Look, here’s Jimmy rising now—if it weren’t for the visible pipe, you’d never know. Who can say what he’s up to, wandering about in the dark? It occurs to Foster that Jimmy might take advantage of the darkness to remove his cloak; that this could be Foster’s opportunity to see what’s underneath it, once and for all. He doesn’t particularly care what state Jimmy’s arm is in—what’s so unusual about a shattered limb? What bothers him, on principle, is the idea that Jimmy feels he’s owed privacy. Foster distrusts privacy: when you live with honour, there’s no need for secrets. He also considers Jimmy’s obvious concealment of his arm to be a kind of vanity. Foster would be annoyed by this in a white man; in Jimmy, it infuriates him.

  Foster lays down his own pipe, stands, stretches, and turns his back to the fire so that his eyes will adjust more readily to the dark. Then he sets out in the direction in which he saw Jimmy’s little light move off. Foster aims to look like a man strolling out to take a piss; but, if questioned, he’s prepared to admit that he’s following Jimmy, who might be planning any kind of mischief. The two local men, however, are in no state to question anybody. The hostile one turns over and snores with renewed vigour.

  In the dark, every rock and bush has a watchful quality. Foster knows this to be a trick of the moonlight: in reality, this whole region is dry and dead, and all the emptier for people’s insistence on populating it and planting their doomed wheat. If anything ever truly inhabited this place, it left long ago. Foster prefers the genuine wastes of the central deserts, crossed by camel strings and Lutherans and ancient tribes, and no one else—out there, at night, a man can feel the lonely eye of God. But here, in the lesser landscape of the Flinders, he picks his way among clumps of spinifex, following a steep sandstone ridge that can have been Jimmy’s only path.

  Soon, Foster finds himself on a rocky outcrop studded with grass trees. There’s no way to go further—the ground drops away from the outcrop in all directions except for the one he came from, and no one would attempt to descend these slopes in the dark. But Jimmy isn’t here. The grass trees look larger than they should; Foster thinks for a moment that he can hear a faint chirping from within their verdant crowns. Their spears rise above them, long and straight. He disapproves of the popular name of these trees, which is ‘black boys’; it feels lazy to him, as all metaphors do (he considers himself a naturalist and, therefore, invested in the precise description of the thing itself, without fanciful recourse to its similarity to any other non-related thing). But tonight, surrounded by the stalky flowers of the grass trees, their concealing leaves, and their low, thick trunks, Foster is unnerved: he feels himself to be the victim of a silent ambush. He stands motionless among the grass trees for some time, as if moving in their presence would be a kind of surrender. The thought occurs to him, as it often does lately, that it’s been two years since he published his last book, and he doesn’t have a new manuscript, a draft-in-progress, or even the inkling of an idea. Eventually, he hears the flat sound of a euro or kangaroo beating the ground with its tail as it jumps through the night; this breaks whatever spell held him, and he makes his way back down the ridge. When he reaches camp, the fire has turned to red embers and the local men are still snoring. Jimmy, smoking his clay pipe, is back in his position, as if he never left it. He breathes in through his nose, and yes, he is—Foster sees this clearly—he’s taking pleasure in his pipe, the rest, the night. Apparently, Jimmy feels that he’s done a good day’s work.

  Foster returns to his seat by the fire. He’s gone so long without a book, he thinks, because he left the central deserts—a man like him can’t write while settled in a town. He needs contact with the land, the natives; he needs the danger of the frontier while there still is one. But he also needs to not be disconcerted by a clump of grass trees. Foster takes up his beloved pipe and his Syrian tobacco, but can find no satisfaction in them.

  Here is Constable Robert Manning, First Class, out on the plain. It’s late at night; Robert is cold, hungry, tired, riding a tired horse, and following a girl. The girl is Cissy Wallace. If asked how he found himself in this situation, he wouldn’t be entirely sure. All he knows is that, shortly after he and Cissy arrived back at the Wallace farm, delivered tidings of the footprints, and received the news of the handkerchief, Cissy came to him and said, ‘Let’s go.’

  And Robert, who intended to talk her out of looking for her father, said, ‘Wait a tick.’ He had so many responsibilities: instructions to give, arrangements to make, bloodied handkerchiefs to inspect, a sunrise meeting at the scuffed rock, and Minna expecting him home tonight. God, Minna waiting for him in the dark—soft, tight, squealing Minna—breathless, sweat on her belly, biting her pink lip, bucking, rolling, laughing—and not leaving him even when he slept, but coming into his dreams with her hands and her mouth. My God, Minnow! Your goddamn mouth.

  ‘Wait a tick,’ Robert said to Cissy Wallace.

  He went out into the wheat with the oldest Wallace girl, the one who found the handkerchief. When they returned to the house, someone came to him and said that Cissy Wallace had ridden off to look for her father—she couldn’t be stopped—and would he go after her? He did. When he caught up to her she said, ‘You were taking too long.’

  He tried to talk her out of the pointless excursion: the day was getting on, her father knew how to take care of himself, they couldn’t even be sure where to look for him.

  Cissy said, ‘You promised.’

  ‘One hour,’ said Robert, and they rode together, following Fairly Creek north-west. After half an hour, he announced that it was time to go home. When she refused, he said, ‘I’m heading back. You can come with me or not, as you please.’

  He turned his horse and set off for Undelcarra, sure that she would follow him. She didn’t. So he turned again and caught up with her, mindful of Foster’s injunction to keep her from getting lost. They had several arguments. He thought of forcing her off her horse and onto his—he would lead her horse and keep Cissy Wallace right in front of him in the saddle, where he could damn well see her. He thought of striking her, but he had never struck a white woman. When he ordered her to come with him in the name of the law, she laughed. He did pity her—her brother was missing, she wanted her father, she was a child. He imagined Minna out here alone. So he stayed with Cissy, thinking that she would tire as the day came to an end. When the sun set in the bizarre way it had been lately, he asked, ‘Are you just going to keep on?’

  Cissy scratched behind one ear and said, ‘Yes, I am.’

  So Robert kept on with her, and here they are, late at night, still riding. He’s interested to see how far she’ll go. He rides a few paces behind, watching the twitch of her horse’s tail. She never turns to look at him. The moon is just bright enough to see by, and she rides as if she knows where she’s going. Earlier in the evening, he allowed himself to fall into a kind of sleepy trance; for the last hour, he’s been singing to keep himself awake. The girl doesn’t join in with the singing, but when he finishes each song she recites part of a poem very loudly.

  ‘Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred!’ calls Cissy, and Robert sings, ‘Poor old Jeff has gone to rest, we know that he is free! Disturb him not but let him rest, way down in Tennessee!’

  Making so much noise as they crash across the plain, Robert and the girl wake birds and send larger, unseen things scurrying through the scrub. They’re getting close to the western ranges. Robert is curious: will she stop at the hills, or will she try to go on riding up and over them? He’s impressed by her boldness. She seems less childish to him now, and he finds himself watching the sway of her hips as they move above her horse.

  ‘And like a thunderbolt he falls!’ Cissy shouts.

  ‘Who should I see but a Spanish lady, washing her hair by candlelight!’ sings Robert.

  This goes on for some time, until a lantern swings amid the trees in front of the girl’s horse and a man says, ‘Whoa!’

  Robert is ready for this, without being conscious that he’s ready: he has his pistol, his sword and, more crucially than both of these, his uniform, which he’s proud to wear. He’s been under attack before. There was one evening, for example, some years back, when he was on patrol and surprised two natives slaughtering a cow. Robert had no choice but to kill one of them. If he thinks back on it, which he rarely does, he doesn’t see himself shooting the man; rather, he feels as if his uniform did the deed. But he has, ever since, been ready for a situation like this: ambushed among trees at night. This man with the lantern is dark-skinned, too, and Robert’s uniform is ready.

  But it’s all right—Cissy seems to know him. It’s her father’s farmhand, apparently, Billy Rough, who Robert has heard is clean and reliable, and hires himself out like a white man. Well, Robert will believe it when he sees it. The man doesn’t look entirely reputable—he has a cut on his temple, and his curly hair is rather wild. He’s saying now that he and Wallace are camped not far away, he came out to see what was making so much noise, and says that they should follow him—which could be a trap, but Robert is too tired, and the night is too odd, for this to feel likely.

  The native leads them along the creek bed where it’s cut its way through the western cliffs. Then they’re in a valley and Mathew Wallace is here, looking bruised about the eyes. When Wallace sees Cissy, he stands and begins to shout at her; she slithers down from her saddle and shouts right back. Robert dismounts, lets Billy take his horse, and intercedes by placing one hand on Cissy’s shoulder, which shuts her up. He squeezes her shoulder and is idly pleased by the way she shivers in response.

  ‘Evening, Wallace,’ Robert says. ‘We’ve come with news.’

  ‘What news, then?’

  ‘We found the boy’s tracks along Marsden’s Creek, about six miles north-east of your place.’

  ‘You found tracks,’ says Wallace. It isn’t a question—he’s pondering this statement. He’s purple about the eyes, and his beard looks a mess.

  ‘Denny’s footprints,’ Cissy says, wriggling Robert’s hand off her shoulder. ‘And Joy found a handkerchief with blood on it in the wheat. So you need to come home with us.’

  Wallace shakes his head, and when Cissy opens her mouth to speak, he says, ‘Wait, girl.’ He rummages in his pack, and look: a pair of boy’s lace-up boots with no laces in them. Cissy cries out as if someone has struck her.

  ‘But where’d you find them?’ asks Robert. He’s never seen a pair of boots look stranger than these ones do, although they’re perfectly commonplace: scuffed heels, dangling tongues, with squinting eyelets where the laces should thread.

  ‘Not five miles back from here.’ Wallace tells them about a knife mark made on a tree; a scrambled trail left by a man (who might well have dropped a handkerchief) and his horse; and a fire in the hills tonight.

  ‘A fire!’ says Cissy. ‘Where? Which way? Why’d you stop here?’

  There seems to be some awkwardness about this question; Wallace looks at his farmhand before answering. ‘It were too late for the terrain,’ he says. ‘And too dark to follow the trail. We meant to sleep and start early and catch him at his breakfast.’

  Cissy throws her arms in the air and cries, ‘You could sleep!’

  ‘Ah, till two lunatics come along singing,’ Wallace says. When Cissy makes a noise of disgust, he snaps, ‘D’you think we’re stopped here for the pleasure on it?’

  ‘And they’re Denny’s boots for sure?’ Robert asks.

  Cissy and Wallace both answer: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, blow me,’ Robert says. But he isn’t truly surprised. It seems tonight as if anything might happen: as if the boy might have walked both north-west and north-east at once, have been carried away by phantom horses, have climbed onto multiple rocks and left boots all over the Willochra. He stifles a yawn and says, ‘I’ll get Foster. If I cut across country I can make the meeting.’

  The farmhand asks, ‘What meeting?’

  ‘An hour past sunrise,’ Robert says. He looks at Wallace. ‘There’s a big flat rock west of Ewart’s Bluff, on Marsden’s Creek. That’s where they found the footprints.’

  ‘I know the rock,’ says the hand. ‘I can go.’ He seems uncommonly alert and sure of himself. Manning recognises him, now, as the black cricketer who used to play for the Thalassa team, and then for the town, and was so much better than everyone else that they all agreed it was preferable not to have him play at all.

  ‘Yes,’ says Wallace to his man, with a growl in his voice. ‘Get on so I can’t look at you.’

  Robert is so tired that the next while takes on a muddled character: the cricketer rides off, carrying messages for Foster; Wallace wants to know everything about the tracks and handkerchief; Cissy, fretting, lies down beside her father and says she’ll never sleep. She sleeps.

  ‘You should have a kip yourself,’ Wallace says.

  ‘Just for an hour or so,’ says Robert.

  He goes into the dark to piss. Afterwards, holding his cock, he thinks of Minna. He could be buried in her right now. God, Minnow. Slick pulse, steady honey. His hand isn’t enough but it’ll do. He’s quick about it: jerk and swell and spill. When he comes back to the low sparks of the fire, Cissy is lying with her head pillowed on her outstretched arm; her mouth is open, her breathing is loud, and her other hand is curled like a snail shell beneath her chin. Her father sits looking at her and frowning. The bruises around his eyes are even darker now—they’ll be black by morning.

  Robert says, ‘Your girl’s stubborn, all right.’

  ‘Ah,’ replies Wallace. ‘She caps my arse.’

  But the frowning way he looks at Cissy is also loving. She really is only a child, with a cross expression on her sleeping face and her fist pressed into her neck.

  Robert settles himself for sleep. He does recall having sworn to Minna that he would be home tonight, but it doesn’t occur to him that she will have taken such a vow seriously. Minna understands his obligations. If she knew where he was, he’s sure she’d feel sorry for him: laid out to sleep on the dusty ground, dirty, tired, far from home, and still with an ache in his balls.

  Tonight, Mary lies in her white bed and dreams she’s on an ocean-going ship and has lost something: possibly a ring, or a watch, or her mother’s hymnbook. She dreams of Denny. He’s looking down into a gully full of scaly ferns at the body of a dead wallaby, and when she asks him what he’s doing he says he’s leaning over the edge of one day or another. She dreams of birds in houses, of combing lice from her hair, and of black dogs running through cornfields with trails of light behind them. Spilled salt. A lamp glass stained with soot in the shape of a coffin. The Devil living in the bottom of a boiled egg.

  Mary is asleep or awake and sometimes both at once. She holds the blood-spotted handkerchief and is visited by all the dark dreams of her mothers and their mothers before them. These are not the lucid visions of the faith she was raised in; they’re much older, they’re long secrets stretched out over the centuries in which women have known death. She dreams that failure has left its habitual post in the corner of the parlour and come to stand above her bed. Failure is a stooped, pale figure with an open mouth and swollen eyes.

  Mary dreams of a child born without ears, who will join her in a silent world and never grow and never leave her. She dreams that she is good at keeping sons. She dreams until she’s no longer tired. Beside her, Lotta kicks and snorts and settles. Mary is afraid to open her eyes in case she finds that Lotta, too, is gone.

  Bess, sleeping in the gorge, dreams of the wallaby. In the dream, it’s a secret that she’s kept from Karl, who believes her to be incapable of secrets. That isn’t true. One year after they were married, Bess and Karl spent the summer in a small red house on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. Karl believed that a patron had offered them the use of the house, but in fact Bess owned it and hadn’t told him. She’d bought it sight unseen the week before their wedding (a quiet wedding, with her father not invited and both her brothers gone to Australia) because Karl said he must do as the other young Swedes he knew were doing: leave Paris behind forever, return home, and paint Swedish themes in Swedish places. Bess was more than willing to leave Paris; she was only there because it was obligatory for anyone with painterly ambitions. She bought the island house with the modest amount of money she’d inherited when her mother died, and this may have been the reason she never told Karl she owned it: her mother, having married a man who turned out to be a gambler, had advised her daughter to keep a place that was hers alone, to which she could escape if necessary. Buying the house made Sweden feel feasible for Bess, and she kept it to herself. When they moved, not long after the wedding, it was to dark, stuffy rooms in Stockholm.

  Months later, as the weather warmed those suffocating rooms, Bess invented the patron with a summer house. She packed a case with their clothes and books, arranged to have their painting materials sent after them, and they went out to the red house on the island. The house had big windows and, upstairs, a long empty attic room with good light. It came with a rowboat in which they could go back and forth between the island and the mainland, a trip of an hour in fair weather. Before the paints and canvases arrived, Bess and Karl walked in the woods, fished from a jetty they shared with another house not yet occupied for the summer, read, swam, spent hours in bed, sketched, and talked about the work they would do when their paints and canvases came: the best and easiest kind of work, that which is impossible at the time of the conversation but will become possible very soon. But not quite yet. And the sun is shining, the fish are frying. At night there’s a fire in the small red house.

  The painting materials came simultaneously with the occupants of the closest house, the house with which they shared the jetty. They were a family with five children. The wife was a blazing reddish-blonde who piled her hair on top of her head and looked, in the twilight, like a thick, pale candle; the husband had come with plans to build an extra room and paint their whole house white. Their name was Carlin. Karl befriended the husband, who went by Beppe, and spent all day with him, sawing planks and driving nails; the children ran between the two houses; the wife rose topless from the sea like Venus, the men applauding her breasts. She was generous, bountiful, with cheerfully crooked teeth.