sigh, held a lifetime, escaped from the corners of her lips.

Esme closed her eyes, embarrassed, touched and startled at once. She choked, silently weeping as Lucetta hugged her, as Lucetta held her up. Lucetta kissing Esme’s soft, bare, freckled shoulders, the lean ridge where her neck swept down into her back, donating every kiss to her auntie’s neck that she herself had ever had and taken for granted, giving back a whole kingdom of kisses dreamed of and deserved but never possessed.

***

When Esme woke, she was lying in bed, in a groggy thirst, under the heavy blanket in her travel clothes.

She remembered, with some humiliation, a dream in which Lucetta had held her naked body from behind while they both cried. There had been much scrambling after tissues and hankies then. There had been nose blowing and the feel of Lucetta’s fingers, wiping the tears out like smears from under Esme’s eyes.

In the dream, Lucetta had helped Esme dress. Her travel dress, yes, she looked under the blanket, she was wearing it now. That’s where she was going. She must have fallen asleep after the exhaustion of packing. Esme checked her watch and was greatly relieved to see she hadn’t overslept. She tried to sit up, dizzy with sleep, with unshakable dream.

When she finally managed to get upright, she glanced at her pillow and found, with surprise, next to her own small patch of dribble on the pillow slip, one sleeping Lucetta, arm pushed under the pillow, her pink lips slightly parted, breathing in and out.

Esme gripped the bedside table, burning with shame. The mirror cast glad light around the room from the slice between the two curtains.

She crept over to the mirror and threw a towel over its stare, mindful of the way it had so powerfully drawn her before, casting a spell so commanding that it seemed she hadn’t been able to extract herself without her niece’s assistance.

Esme shoved her feet into her shoes, grasped the handle on her shopping trolley – an overnight bag in disguise – and quietly left her room. She liked that she wasn’t leaving it empty, but full of the sleeping life of Lucetta, the shifting darts of morning light after rain, the warm memory of a hug. Around Lucetta, the air of sleep was harmless; it hung like a cloud over the bed, wavered towards the window. If Esme were to open it, sleep would slink out, travel across the grass, following the wind.

Esme closed the door.

***

Byrne lay under the doona, knees up, the book Hazel had lent her balanced against her thighs. She heard Esme shuffling down the corridor, a heavy presence, a shift and sigh, a squeak-squeak trailing her like she was pulling her puffer along behind. Byrne should see how she was going; she should get up – but no, no, she had promised herself at least one book. Just one. The world could wait. She heard Esme exhale noisily, murmuring to herself, or was that a bird out the window?

Her eyes swam back to the page.

***

Esme found Minnie Mueller on top of the dining table, sitting back on the base of her tail and spine, one leg lifted, furry pouch spread, bent over, licking. She didn’t look up when Esme came in. Esme reached out and pressed the whole of her palm across Minnie’s little head. Minnie looked up, narrowed her eyes as if to say, What? What now?

‘I still don’t know how you feel about me, but I just wanted to say, I love you, Minnie Mueller the cat.’

Minnie, unmoved by Esme’s proclamation, went back to licking herself.

Esme sighed. There was nothing left for her to do but leave her note on the table for Byrne and close the door behind her. She hoped she would be able to start her mother’s car without attracting too much attention to herself. When she got to Cooma, she’d leave it at the police station with instructions on the dash for them to ring Byrne to collect it.

Esme trembled as she looked around the rooms that had contained her, if not sufficiently, if perhaps too tightly, for three-quarters of a century. There on the dining table Lucetta had desexed that small black dog. Over there Byrne had stood peering down over her specs, in turns amused and captivated by the circus documentary on TV, saying, Oh oh oh! I would have had hundreds of dwarfs if I’d lived in the olden days. I would have taken good care of them . . . Lucetta as a child, mud-splattered, wind-tangled, dancing from foot to foot by the toaster, hands over the red glow, waiting for her bread to brown and claiming she’d die of starvation if it wasn’t that second. A room full of family, bent over Lucetta’s homework, taking turns passing it around, taking guesses at answers, while the door banged open and shut, with dogs roaring in and out for cuddles on Byrne’s bed. Byrne grabbing an older Lucetta, now a vet, in a hug. Congratulations on your first amputation! Byrne frowning over her bills, Esme catching her silently weeping over the bills. And Esme’s mother in this same kitchen, even longer ago than all of that, before the flood, before the house was shifted, before Byrne was born, back when Pictoria still lived at home and they were a family.

‘Whaddya look so flustered about?’ Hortense was in the doorway, staring at her.

Byrne’s note was still in Esme’s hand. She withdrew her hand, quickly pocketed the piece of paper. Damn. Why hadn’t she left when she had the chance, instead of standing around in dreamy reminiscing?

‘Oh, hello. I was just pondering, you know, things . . . the past.’

‘Well, don’t get stuck there, I’ve had enough for one day – I just went to Hazel’s exhibition,’ her mother said.

‘I noticed.’ Esme studied her mother’s outfit: a red and blue ski suit that she was sure once belonged to Pictoria, a sun-hat, Blundstones, walking stick.

‘You were sleeping. Far as I could tell.’ Hortense gazed back at Esme with an unfamiliar intensity. She thumped a hand awkwardly over Esme’s arm. ‘I think you might like it, Ez – her exhibition.’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Hazel didn’t stay, not a minute beyond what was necessary, but the ladies loved it.’ Hortense set to making herself a glass of cold Milo.

Esme took the opportunity to inch herself and her trolley in the direction of the back door. ‘Oh, I’m sure they did . . .’

‘Said it was a cinch to find their way around. And there was more than a tear or two when they saw their love letters plastered up on the wall for all to swoon over. They pretended to be shocked, but I could tell they were proud as punch. Mine weren’t there, of course. What your father and I had you couldn’t write down.’

‘Of course.’ Esme slid one foot past the doorjamb.

‘Though Evie Flutter was quite perturbed that Hazel hadn’t displayed the official souvenir program Ben Chifley had autographed for her. And there were no maps. Not one. People like maps, navigation of the terrain, compass points . . . I got a lift back with Mr Benbow, speaking of which. My, he’s an odd one. Went on and on about his lettuces, bored me half to death, I mean really, what is there to say about them other than you grow them, you eat them? Though we did get into a rather interesting discussion about snail bait. He reckons the snails eat the bait, electric blue to attract them, and bam, their insides melt, they just kind of swell up. If they retreat into their shell, they swell there, can never get out and the shell just bursts. If they stay out, they can never get in again – can never go home, is what he said.’ She twirled the spoon around the inside of the glass until Esme was sure the glass would shatter. ‘They just dissolve, apparently. Then he went on and on about those who can “consciously send a snail to its death”. Hazel must have said something. I’m sure he was saying it specifically to me.’ She stopped and chugged her Milo down in one go. ‘I said, “Mr Benbow, I wouldn’t set out to deliberately kill them, but I’d rather have a snail-free life.”’

Esme had made it to the back door. It was ten thirty, her bus left at noon. She had an hour and a half. She left Byrne’s note on top of the cat food by the back door. With the steady deliberation of a bomb-maker investigating a faulty fuse, Esme turned the doorknob.

‘He was pretty worked up, is all I can say. He seemed person ally offended by what somebody else chooses to do in their garden. Not that we use bait here. Byrne wouldn’t have it. But still. It was directed at me. Those little eyes feeling you out . . . He looks like a snail himself, if you ask me . . .’

Esme was attempting to drag her trolley through the open door, but the left wheel and her left leg were both seriously stuck. She leaned one elbow against the screen to hold it open and yanked on the handle of the trolley, twisting it. The trolley violently crashed through, bringing her leg with it, and the door banged shut.

‘What are you doing back there, love?’ Her mother appeared at the door, a dark moustache of chocolate over her lip.

‘I’m going out, Mother.’

‘Out?’ Hortense pushed through the screen door and nearly whacked Esme on the nose. Esme backed away.

‘Yes.’

Hortense stood with her hands on her hips. ‘Out where?’

‘I’m going to Cooma.’

‘By yourself?’

‘And why not?’

‘I have no idea how you’re planning on getting there.’

‘I’m planning on driving your car.’

Hortense chuckled long and hard.

‘What’s so humorous about it?’ Esme demanded. ‘I am the one, after all, who still has a licence. Your car’s not being used. It’s just going to waste. It’s a waste, Mother. You’re the one who taught me never to waste.’

‘Time, life, bread, leftover stew. That car’s not included.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you say, Mum. You can’t stop me. I have the keys and unless you plan on tackling me, I’m going to drive to Cooma. You’ll get your car back. I wouldn’t dream of wrecking it, since it’s obviously more important to you than anything else.’

Hortense looked at her. Her eyes softened with some recognition, amusement, Esme wasn’t sure what. All she knew was that her mother hadn’t looked at her like that in a long, long time.

‘What?’ Esme asked, impatient, annoyed that her unexpected empowerment was so soon reduced. There she was again, waiting for her mother’s love, a kind look, anything.

‘You missed a button.’ Hortense touched a finger to Esme’s coat.

Esme looked down to where the wool left a gap, a gaping hole right next to her heart.

‘Oh.’ She released her trolley, fumbled with the cold, round buttons.

‘Let me.’ Her mother squinted as she undid the line of six, then carefully pushed the buttons back through the correct slits. ‘There.’ She patted the front of Esme’s chest.

Esme looked down at the clean line of coat like a child off to school for the first time, wholly wrapped in a mother’s touch, snug and secure, with lines that matched up. She was silenced by the affection.

‘Let me just get my handbag, then,’ her mother smiled. ‘Milo doesn’t hit the spot when you’re dying for a cuppa. We can have the afternoon together. Mother and daughter. Like the old days.’

***

Lucetta sat up. In Auntie’s bed. Heard the Monaro taking off.

Outside, she brushed her knuckles across the still-wet fir branches as she crossed the grass, submerging her hand to the wrist in chill. She approached Rhett’s door tentatively. Planned what she would say. How she would stand.

Her first knock was meant for the mice. She bit a nail while she waited for the mice to finish their meal. Removed her elastic. Let her hair fall. Tested the knob. It was locked.

This time she knocked for the dog. There was the sound of faraway barking but no answer. She knocked and knocked again, using the whole of her palm. Refused to believe anything was the matter. Refused that persistent, perverse image of him lying dead inside, with Lucetta left to live out the repetitions of a grief that had already happened so long ago, before Joe, in the very moment she first met Rhett. Their ending buried in their beginning, awaiting its time.

No, he was fine. She’d be productive. Work off the waiting.

She went to the shed and emptied the boat of rain. It would need repairs if they were going to use it regularly. She could see several splits in the wood near the base and in the bottom, hairline cracks that, once swelled, might cause the boat to slowly sink.

She dragged the boat out, dislodging cobwebs and swallow shit, dragged it past Bruce’s old car with possum prints on the windscreen and gum leaves trapped in the blades, past Alesandra’s wheel, caked with dried mud so thick it resembled the lake’s own shore. She thought about how much had passed since she last pulled it across this threshold. Now she left it on the edge of the shore to dry out.

She grabbed one of Rhett’s old winter wetsuits and booties from the hook just inside the door. It was heavy and rubbery and would encase her skin in the smell of his skin. He was right. She had to get over it.

Down along the water and around the bend, the tall edge of one of the white rocks gleamed, a rocket shard of pinky granite, a granite and limestone shore, iridescent.

She wondered if that was what Greece looked like.

***

Esme sat across from her mother in the coffee shop and glanced out the window as her bus to Canberra pulled up outside the station across the street. The distance between herself and that bus now seemed as wide as the table between herself and her mother. Both were impossible to cross.

Esme had wanted to go to the Snow Gum Cafe, tucked discreetly around the corner. She’d had visions of excusing herself to go to the ladies’ room, then slipping out the back door and making her way to the bus. She imagined her mother standing in her snowsuit on the street, suitably distressed by the disappearance of her eldest daughter, while Esme waved goodbye from the window as the bus gained speed. But Hortense had insisted that the Snow Gum Cafe had the world’s worst bran muffins and that if she had any chance of defecating this week she needed a bran muffin, a strong cup of coffee and a side of prune juice. She claimed the storm had put her out of whack.

‘I didn’t think you were that delicate, Mother.’

‘I’m not delicate. I’m particular. And determined. To have a good, warm bran muffin from Cafe Split.’

So to Cafe Split they went, with its tables of wayward youth, the gum-chewing, nose-pierced waitress who laughed with her mouth wide open, and music too loud to talk over. They sat in the window seat and Esme was therefore in the perfect position to watch, if not board, her beckoning blue bus. She clicked open her bag to check that the ticket was still there, before snapping it shut. She had her flask of brandy, her bus ticket, her money, the clipping she called her favourite by far and a change of underclothes. She’d already left her trolley in the car, knowing that she’d never be able to sneak away with it in tow. She was happy to forgo her bag, her duck-feathered Eternity pillow, and her change of underwear, but not her trip, her Birdsville Hotel reservation, or her single-windowed view of the expanse of red desert. She had saved her money for years for something, and it was this.

Outside, the bus driver was leaning over a clipboard and directing passengers in their bag-shuffling confusion to form a crooked queue. Esme’s stomach fluttered. She cast her eyes down at her watch: eleven forty-five. If she was going to go, she had to go now, or risk missing her bus altogether, and therefore her connections from Canberra to Adelaide and Port Augusta, and then her flight to Birdsville; her tickets were non-refundable.

Hortense was pressing her finger into the plate to gather all the scattered, dark, muffin crumbs. Around and around the finger went, cleaning up the plate. She sucked sweet specks from her finger.

Esme took a last gulp of Earl Grey for courage. ‘Excuse me, Mother, I’m just . . . I have to go to the loo,’ she stammered over the music, glancing once again at the bus. The driver had begun shifting bags in twos towards the large flap between the wheels that lifted like a silver wing. She hurried, pushing back from the table, unsteady, sloshing the grey watery tea.

‘Don’t take too long, my dear,’ her mother instructed. ‘I can feel a bowel movement coming on.’

Esme gripped chair back and wall and lifted herself. She took one last look at her mother with her hair out, her ski suit unzipped to the chest, her elbows on the table, and impulsively leaned down to kiss the top of her fuzzy head. Hortense jerked her neck back, surprised, and her skull collided with Esme’s bottom lip.

Nearby, several young girls giggled.

‘Holy moley, I thought you were falling over, Ez.’ Esme stood back with her fingertips to her lip, dabbing it. ‘What were you doing?’

‘Nothing, just . . . I guess it was vertigo.’ Esme’s lip was already sprouting like a flower, a drop of blood on her finger. She rubbed it into her thumb.

‘Now take it easy, Aged Daughter; that corridor can be slippery,’ she called.

‘You too, Mum.’

Esme turned and walked to the back of the cafe, pulling her leg along after her, tears blurring the room, so that when she looked back it resembled a wonderful impressionist painting not unlike the ones she often dreamed: Mother With Bran Muffin.

Then she disappeared down the dark throat behind the kitchen.

***

It was not the image Lucetta had of herself, plummeting into the water for the first time in years, encased in a black skin, this rather unromantic skin, this black itch, ankle grabbing, bum sagging, too tight across her chest. She flopped in it, rather than swaggering as Rhett did.

The lake still held a trace of summer’s heat, but even rugged up, she knew its chill.

Lucetta stepped in. She smelled the rich murky bottom of it, the smell of her childhood. The surface was a dewy mirror of glances without end, the textures of reflected clouds and the black tree branches piercing them were dark and sharp as if carved from chunks of coal. If she could lift it, peel it off like a rubber mask, she was sure she would find the true face of the lake beneath. The distance of water she had to cross, the blueblood clot of it, was daunting now, but as she was not the sort to wait long on the edge of anything without letting it absorb her completely, Lucetta, black-suited, leapt into the lake.

***

Esme made her way through the grease-glossed underworld of the kitchen, the single black burner with a burnt, bent pan frying eggs, two yellow eyes that watched her navigate benches to the door at the far end. The cook was nowhere to be seen. There were termite bodies stuck in the weave of the screen door. The brown metal handle was sticky. Esme used her hankie to press it down until it clicked, then she stepped from the smell of old lard to the smell of sour milk and vegetable peelings. The rubbish bins overflowed with split white plastic. She held her nose and shuffled to the back gate. Slid the latch across and pulled it open. It led on to an old narrow dunny cart lane, overgrown with vines, tiled with broken glass and VB cans, cigarette butts and a couple of blue milk crates turned upside down. She had managed to secure two silver packets of Panadeine Forte from Byrne’s emergency kit and had surreptitiously taken two in the cafe, and now, with their codeine effect coming on, felt herself in possession of a pair of legs and hips not to be bartered for the world. How she seemed to sail down the lane, expertly ducking brown-leafed jasmine vines that reached for her hair, passing over previously insurmountable obstacles in such graceful fashion she fancied that, if seen from a distance, it would appear that she was actually leaping.

In this way, she reached the end of the lane, which formed a T intersection with another lane. Left was the direction she needed to go. Just ahead, beyond that pile of rubbish, would be the street. Then she’d merely have to cross and, using the bus itself on the other side as a cover from the cafe, slip down its length and take her place in the queue, just in time. She’d be gone before her mother noticed a thing.

When she reached the rubbish pile and squeezed herself past it, however, she found that rather than leading directly on to the street, the lane turned right and continued down along the backs of the shops. She looked around. Perhaps if she had turned right back at the T? It might take her to the other side of the block, but at least she’d be on the street. If it came to it, she could throw herself into the road in front of the departing bus, flap her arms and ticket until the driver stopped. But to go back down and around now would risk the whole venture.

She’d have to continue following the lane this way, rather than risk going back. Surely it had to end somewhere? Esme sped up, noticing a faint fatigue in her legs. She tried to banish the suspicion that her leaping happiness, which only moments ago was certain and real, had been nothing more than a drug-induced chimera much like her mother’s recent Doom. How cruel to make one feel young and agile again, only to allow the real body, in all its disintegration, just to slip back into its coma beneath the surface. She should have taken three pills. She would have stopped right there and then to pop another with a nice, sweet burn of brandy if she didn’t fear so terribly that she had made a grave mistake in coming this way; if she hadn’t at that exact moment found herself at a dead end, stopped by a door with a worn, painted sign above it: PEARSALL’S ENGRAVERS.

This was a moment she felt certain would be engraved on her brain for the remainder of her days: twelve o’clock sunlight mottling the glass-strewn ground, the smell of rubbish and cat piss that made her think, unfortunately, of Minnie Mueller, and the feeling of forever being at the end rather than the beginning of something. It was the moment when her failure was most marked, for the door was locked. She rattled it twice loudly, and even kicked it once before losing all faith. In herself. In the world. She felt grave indeed.

Esme didn’t even attempt to sneak back in through the front door of the cafe, but hobbled, windswept, hair fallen, half-drunk on brandy, after having made a long walk back through the rubbishy lanes, back out the far side, past a group of smoking builders – ‘How ’bout a swig, love?’ – and around the block, for the cafe’s back gate had been bolted during her absence. She had heard the heartbreak rumble of the bus’s engine as it pulled away.

Her mother looked up from their bill, face like a child just woken. ‘What happened to you? I was busting. I knocked, expecting you’d fallen in. Loo was empty. I thought you’d finally ditched me.’

‘I got lost.’ Esme collapsed into her seat, wilted there. ‘Out the back.’

‘Mmm-hmmm.’ Hortense was checking the bill; she didn’t seem to care either way.

A woman at the next table, maybe Byrne’s age, maybe slightly older, dressed in purple with short silver hair, was eating pumpkin soup. She said something to her companion which sounded to Esme distinctly like, Do you like to be licked?

Esme looked up, flabbergasted. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. The woman was standing up from her table, exclaiming the virtues of ‘the dance of anger, the book . . .’ She walked over to Esme’s table and reached for the salt shaker (‘Excuse me’), still talking to her friend, ‘. . . You must buy it.’ Then she registered Esme and, with a look strong enough to start a fire, said, ‘You’ve done that dance, haven’t you?’

Esme didn’t know what to say. This impertinent woman stood staring at her as if with a certain knowledge of her innermost parts.

‘Are you playing a joke on me?’ Esme croaked.

‘You’ve done the dance of anger,’ the woman repeated.

‘What, her?’ Hortense snickered, pointing at Esme. ‘This one’s averse to exertion.’

Esme caught her mother’s eye and was on the verge of being offended when she realised that it was not annoyance she felt, not annoyance that was rising like a bubble to the surface. Mother and daughter opened their mouths simultaneously to retort, but instead, captured by a quick, shared, inexplicable glee, simply and suddenly giggled.

Long after the purple woman retreated to her licking and lecturing, long after they paid their bill, and even once out on the street, not fifteen minutes after she was meant to have been carried away from there for eternity, Esme couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her face, her stomach threatening to dislodge her tea, or the effortless joy at the way she and her mother attempted composure, only to clutch each other by the arm again, doubled over against the streetlamp in dangerous, convulsive hilarity.

Even an hour later, as they sat out the front of the fish and chips shop, peeling back the semi-translucent hinges that encased the hot pink prawn flesh, twisting off heads and legs, Esme and Hortense couldn’t stop laughing. Esme’s fingers and hands secreting the sea, slippery and happy to the gills with crustacea, and sisterly giggling.

***

Lucetta stayed close to the shore on top of the dark blue reflective surface as best as she could, but now and then descended slightly. She told herself she wasn’t just swimming, she was meant to be diving, too, and therefore she had to at least get her head wet. She wasn’t good at holding her breath for a long time anymore, and there was new terror in her lungs, she had lips that wouldn’t stay snapped shut. Instead, she learned to lower her face through the push of water and, floating her body on the top, let eyes that were clenched, open, tentatively at first, then wider, wider, trying to see beyond the gloom. Bubbles escaped her mouth and she surfaced quickly, taking in hair and air at once, strands of her own hair wrapped around her neck.

The panic will come, she told herself.

The panic in some form will always come.

But still, there was no poise to her endeavour, this steady flapping, and she was glad that Rhett didn’t have to see it. She had to survive the panic, just today, just today. No need to dissect it, but just to express it, like a dance, to swim past it somehow. She wouldn’t imagine the things that were underneath her (abandoned roads where people once strolled, old cars and sheds and fences), nor those that were not (sharks, alligators, dead bodies). She was more than halfway now, nearing Springwood Bay. If she could just get to that next half-submerged tree close to the far shore, she told herself, it was a perfect seat for gathering breath and a dose of courage; she could perch there.

She swam and saw her head as a black shadow hovering just below the surface, with shafts of reflected sunlight her halo, nearly there, then finally she scrambled up – quickly now that she was leaving the water, eager for no part of it to touch her – from a low, underwater branch, climbing higher, until she was well above the water line. The wood had petrified; was more rigid than brittle, and wore dried lichen, dried weeds and old fishing line like a woven cap on its crown.

The clouds above her were transforming themselves. As she sat on a branch, her foot hooked onto something protruding from the tree trunk. She squatted down, holding another branch, to feel a wire wound around the trunk along with a small, dangling heart, cut by hand from a thin sheet of pewter. The heart was tarnished and dull. She carefully untwisted the small cut of rusty wire from the hole punched through the heart until she’d worked it free from the trunk. An old brooch, the clasp on the back broken off. It reminded her of flowers secured to posts to mark roadside deaths. This tree probably had sat beside a road once. It gave her courage, but also a chill. She dropped it suddenly and watched the water balloon around it for a second before it sank, disappearing from view.

Lucetta plunged too. And there was joy in it. Swimming through the darting light, the icy, liquid ripples patting her face; it felt so close now, White Rocks Inlet and childhood.

***

‘Rain brightens everything, don’t you think?’ Hortense said, glancing out the car window.

‘I find that some things brighten unexpectedly and some things, never do,’ Esme answered.

‘Never?’ her mother asked.

She hadn’t meant to say ‘never’, but people had habits, people had words their tongues formed more often than others, and ‘never’ was one of Esme’s.

‘And I’m not being a wet blanket, as you say, Mother. I admire the will of a eucalypt growing out of a rock face, but I’m not fooled into thinking that eucalypt . . . has it easy.’

Hortense held her hands up, starfish, and Esme remembered like yesterday how able they once seemed, how wide and strong, with nails she kept clipped short.

‘Who said anything about easy?’

‘We never were.’ Esme hesitated, then looked to her mother for confirmation that she had actually spoken what she thought she had. You were never easy, is what Esme meant to say, but was not as reckless as all that, not today, not with the softness of the dirt she was thumbing a new seed into, the blossoming seed that would bring her and her mother even closer together.

‘What is that meant to mean?’ The hard look was back on her mother’s face.

‘This was a wonderful day, Mum.’

‘I’ve enjoyed myself, Ez.’ Her mother’s shoulders relaxed, she was back to her hands, picking her nails, examining the dirt.

‘It was a wonderful, wonderful day,’ Esme emphasised. ‘We haven’t had wonderful days, not for a long time. Maybe never.’

‘There you go with that never again.’

‘Some nevers are accurate. I’ve tried to be happy –’ she hoped to make what she was saying harmless, to make it smaller than it was somehow, ‘with less.’ Less was not nothing, less was just not as much as she would have hoped for, if she’d ever let (and good thing she never let) herself hope for a smidgen more.

‘There hasn’t been much to look forward to, perhaps,’ Esme continued. ‘I’ve felt all alone for so long . . .’

Outside the sun was just a place where the sky had been nibbled away, allowing a glimpse into softer, more buttery reaches of the day. She wanted to go there, to where the softness was.

‘You’ve had me.’ Her mother seemed put out. ‘I meant . . . I wasn’t implying . . . but you had Dad.’

‘You had Dad too, you have me. You have Pictoria.’

Esme was discovering that a conversation was like a road. You could get caught in a rut, and it could take you somewhere before you knew it, before you could stop it. Ruts in the road followed their own course, their own system and rhythm, unexpectedly diverting elsewhere, and sometimes a person, once caught, could not recover from its superior force and will. But you could will yourself to be curious about it too, you could let it take you; you didn’t always have to fight it.

‘I’ve never had you,’ Esme whispered.

‘You’ve had Byrne.’

Esme would go there, yes, tomorrow, she would slip out to the car again, alone, she would let the road take her wherever it chose, and if she didn’t make it all the way to Birdsville, no matter, she was adaptable, she would simply go elsewhere. Because this day had been an aberration, she now saw, their earlier companionship just a slip-up of the usual register, as incomprehensible as laughter sometimes is and just this side of sadness as well, a kind of hysteria even. But now, in the airless space between them, they were compacted, back to usual, and there was no room for further expansion.

Even better, Esme would drive her mother home, then turn around and go straight back. She could drive and make the Canberra connection to Adelaide, as it didn’t leave until that evening. Byrne’s note would not yet be wasted.

***

The shadows of the trees broke as they extended across the water, like oil spilled in the shape of a tree, inked drawings in the shape of a dream of a tree. There was something mythological about them, the way the roots on the shore were exposed, twisting and curling above ground as if nothing but their own inner fortitude were holding them up. She had been told this was once a sparse glade of tall gums and pines that ran at a distance from the town, not far down the road from where Gran and Auntie’s house used to sit before the flood, and she could imagine the crooked path through the trees where a pair of lovers might have walked, with light darting around the leaves and kangaroos on hind legs, still and watching from afar and all the snakes sliding under the rocks as you passed and mushrooms sprouting.

As Lucetta swam through these old trunks, she stared into the reflection of trees, a whole sprouting web of nerves against the sky, and when she finally turned around, she was surprised to find she was leading a carnival of swimmers behind her, a trail of men and women in suits and dresses and hats, a whole history of people dog-paddling after her, nodding and murmuring in gentle splash, and she was sure that one of them was Alesandra.

She could hear the wind picking up, the distant rustling, the incredible quivering of the trees on the far shore, and silver was the colour the world turned when the cloud came over, the sun was powerless against the determined haze. The water darkened and she could see it charging from a distance, the steely grey, the pounded metal of shadow coming swiftly over and the water rising into sharp white horses. Cloud covered Lucetta like wet hands, and the wind and trees felt as menacing as any lost place turned dark becomes. She wanted out now. She kicked harder, her right foot shot out behind her and she felt it lock in the grip of something, felt the certainty of the snag, the pain of it, how fast it bit through the rubber bootie and into her skin, and how quickly, as she cried out, she was pulled under.

***

‘Do you know, Ez . . .’ her mother said, staring out the window – they were passing the lake, the desolate cold shores of dead wood – ‘. . . what happened the day you were born?’

‘I have no idea.’ It was all dead wood, Esme thought, driftwood, everything they ever had to say to each other.

‘I think because of my being born in a blizzard, birth was a bad dream the way my mother told it to me, and I think I absorbed that, expected that when I had you,’ Hortense was saying. ‘Of course I was in love with your father, he was the thing that happened to me . . . in my life . . . but after you were born, when I could walk again, I walked – or hobbled, I should say – into the nursery and I saw you, all bundled like a bud on a tree. I swear you saw me when I looked at you – She saw me, I said – and I knew, instinctively, that this was going to feel different. I was, for the first time, transparent. You saw me. And I think, Ez, if I may be so bold, you’ve seen straight through me ever since . . .’

Her mother was watching her.

Esme was trying hard not to let the tears blur her vision. She had plans, she was resolved again, would take things into her own hands. Her mother’s words were just that, a clutter of flimsy letters that floated through the air between them. Flimsy as tissues. Or discarded clippings kept for much too long, so long that they no longer meant what they once had, what they would have meant had they been offered earlier. Now they were shreds, wet with tears, stuck to her cheeks, little shreds of words.

Esme wiped her cheek. ‘But one doesn’t know . . . ever . . . what you are feeling, Mum. I mean, one doesn’t know what you are actually thinking sometimes, compared to what you say. One doesn’t have a clue, does one?’ She exhaled loudly. There. She had got it out.

Hortense turned, regarded Esme for a moment, Esme could feel her looking again, and then, quite suddenly, she brushed a finger across Esme’s cheek. ‘Sorry, One.’

Esme wanted to pull over and grab her mother and cry into her chest like a child.

But this would not do, no, it was not part of the scheme of things, even new things, newly planted. There had to be time for them to germinate, to search out a firm hold before sprouting.

‘You always knew better, Ez,’ Hortense continued. ‘Always the one. If I took my judgement and then took yours and halved them to make some kind of average, as much as it might have leaned on my side of things, that was what I should do. That was the right thing.’

‘But you never told me I was right, or even close to right!’ Esme cried.

‘It was just what we played,’ Hortense said, ‘our ongoing play . . . We were meant to be in opposition, love; we were like two alternating tones making discords, weren’t we?’

‘I was miserable, every day.’

Her mother sighed, shook her head, but her mouth went velvety with affection. ‘Oh my kind, worried, unaccountable Esme. You really have been in a rut.’

Esme turned, as much from the afternoon glare through the windscreen as towards her mother’s face. As if her mother’s face were the sun, and she a sunflower. She never remembered feeling so young, not even when she was six did she feel like this, that inexpressible sense that her life with her mother could be an everlasting kingdom.

‘You’re still my daughter, aren’t you? I think until this morning I’d mostly forgotten.’

The car jolted too, with that recognition.

Then the windscreen blinded Esme, a star of light.

***

Fifteen seconds is an eternity.

Lucetta reached up but just the tips of her fingers emerged from the water to wriggle at the air and there was nothing to grab onto. Her hands slapped at the surface, but she was beyond the reach of any of the old trees. She kicked her free leg, then tried to use it to gain some leverage against her caught leg, to pull herself out, but her ankle was snagged on something sharp like a hook in the gills; she could feel whatever it was – barbed wire from an old fence? – lodge itself deeper into her skin and she nearly opened her mouth in pain. It took all her will to keep it shut, but inside she moaned. She knew from studying the facts of Joe’s death that the more she struggled, the more quickly she would tire, the greater the chance she’d open her mouth to the water.

She peered down through the murk and tried to see what had caught her, but could only make out a shape that seemed to her brain to be a face, like a two-dimensional plate without corresponding body.

Her head swam. She saw the crowd of people that only moments before she had imagined trailing behind her now similarly tangled in the branches and fence wire below the water, blue faces bloated, eyes wide and glossy as fish.

***

It was a small brown bird, a wattlebird perhaps, with yellow patches at its neck. A galah in a rush of pink. A sulphur-crested white cockatoo. Or a duck escaped, a white Muscovy with half-clipped wings.

Before she saw it, Esme had heard the rubbing of two pieces of silk. Then glimpsed the wing so perfectly folded into itself, like a fan. How easily it stacked itself and uncurled from its furl. A great unwrapping of quill and vane against air.

Later they would accuse her of having fallen asleep, but the bird had kicked its way across the windscreen, she was sure. Then it seemed as if they were dancing, wildly, slowly, Esme and that engine, she and those four wheels, swerving in S-bends across both sides of the road.

A person could be curious, you could see where the rut might take you, you didn’t have to fight it.

Yet if at this point the rut seemed to recover itself, for a moment, as if it were following the road, a person might be forgiven later for having sighed with relief, and for thinking Wattlebird? Cockatoo? Muscovy? Galah? And for doing absolutely nothing to stop the car, for letting go of the wheel even or perhaps just gripping it futilely like prison bars, while a second pair of hands had taken over, shouting, trying to straighten the car, but for the groove, the rut, the route. It was in charge now. It had plans to lurch off through the ditch and into that last patch of still-standing gums, the last trees in the district, it seemed, that had not been chainsawed.

A person might even be forgiven for finding it slightly fascinating, the way the car lifted as it flew off the shoulder of the road in a rush and thrush of sound, and made for a high vanishing behind the trees.

There was very little a person could do about it, they might later insist, because the groove was a lunatic and they were airborne, airborne.

***

‘There are three ways to end a story,’ Alesandra had once said. ‘The ending that happened, the ending that didn’t happen and the ending that might have happened.’

Rhett woke. Fragments of his mother’s stories were clattering around the remains of sleep. The fragments were knocking in his mind, trying to tunnel down through the ears, to expertly drill holes in his head and gain access to the meat of his brain. He was woken by this drilling across his forehead and the words crowding around, trying to get in, get out.

His head hurt. There were tears dried on his face. He couldn’t remember crying. He couldn’t remember falling asleep either, though here he was, on the floor of the closet. He thought he heard knocking and distant barking and then, very close, a deep sniffing under the door, along the length of the closet door: Scout, smelling him out.

He sat up.

The door cracked open, let in way too much light, his head was pounding with dehydration and dream. Scout in ecstasies of leaping, boinging down the hall after him, moaning with delight, as he hunched, thumbs to his forehead, pushing back the word that haunted him, to the loo. Head against the mirror, the tap on full, gulping cold water. Sat down to wee, too drowsy to stand, but refreshed somehow, released, from thirst, from something with a much greater ache than thirst even, and with that release came desire. Warm and real. The milky afternoon gathered at the window, still and understated; Scout licking his ankles.

***

Lucetta was caught among them, the creatures of beneath, all of them locked together in a watery embrace. Above, the surface was just a place they couldn’t reach, an entirely other world, with shades of blue that peeled away to black each twenty-four hours, a single rotation, and Lucetta saw that would mean no more to those who lived underneath than the unfathomable depths did to us.

The light around her separated into little crystals. Seconds later, she lost her peripheral vision.

Let me go! she begged, and kicked at the murky hands that held her. She was sure now they were Joe’s hands. He didn’t want her to forget him. He wanted her to know what he had known and she cried inside her mind for what he’d known and not come through.

So this was what it felt like. The jagged seconds.

She had a sense of her bloated arms thrashing, her long yellow fingers clutching at nothing, the smothering of lungs. She had, not quite thoughts, but flashes, a single image that if decompressed would contain a thousand thoughts, a thousand moments, one of which was her mother at home in bed with her book, reading happily, finally resting; how this would kill her – like Auntie always said, a child shouldn’t die before their mother.

Things switched off inside her. Animals in all their death throes came at her. The last twitches. The cats she had put down because nobody wanted them.

Let me go! Lucetta jerked her caught foot one last time, hard, despite the blood rising from the ankle’s wound like a ribbon through the water, and this force propelled her torso down to the barbed wire and fence paling that caught her in a black stink of rotten leaves and weeds, the floating black hair of a boy, with his dead, swollen log face. She grabbed onto him with both hands, she was bending back the hand that held her; she was breaking thumb and ring finger most especially.

Stay with me.

***

Rhett opened every door. He opened every window and every door; let the breath of the world into the house. The blue haze of the distant mountains, bluing into nothing, blue air on the horizon.

He opened his mother and father’s door, their room still faint with his mother’s perfume, wallpaper faded in yellow stripes by the sun from the curtains gaping a year, the bed made in her absence by somebody else’s hands.

He opened the other closets, the workrooms, the pantry, his brothers’ doors: Andy’s, then Jason’s. Their smells diminished with each, as the length of their death outlived the last trace of their scent.

Rhett flung open windows, for the flinging as much as for the air it brought. The cool, still-wet breeze, real and direct from the snow-caked mountains, hit him full in the face. He secured the doors open with shoes as cross-winds pulled threads from the front of the house to the back, replacing the complicated, stifling, worn-down footsteps with its own fresh, rousing marches. He watched the dust swirl across dressers and tables, the wood furred, alive, before the wind, like a hand wiped it all away.

The last door and window he opened was his own.

***

In the late afternoon, with slow shafts coming down through the cloud like falling scarves, the light wandered without exerting itself, ambling Sunday style along the wide avenues of sky to the trees. The trees saw the light coming and waved and shivered with rustling, with cotton sheet excitement that sounded like rain, and the bellbirds rang, their calls echoing down the red winding road.

The trees awaited the light and when it reached them, when it hit, they called and were silent. The clouds lay flat over the trees, cast dark, motionless forms, and the trees waved their red and green hair and whispered among themselves and then were silent. The bellbirds rang their bodies across the valleys and trees and they rang the story of time and would not be silent.

Esme sat strapped into the sideways car and saw all this, heard the song of the land, the bellbirds ringing and the trees whispering and the blue melting, down down to the bones of things, stripping back the world’s flesh to reach the pale, white wager of bones. She was strapped, hanging, sort of dangling over the mountain again, but this time, she didn’t need her fingers to catch her, the seatbelt did the trick on her light frame, kept her suspended.

For moments, long, forgotten moments, there was dream, as if she had never slept before. She heard a car or two passing, as though at a great distance, through the trees, and a currawong screaming overhead like an alarm through the body, and opened her eyes to find a black bird on the tipped-up edge of the orange and black bonnet, staring at her through the windscreen with yellow eyes, and she dozed again. The car was full of the sound of laboured breath. She didn’t know if she were alive or dead, didn’t know if her mother were alive or dead, or if they were both taking turns sleeping, watching each other from suspended distances.

But she could feel the day ending. The car was filled with that last light of late afternoon sun, the golden kind that rushed through the leaves as if needing to touch them all one last time before night fell.

She didn’t want to remember how her mother pushed the wheel at the last second, jerking it out of the way of that bird, to save that flying bird, so that the car, taking on a life of its own, had danced for a long time down the road before suddenly spreading its own wings and launching sideways through the trees.

For a long time, Esme couldn’t look at her injured mother. When at last she finally allowed herself to look, to see, to see her mother, she gathered only her face, just her face, damp from her own tears, the falling tears, dropping, torturous, onto her mother’s face. She reached down and touched her mother’s soft hair, and felt like Eve reaching out from a painted roof to touch the face of God.

‘Mum, it’s going to be okay. You’re okay, we are . . .’

She could imagine what others might say, when they found the two of them side by side, and later, when all the evidence had been examined and noted in special registers and various theories dreamed up during long insomniac nights; how Officer Moses would sit up one morning, snap his fingers and understand that Esme, although she had survived the initial impact, had sat strapped as if to a roof next to her unconscious mother until she slowly perished from thirst. She wouldn’t leave her, they’d say. Hazel Rey would be asked to create a memorial that marked the spot: Dedicated to the Life and Courage of Esme Mona Windle.

Esme pulled her foil of painkillers from her pocket. The first popped out and fell into her mother’s lap. The last three she projected directly into her mouth, swallowed dry, the hot bitterness spreading pasty across her throat and sticking there. She swallowed over and over until they dislodged or dissolved, she wasn’t sure which. Then she waited for them to kick in. A half-hour to be certain.

The driver’s door was too heavy to open and she knew how gravity would fling it back into her face continually anyway. She rolled down her window instead, lowered the arm rest between the seats. She gripped the steering wheel in both hands and then carefully released her seatbelt. Her body freed, dropped sideways against the arm rest. She gingerly shifted her left knee forward onto the steering wheel. The metal dug into her bone and she shouted with the pain and nearly dropped onto her mother’s lap. She shifted her body slightly to the right so that her right knee, and then the throbbing left, could balance on the leather armrest. She straightened her torso out. Her head and chest cleared the window.

The car had landed in a small green field of long grass, hidden from the road by the gums and pines, grass flattened in places from the roos. The sky was ticking down towards evening. Wisps of pale blue fog descended from the sky and rose from the ground, swirling among the twigs and leaves, until it finally converged around the car, getting into the cracks, passing through the rubber window edges and doors, filling the car with blue cloud.

It seemed to be forming Esme and erasing her simultaneously.

‘Mum, I’m going to get . . . somebody . . . help. Okay?’

She grabbed the outside door handle and dragged herself as if from an ice hole, pushing away from the arm rest with her feet. She inched her hand forward from the handle until she could transfer her grip to the sharp bottom edge of the car doorframe. Then she stretched to the very edges of herself, as if on a rack, until she was lying on her belly over the driver’s door, legs splayed, breathing loudly and unevenly, exhausted.

She inched herself sideways, her hose tearing across the knees, until she touched the front grille with her toe. This she used as a stepladder to climb down to the pine-needled ground.

She was only wearing one shoe.

***

Hazel heard that distant, familiar ringing singing across wires of flight. The receiver was plucked from its cradle and breathed into.

‘Mom? How are you? How’s the hip?’

‘I’m resurrected. Finally walking. Walking without wavering, that is.’

‘Good. That’s really good. I finished my exhibition.’

‘Does that mean you’re coming home?’

‘To Sydney? I don’t know. I’m at Byrne’s now. My boss mentioned some editing work for the newspaper . . .’ Hazel looked around at the kitchen that had welcomed her so well. When she left Burchill’s that morning, she was sure she’d be driving back to Sydney, but now, in this quiet, ticking house with the desolation of the lake through the windows, she was no longer sure. She could picture the four of them again as the room filled with night sounds and the lights sputtered, blinking not with wax and flame, but power surges, and she let them move around her, their bodies and talk taking on various shapes in relation to one another and to her.

‘I might stay.’

‘I wish you lived here.’

‘I know.’

‘I wish we could just go for a cup of coffee. Just that.’

‘Yes, I know.’ And they were quiet for a moment.

‘Mom, I’ve wanted to ask . . . You once said every being has been your mother?’

‘Every being has been your mother. In another life. Every person, the mosquitoes, your dog . . .’

Hazel eyed Josie through the window, rolling on the grass on her back in unbuttoned bliss.

‘But what if you have a problem with your mother? The analogy doesn’t work.’

‘Everybody, Hazel. Every person on the street. Every person on the planet.’

‘I mean, it doesn’t help me to love better, by thinking of mothers, if I have a problem with my mother.’

Her mother paused. ‘It might help you to be kinder to them is all.’

Hazel could hear her breathing and for a second, just one second, they seemed in sync, separated by only a wire.

‘You’re done with Danny, aren’t you?’ Her mother sighed. ‘I never even met him. You never actually told me anything about him.’

Hazel knew her mother thought that life was what was lived in the moment, what was actual. Hazel had an idea of something beyond. Because if a person lived only in what was actual, how did they ever envision new possibilities? How did they reach for something outside the margins of themselves?

Like a snail emerging: it had to have an image of itself moving beyond the cosy, enclosed interior space of shell. They had to project an image of themselves out into the space beyond the shell, the space of the world, some of it imaginary, a space that included the past, as well as the envisioned, hoped for realm of the future. Then, though it might take a lifetime to cross the distance of a backyard, they had to move.

So Hazel began to tell her mother the story of Danny, remembering the night at a party, not too long before they broke up, when somebody had asked her and Danny how they’d met. How Danny had started to tell the story, the story of their love, from the beginning, the long, sprawling version, but then, halfway through, the man who had asked the question got up to get himself another drink, and because there was nobody left at the table paying any attention, Danny was essentially telling the story to Hazel, his partner.

He was telling her how they met and she was telling him how they loved and what Hazel now saw was that, even then, the relationship was already consigned to memory, to scrapbook, to the plaques of revelation, and that they had been telling it to each other as they would a good tale, down the track, to somebody else, in another life they had yet to make real.

Hazel wondered about the power of her own distance.

Telling it as she was now, to her mother, on the shores of Lake Eucumbene.

***

Esme limped, ghostly, through the blue fog. The sun was sinking, unreachable through cloud, it didn’t so much set as simply begin to fade, shrink, disappear. She walked along the back road; didn’t know where she was going. Home, help, but how far that was, how long it would take her, she had no idea.

She tried to walk without thinking, without wondering which impulse of fog would triumph, the forming or the erasing; whether she would get to the other side of it, the haze, that is, for that was as much as she could stand contemplating.

One step first, then another, a reliance on the shod foot. She could feel the painkillers wearing off, though adrenaline seemed to carry her on quite a way beyond comprehension, beyond possibility. She was wrapped in a silk shift of shock and it fitted her quite well.

She thought, I wish I was walking in snow, and then she was, suddenly; the temperature, which had been steadily dropping, rose, and the flakes fell spaciously, soft and wet, to touch her hand.

A single flake melting on her face contained the entirety of her childhood.

It was gone before it reached the ground.

But she still walked into the memory of snow, calling up the cloud of moths around her face and her youth which she still carried somewhere inside her, and the vague adorableness of Minnie and how it felt to be lost. Her mother too, hauling wood through the snow.

It wasn’t long before she recognised a curved red trail cut through the brush on the left side of the road, and the long driveway winding through cow-studded hills and blowing tussock that led to a little fibro house and the car, perched up on concrete blocks, wheel-less, engine-less, a vinyl front seat ripped and stained with melted butter: the permanent address of Owen Swan.

Across the muddy silver of the cattle grid she stepped, one-two, one-two. She tripped out of that breathless fog, out of the snow, which was now gone. The twilight air turned glassy, dispersing, deepening the blue. The first sliver of the new moon woke. Above her, the long slow trajectory of a star tore across a belt of speckled light. She felt as if she were floating in deep space, just a lone planet in a dark universe, just a speck of dust, and was amazed not to have seen it before, under the deep blue curve of the evening sky, how small she was.

She passed through Owen Swan’s front door, past the careful stacks of newspapers left on his doorstep and, later, piled inside, his house full of dried, yellow, crumbling dailies, rooms taken over with world and local news. She walked through the house of paper, out the side door to the driveway and opened the car door. She climbed into the passenger seat beside him. The car was warm with breath, still alive, warm and sweet with the smell of him. And toast.

‘A person should not drive after seventy,’ she said.

He turned slowly. She was blurry to him, though she didn’t know that, for he was blurry to her too, through all the salt. She scooted closer.

‘Who is that?’

‘Esme,’ she answered simply.

‘I guess you’ve come with the paper,’ he murmured.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her hands were empty, unfolded in her lap.

‘It’s okay.’ He gazed his watery, blue eyes past her. ‘I can’t see anyway. I haven’t been able to read for years. I miss it, though . . .’

She nodded, for nothing more could shock her. ‘Oh. Blind.’

‘So what did it say?’ he asked. ‘Today’s paper?’

The windscreen was plastered with brown flower petals, old leaves, the wet, twilight remnants of snow crystals.

‘Long Passion for Deer Life,’ she recited. And knew it true.

She leaned her head on his shoulder.

There was no regret. There was nothing.

***

Her last air bubbles had forced themselves out one after another like a necklace of glass beads, but using both hands to tear and scratch at the weeds, the fence, the fingers, the face, Lucetta had managed to yank her foot from the wire and rose, light-headed, through a tunnel of green to slam through the seemingly unbreakable surface of water to breath and light.

She had floated on her back then, heaving, crying. The heavy sky a gift above her.

When she finally reached the shore, stumbled up out of the water and ripped off the rubber boot, blood was branching across the arch and veins of her blue foot like a map of a new country.

She had pulled herself, exhausted, onto a granite boulder, stripped off the wet suit and laid it out on the rock, hoping that it might dry. She took off her swimming costume and wrapped it tightly around the wound on her ankle. She lay down in the last of the sun, just now coming through the clouds in wide, brave shafts. The stone held the heat of the day.

She thought about being up in the mountains, camping with Rhett on the side of the Yarrangobilly River and how they’d fallen asleep one afternoon to the sound of the birds. A bellbird, the squawk of lorikeet, this bird then that, high, low, high, low, of flute and string, then the swallows, and the pure, long-stretched summons of the whipbird, whose welts she’d wear on her back any day, like blossoms. After their nap, Rhett had stacked rocks in the river, alternating sizes, shapes, colours, creating tall, precariously balancing towers, a through line in a spirit of hope. The towers had stood so solidly, so sure and silent, as the river rambled past, that Lucetta had known that even after they’d gone, there’d be rock towers in the river.

‘One day we’ll be old,’ she’d said.

Despite last night’s rain, the water level of the lake had not risen. In fact, the beach around Lucetta now seemed wider and lonelier than ever. She wondered, as she had when she was a child, who had died that day; whose body had been carried under; wondered if perhaps it was meant to have been her own.

The water moved past her slowly, here a floating leaf, here an insect skating the surface, water pulled always onward. She thought, something that was here is going, is now gone and something new has already arrived to take its place.

So the fabric of seconds passed by, ever renewing.

‘One day we’ll be old,’ she’d said to him. ‘And we’ll say, “Once we were young and naked by the river.’’ ’

***

Rhett’s bedroom was as he had left it, but emptier somehow, bare as skin, as though there’d been nothing from his childhood worth keeping. He found a single box under the bed. A stack of old magazines, a tiny clay cup he had made with his mother, a couple of rocks, a scattering of photos: his grandparents, his various dogs, a rosella on a fence, an out of focus sunset, he and his mother (was he four? clinging to her skirt), and Lucetta.

There she was in her brown, leggy magnificence, hanging off the branch of a gum tree over the water’s edge. He knew, though it seemed too simple, that he loved her now because he had loved her then. Because she had known him when he knew nothing. That she had known his mother and helped him bury his dog Trout in the back garden and hook fish; because she had hurt him and left him in that wordless, sun-struck daze of childhood where time had no edges, no expectation except for another day, and pain, when there was pain, was felt like a series of quick, sharp slaps to the face, alternating with afternoons of such thrill, the tumble and spill of days. Yes, his face sometimes stung, but was it the slap or the sun or the love he had felt for her that burned him so?

He did not know. It was all knotted together.

He loved her because it was all knotted together.

The room was white and empty and he was in front of the mirror, on his knees, holding her by the hips. His bones had grown on her love and he was marrow-rich with her.

He knew a man was meant to give his childhood away, to let it sink like a city beneath the lake. He could float it out, an offering to the dead, a raft of sticks and old photographs, tinned soup and coupons, boxes of receipts and all the scrolls of paper they kept, and the chipped, hand-painted crockery commemorating every family event for fifty years, and the gold-plated trophies with his brother’s name on them, a man on a horse, a man on a horse rearing up.

A man Rhett wouldn’t be. A man he didn’t want to be. He would set it all on fire, let it burn and melt, burn and sink.

He stood at the window. Beyond the glass, the heavy clouds gathered as if towards a single point of focus and light, drawing him down the shore to the point where he and Lucetta once played.

He could see, near White Rocks, a figure.

It was her, his girl. Lucetta, on the back of a stone, her hands turned to support the lean of her body, her face tilted up to catch the last drops of sunlight.

She looked up as if she knew he was watching her.

Rediscovering her had been like finding yourself in a mirror after years away: how his face had sharpened, as if sculpted by life’s seconds, worn by continual rubbing with the air. Like watching yourself make love in a mirror and how all that was contained in love was etched in that reflection, in your face: loss, anger, light, darkness, yes, no, time, eternity, space, death, regret, helplessness . . . all of it sucked and whirled into the meaning of things, until you were wide open, there for yourself to see, to say, This is what you make me.

They would exist together beyond this place.

Now he left the doors of the house flung wide, he left the closets and the drawers wrenched open until the documents and paper of a family cartwheeled through the air, tugged by the threads of wind through the doors, carrying them away.

Running down to the shore, arms loaded with blankets, he finds a boat, drags it into the water. It will float. Barely. But it will float.

Rhett believes that loneliness is curable.

Her face is in front of his, in the mirror, her head tilted up as if towards the light, and her eyes are closed now, her body swaying. When at last they open to find him – she knew he was watching her all along – there is a lake of tears in them.

And you are a child again, carving her name into stone.

I LOVE YOU LUCETTA

HORTENSE LILA WINDLE
AUGUST 8, 1900 – APRIL 22, 2002

BELOVED OF ‘BRUMBY’ JACK JOE WINDLE

AND MOTHER

Dear Byrnie,

I know sometimes I annoy you. I think the way love works is this: you poke the ones you love most to see if they bleed. Then you know they love you too. If I poke you, it’s because you are all I have that also has me. We have had some lovely times. I hope you will find somebody, Byrne, to settle down with. Please take Owen his papers. He needs them. My will is in my top drawer. I’ve left you what cash I can.

Don’t worry about me. It’s my turn now.

Love always,
your Mum,
Esme

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I WOULD LIKE TO thank all of those friends and colleagues who read or discussed with me the manuscript, or portions of the manu script, and offered thoughtful and invaluable feedback during Aphelion’s long gestation: Jane Cameron, Sadie Chrestman, Marie-Pierre Cleret, Louise D’Arcens, Rosamund Else-Mitchell, Kathleen Farrar, Francette Geraghty, Liesbet Geraghty, Bonnie Lander, Lesley McFazden, Ewan Morrison and Cindy Ryan.

A very special thanks goes to the extraordinary Christopher Cyrill for bringing new life and devotion to the manuscript at its darkest hour; for taking it under his wing and caring for it as one would a child.

The Australia Council for the Arts gave financial support in the form of a New Work Grant. Thank you.

To the Irish band The Frames and your beautiful album For the Birds. Your songs, words and rhythms have thoroughly infused this book. I consider it something of a collaborative effort! Thank you for your music.

Though several people have lent me their knowledge and expertise, any historical or technical errors must be considered my own. Some are even intentional, such as the notion that there are only three houses on the shore of Lake Eucumbene. While original places have been my inspiration, this book’s Adaminaby and its Lake Eucumbene are, in the end, of my own making.

A huge thanks goes to the author Siobhan McHugh for reviewing my Snowy Mountains history so generously and so quickly. I am especially indebted to Siobhan’s wonderful book: The Snowy: The People Behind the Power. Several images in Aphelion have been directly lifted from her own research, including the damper that even crows won’t touch, the frozen and dangerous towels on the Hills hoist, and the steak fried on a shovel.

To John Rudd of Reynella at Adaminaby for assisting me with flora and fauna issues in the Snowy Mountains National Park.

To Francette Geraghty for loading me up with veterinary magazines and teaching me all things animal and, though it didn’t make it to the final manuscript, for showing me how to remove a cow’s eye.

To Kate Smith, to whom I go for all automotive questions.

Renate Ogilvie was very inspiring on the subject of death and dying, and any wisdom from the mouth of the Buddhist mother is hers entirely.

Philia Hayes very kindly offered to correct my story of the building of Anafiotika in Athens but, wayward as I am, I simply preferred her son John’s version of dwellings that appeared in the space of a night. I also have John Hayes to thank for sharing his home on the island of Anafi with me and for helping with my absolutely flawed first attempt at the translation of the Rilke stanza that appears in Chapter 2.

Jan Sardi read and made suggestions regarding the Italian sections and Italian names, for which I am most grateful.

David Catterns generously lent me his peaceful, phone-less mountain cottage to work from; I wouldn’t have finished the book without those long, silent days.

To Josh Raymond for such friendship, support and technical help over the years, for days of author photos and the beautiful cover image of the lake that he painstakingly assembled from my photo graphs and my dreams.

To Sue Smith and Andrew Kelly for their spare bed and dog minding and much wine and friendship.

To Sarah Ducker, Richard Manasseh, Harry, Uma and Raffy, for sharing your home and lives with me.

To my wonderful agents at the Cameron Creswell Agency: Jane Cameron, Sadie Chrestman, Sophie Hamley, and Lucy Luck of Lucy Luck Associates in the UK. You are all so supportive and so kind.

To Ali Lavau and her meticulous eye! My words are so much the better for it.

To Nikki Christer, Sarina Rowell, Jane Novak and Annie Coulthard at Picador/Pan Macmillan. As always, I am very grateful.

Finally, this is a book made from many types of love.

To Liesbet Geraghty, my Australian mother, for her generosity and her stories.

To my mother, Ann Jacobson, my father, Stephen Ballou, and my family, thank you for all the years of financial support and love, despite my distance.

To Barbara Ballou and in memory of my grandfather, Bob, on his horse.

To Bryan Woltjen, who brought inspiration at a time when I lacked the capacity to write about love or anything approximating it.

To James Livingstone, who first showed me the wonders of the Snowy Mountains and who taught me how to build a bridge of stones and drink from a lake.

To Cindy Ryan, Genevieve Maynard, Emma Freeman and Em Owen. Thank you. Thank you.

Ewan Morrison, you are the one. How lucky I am to have found you.

Snowy: The Making of Modern Australia by Brad Collins, Tabletop Press, Canberra, 1990

The Snowy: The People Behind the Power, Siobhan McHugh, HarperCollins, 1995

The Snowy: A Dream of Growing Up, Film Australia, 1989

Operation Adaminaby, The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority, propaganda reels from the 1950s and 1960s

GRAVITY

pp 34–5: second stanza of [Du im voraus] by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Uncollected Poems, 1913–1918, translation by Emily Ballou and John Hayes

p 213: ‘Thousands of years of Aboriginal history were also lost beneath the waters’, from Siobhan McHugh, The Snowy: The People Behind the Power

p 219: ‘Every disease is a musical problem. Its cure, a musical solution’, attributed to Novalis

p 220: ‘When it’s dark enough, you can see the stars’, attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson

FLOOD

p 260: ‘She was in a prison as you see, all in a cave of snow . . .’, American street ballad from 1838

p 278: ‘Tonight I am “Eros of this warm vigilia for the cheek of a girl”’, from Antigone by Sophocles, author’s own translation

p 279: ‘Oft a flood . . .’, from John Donne. Italian translation, Paola Balzarro

ARC

p 425: ‘I’d still be planting my little apple tree . . .’, quoted by Renate Ogilvie