Miss McNeil laughs at this cruelty and says, ‘Cissy is extremely clever. If I had my way, she’d be off to Adelaide, to the Training College, to become a teacher.’

  This is the first Cissy has heard about the Training College. Her immediate thought is: but Miss McNeil isn’t in Adelaide.

  ‘A scholar, then,’ says Mr Lewis, and he winks at Cissy, but she knows the wink is for Miss McNeil.

  Mr Lewis has dark skin but he’s a white man; he has a high wrinkled forehead and is balding, but he’s not particularly old. He’s an ordinary sort of man, and undistinguished: he isn’t wearing a jacket, his rolled-up shirtsleeves reveal raised blue veins, and he’s young and strong enough to be out looking for Denny. But he’s here in the Imperial with the palm and flies and ale, and Miss McNeil is saying, ‘Cissy isn’t like us—she’s a true Australian. She was born right here in South Australia. Weren’t you, Cissy?’

  Cissy isn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed of this allegation, or if she’s supposed to point out that they’re all British subjects, no matter where they were born. Uncertain of the correct response, she gives none. This seems to disappoint Miss McNeil—this version of Miss McNeil, anyway, who enjoys pointless speech and who now prompts, ‘Well, Cissy?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cissy says, sullen, bewildered.

  Mr Lewis smiles; he’s looking at Cissy, but the smile, like the wink, is not for her. ‘A clever citizen and someday teacher,’ he says. ‘I expect you’ve learned almost all there is to know.’

  ‘I know some things,’ Cissy says.

  ‘Such as?’

  Miss McNeil waits for Cissy to speak, and when she doesn’t, Miss McNeil says, ‘She knows poetry, don’t you, Cissy? Tennyson in particular. Dozens of poems by heart.’

  But Cissy won’t speak. She has closed up the way some flowers do at night.

  ‘I know a few poems,’ Mr Lewis offers. ‘Shall I recite one?’

  ‘Please do,’ says Miss McNeil. ‘There’s nothing like a Welshman’s voice for recitation.’

  It’s awful, all this saying, it’s hideous; Cissy refuses to believe in a single word. It seems impossible to be talking like this while Denny is wandering out in the desert.

  Mr Lewis pushes his shirtsleeves higher above his elbows. He clears his throat and lifts his chin and says: ‘Down from the ranges and on into Fairly, the desert behind me, the sea far ahead—a pretty girl waiting all rosy and curly—yes, that’s where you’ll find me: in Fairly, in bed.’

  Miss McNeil, dimpling, scolds him. ‘Not that kind of poem!’

  Cissy stands and walks to the door of the Imperial and, when she opens the door, is further humiliated by its little bell.

  The street outside is still long and hot, but the sky has begun to redden in a way that seems unwarranted. Cissy sees Miss McNeil’s horse at the trough on the other side of the road. Beyond the horse, she sees the train tracks, and after them the flour mill, and after that nothing but stunted scrub with the ranges in the distance. Everyone Cissy knows lives here in this bowl of mountains. It may be that the train tracks go to the other side of the mountains and simply stop—there’s nothing beyond the ranges, the train is pretending, her parents and Miss McNeil are pretending, there’s no Wales, no Adelaide, no Training College, no sea. How stupid to send telegrams into nothing! At this very minute, Denny may be climbing into the mountains and finding the nothing on the other side of them; he may step into that nothing and never come back.

  Miss McNeil has followed Cissy onto the verandah. Once upon a time, whole weeks ago, she told Cissy that she—Miss McNeil—would only ever fall in love with a man who was also in love with ideas.

  ‘You’re not offended, are you, Cissy?’ says Miss McNeil. ‘Mr Lewis—’

  Mr Lewis! ‘Who is he?’ demands Cissy.

  ‘He’s Mr Lewis,’ says Miss McNeil, placid, pleased, as if that’s enough.

  ‘What ideas is he in love with?’

  Miss McNeil inclines her head to one side and smiles. ‘Kindness,’ she says. ‘Joy. Work. Play. The body unfettered. A man and a woman.’

  That’s too many ideas. Cissy would like to burn with one idea, one true and important idea, but she doesn’t want to choose it—she wants to be chosen. She wants her whole self to be so full of this idea that looking at her is like looking at the idea. No one she knows burns with one true idea like this. Until today, she thought Miss McNeil might have.

  Miss McNeil is still speaking. ‘I’ll tell you something, Cissy, that will save you time. A woman like me, and you’re like me: we don’t wait for our hearts to decide anything for us. We don’t fall in love—we stride into it. We choose.’

  ‘And you’ve chosen Mr Lewis?’

  ‘I have,’ says Miss McNeil.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Do you know how unlikely it is,’ says Miss McNeil, ‘that he and I, that you and I, should all be here, not just in this particular place but at this particular time?’

  Cissy would rather not be here. She would like never to have seen Miss McNeil step out of the Imperial Hotel. She would like never to have heard of the Training College or Mr Lewis. She says, ‘I just came to send telegrams.’

  ‘Cissy,’ says Miss McNeil, in her teacherly voice now, ‘you have no idea how big the world is. You have no idea how long the world is.’

  ‘My brother is lost,’ says Cissy. ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘Of course I care,’ says Miss McNeil. She looks at Cissy with an expression she often wears for younger students: puzzled and fond.

  ‘I can’t join the search because I don’t have a horse,’ Cissy says, ‘so I’m going to take yours. I’ll bring her back when Denny’s found. Mr Lewis can see you home.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Cissy gives a terse nod and turns away. She’s both offended and buoyed by Miss McNeil’s willingness to hand over her horse.

  ‘Well,’ says Miss McNeil, ‘and what do you think of him, of Mr Lewis?’

  Cissy looks back at her. ‘What do I think? I think! I think! I think he looks like he’ll snore.’

  Miss McNeil laughs on the verandah. She says, ‘Denny is lucky to have such a formidable sister. You’ll find him, Cissy, I’m sure of it.’ Then she opens the door and disappears forever into the tinkling dark of the Imperial Hotel.

  Cissy stands for a while with Miss McNeil’s horse, waiting to see if the ladies’ entrance will open again. The horse is a bay mare, red as a new penny. Her name is June. Nobody goes into or comes out of the Imperial, so Cissy leads June to the post office.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ says Mr Blake, and he seems contrite, or perhaps just nervous.

  Cissy leaves without speaking. Through the window she sees Mr Blake remove his green visor, which leaves a thick pink mark on his otherwise pasty forehead. It’s just about time to close for the day. Soon, Cissy knows, Mr Blake will lock the door and go into the room behind the post office, which is where he lives, and he’ll wash his face and hands and pour himself tea, and he’ll be alone for supper. Mr Blake’s wife is dead, his children live elsewhere; he’ll be alone all night, and when he wakes up in the morning, he’ll go on being alone. Cissy wonders if Mr Blake knows how long the world is, and suspects he does.

  Cissy rides June towards the edge of town, heading north. She passes the house Minna must now live in with her constable; its windows are bright with the red west. She passes the unclaimed lot, marked at its corners by grubby flags, which optimistic women persist in believing has been bought by a milliner. She passes the last house: that of the reclusive German woman who Cissy has been told in hushed tones is a seamstress, and who keeps a donkey tethered to the native peach tree outside her cottage because, Cissy assumes, the donkey will bray if anyone tries to steal the peaches. Then come Sammy So’s gardens, crowding the creek; then Fairly ends. Cissy is startled, as she always is when leaving town, by the decisive arrival of not-Fairly, which has existed since long before the houses and the railway and the Imperial Hotel, although Cissy finds this hard to imagine. Just outside of town, an emu runs over the plain with his striped chicks following behind him; he runs away from the sun and into the twilight shadow that’s creeping across the Willochra.

  The road to Undelcarra is completely flat, but Miss McNeil’s horse insists on taking it sedately, and Cissy acquiesces to this pace. She recites her favourite Tennyson in time to June’s slow rhythm. Cissy loves Tennyson for his reliable music; she responds to the sound of him more than the sense. ‘Twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark!’ she chants. ‘And may there be no sadness of farewell, when I embark.’ How would it feel to embark for the Training College? Her family would never manage without her. And might it be possible not to love Miss McNeil? The sky is red and the shadows are turning a thick, sooty pink.

  A mile from home, a man appears on the road, riding towards her. He’s singing, and Cissy identifies him as Constable Manning: who else would be singing on this road today? He’s singing his way home to Minna. He sees Cissy and stops his horse and says, ‘I know you. You’re a Wallace. Which one are you?’

  ‘I’m Cecily.’

  His face swims in the velvet light. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’ He looks concerned but in a routine way, as if concern is simply part of his duty as a policeman. ‘Not out looking for your brother, are you?’

  Cissy sits taller in Miss McNeil’s saddle. ‘I had business in town.’

  ‘Business?’ says Robert Manning, and when he smiles she sees the blush of his mouth and throat beyond his teeth.

  She says, ‘Have you found my brother yet?’

  Robert leans across from his horse and puts one hand on her shoulder. ‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘But no news is good news, and there’s a sergeant on his way from Port Augusta.’ His voice is so low and his hand so warm on her shoulder that Cissy looks up at him, at his broad bully’s face, and she does as Miss McNeil says she must: she chooses. She chooses to be in love with this Robert Manning. She watches as he rides away, waiting to see if she feels any different. She doesn’t. But by the time she reaches the gate with the lettuce plant beside it, she thinks there might be something very slightly altered in the region of her heart.

  Bess and Karl reach the waterhole two hours before sunset. Bess knew they would find it today; she’s good at finding things, is in fact delighted by the challenge of this landscape with its pleated hills and endless scrub and deep sandstone gorges. The waterhole lies in one of these gorges, which itself runs through a steep, compact range on the north-eastern edge of the Willochra Plain. The walls of the gorge are striped in shades of carmine and ochre, and these stripes, uniform in width, run along the rock at an unlikely forty-five-degree angle, as if a colossal finger has tried to prise the range out of the ground but given up before the job was done. The floor of the gorge is sand, as befits the bottom of a river. Bess takes note of all these things because they are useful to her, both practically and artistically—this is always the nature of Bess’s looking.

  The waterhole itself is, as promised, sizeable; it seems to seep up out of the sand, and is shaded by large gums whose smooth pale branches emerge from wrinkled grey trunks, like geese rising out of an elephant. The sun is hot, so Bess and Karl swim, and as they swim they drink, and the gorge rises up around them with its red, striated sides. Half in shadow, half in sun. The waterhole is cool and deep and on either side of it the dry riverbed looks like a narrow white road through the trees.

  After swimming, they decide to camp here for at least a day, although they’re both impatient to reach the marvellous vista they’ve been promised, and for which they’ve made this trip: the ridged walls of Wilpena Pound, a natural amphitheatre in the ranges north of the Willochra. Karl, naked, sits on a big, flat rock. He’s the colour of a honey made by happy bees. But here—in these shadows, beside the red walls of this gorge—Karl’s colour is less dazzling than elsewhere.

  ‘What’s this place called?’ he asks.

  ‘Neville Spring,’ says Bess. When they were staying at Thalassa, she asked for the native name and learned it from Nancy, the housekeeper; she wrote the name on the map but has forgotten how to pronounce it. There was a story, too, about an ancient snake who lived in waterholes—Nancy called him the Akurra. ‘Take care with them holes,’ she said. ‘You better not wake him.’

  ‘Neville!’ scoffs Karl. ‘A boy who needs to blow his nose. Not a name for a place like this.’

  ‘What shall we call it, then?’

  ‘This place,’ Karl proclaims, ‘is called Two Red Men. The first one’s there above the pool—look at him twisting like a devil. He’s the Politician.’ He points at a vertical ridge of rock that juts out from the hillside. ‘The second is behind you, he’s the Tax Collector. Look at him rubbing his hands together.’

  ‘Three Red Men,’ says Bess. ‘You’re sitting on the third.’

  ‘That’s true. And what is he?’

  ‘The Art Critic,’ says Bess. ‘When it comes to you, he takes it lying down.’

  Karl laughs at this, filling the gorge with sound.

  As soon as they arrived in the Australian colonies, having spent weeks on the ocean with nothing nameable between Weymouth and Brazil, Bess and Karl began to play at naming things. Sometimes their names were grandiose: Valley of the Eastern Sun (for the dingy laneway behind the first rooms they took in Melbourne) or Stream of the Seven Sorrows (Karl upset a pail of ripe pears into a gutter—eight pears, only one retrieved unharmed). Sometimes they liked to glorify the funny Australian names of things, like ‘creek’ and ‘paddock’: Robes of Heaven Creek, Parnassus Paddock. Sometimes, exasperated, they named a Dog’s Arse Boulevard, a Fleatit Bottom or a Shitboot Lane; one shabby house, which always had underthings drying in the garden, they called the Parthenon. In this way, the unfamiliar streets of Melbourne were made for them, in secret, and every place spelled out some private message for the Rapps.

  Bess and Karl Rapp: with Melbourne behind them now, and those weeks on the heaving ship, and before that Stockholm, Paris, London, Leeds, all of Europe, the low skies of family; all of that behind them now, and here are the Rapps, alone at a waterhole in the red rock country of central Australia. In debt, certainly, but Bess has become accustomed to a life without money in it, and is full of plans to make some. She didn’t expect Australia, but she’ll make use of that, too, as she does of other things—she’ll make something out of it. She’s thinking of a children’s book, which she’ll both write and illustrate. She takes out a pencil and paper and begins to sketch the waterhole as a child would see it, a child of seven or eight. The sandstone of the gorge takes on fantastic patterns. She adds kangaroos resting in the shade and parrots in the trees. In the water she draws a swimmer’s shadow. What kind of child would ever see this pool? The child of one of the big sheep or cattle properties—a lonely child, she thinks, who makes an unlikely friend. What kind of friend? A native man? A native child? A kangaroo or emu? And together they have adventures. Children, tucked in nurseries, like illustrated escapades. And illustrations of this kind suit the black ink she works in; until they can afford more materials, she’ll leave colour to Karl, who can’t be without it.

  Karl, cursing flies, jumps back into the pool and for a long while stays underwater. Bess holds her breath until he comes back up. Every movement he makes creates waves against the waterhole’s little beach, and the smallest sound of him echoes down the gorge.

  ‘Shall I dive down and try to touch the bottom?’ he calls.

  ‘Better not,’ says Bess, remembering Nancy’s warning about the snake; nevertheless Karl tries and fails and comes up spluttering. Then he floats on the surface and she can see his whole exquisite body. She never thinks of it as belonging to her, but then she doesn’t think of it as belonging to him either. She wishes, sometimes, that his body would step aside and leave them be. He waves at her, then turns and swims until he’s out of sight behind the Art Critic.

  Bess goes back to her sketch. She draws an enormous snake coiled around the perimeter of the waterhole. What if the child made friends with the snake? She could give it a trustworthy canine face. Bess experiments with this—a devoted, drooling snake—but finds herself producing elongated gargoyles. When she looks up again she sees a plump grey wallaby coming down to the waterhole to drink. Karl is watching it. He’s silent, just a pale head above the water. The wallaby’s tail is striped, it has yellow feet. It’s slightly larger than a cat. And it seems to be two different animals: one when it’s moving and another when it’s still. It takes wary, shuffling steps forwards and waits, comes forwards again, and again, and waits.

  Bess leans over their packs and takes up her rifle. She loads it, opens and closes the breech, and waits for the wallaby to come nearer the waterhole. When it’s close enough, she pulls the trigger, and the sound is so loud in the gorge that she has to shut her eyes. When she opens them again Karl is rising, streaming, from the pool. His arms are raised, he’s shouting, but all she can hear is the echo of the shot. It’s as if there’s a battle taking place around a corner, or a clumsy ambush.

  They meet at the body of the wallaby. Karl crouches to stroke its snout. It has such tiny paws, entirely black. He’s saying something about not having killed it outright, but she says, ‘Of course I did,’ and she did: the wallaby is dead.

  Now Karl sulks. ‘You might have warned me,’ he says, but he knows as well as she does that warning him would have scared the wallaby away, so she doesn’t reply. She just stands beside him as he strokes the wallaby’s head. The fur on its cheeks is white.

  ‘Look at the eyelashes,’ says Karl. ‘How could you kill a thing with such eyelashes?’

  Bess says, ‘We won’t eat the eyelashes.’

  Karl closes his eyes and his own lashes sit lightly on his cheeks. Then he stands up and dusts his hands against his thighs. ‘I won’t eat any of it,’ he says.

  Bess lifts the wallaby into her arms and it feels nothing like a baby, but she thinks of a baby. Not her own—she has no baby, never has had, but she once held a baby that was dead and now anything she holds that’s roughly baby-sized makes her think of it. The wallaby is all long feet and tail and furred ears, and the flies have already found it.