I have no idea of what I was attempting, where I thought I was going. I think I was naked. Standing amidst the rows of our new array. And I remember looking up. Seeing the sudden hole in the sky where the dirty cloud drew back like an opening mouth. Until I saw its teeth, the pearly mess of stars within. They wavered, as if the mouth of the sky wanted to eat me. Maybe it was speaking to me. But I heard nothing. I craned my neck, tried harder, but no sound came, no message arrived.

  By February, things came to seem more orderly, more coherent, and I began, very slowly, to function again. My progress was fitful. Still, I could sense order returning. I felt cauterized, if not quite restored. But eventually I was well enough to do simple tasks, to follow a routine and pay attention to my mother’s deliberations about next steps.

  In late April, we came up into the open in a kind of détente. Returned to our separate winterhouses. And resumed something resembling our old life.

  And although I could sense my mother’s relief, she remained watchful. In the evenings we’d share a meal and mend kit or clothes together. To me she seemed settled, even content. But I was not. No matter what I did, despite any reassurance she offered, I couldn’t be convinced that the life I’d re-entered was anything like the one I’d had before. So although I was quickly back to performing the part of the doughty homesteader, the stable, competent son, it was all a front.

  In secret, I was seized by fantasies of loading up and hitting the road to go in search of Sun and Ester. But the events of summer had scarred me. The idea of descending once more into that madness was enough to keep me home. And I knew my mother was right. Nobody wants to be hunted after fleeing, especially not when they’re raw. Leaving could not have been easy for Sun. I didn’t want to hound her and make things worse. I loved her. I didn’t want her to suffer. Nor did I want her to see me as I’d so recently been. So I resolved to get solid again, to manage myself, bide my time, see what opportunities arose. Life is long, I told myself. Which is the sort of thing a young man will tell himself. And who can blame him?

  The summer I wigged out, the monsoon failed. Entirely. No storms, no rain. In the sagas, ancient folk would have seen a connection here, as if one misfortune foreshadowed another, or even begat it. I was still loopy enough to wonder if I’d killed the rains, but no longer sufficiently ill to entertain such a notion for long. The fact is that when we came up that year, the earth felt glazed. Right into May the air felt hard. Baked into crystals. Weaponized by any breeze.

  In my uncertain state, I didn’t know what to make of the hostility in the air around us. And I was puzzled at how differently my mother responded to these same conditions. If anything, she seemed energized. And now I wonder if perhaps she was performing too. Doing what she could to lead by example. Or maybe the enthusiasm with which we she threw herself into the new season was a way to leave the horrors of summer behind.

  It was the first time I saw her make an error. She was never one to mistake folly for boldness. Which shows how much recent events had affected her. For once in her life, she succumbed to wishful thinking.

  She was determined to acquire another flock of laying fowls. I was sceptical. Leery of the weather. And didn’t welcome the prospect of more work. But, conscious of my probationary status, and anxious to seem amenable, I agreed to her plan, and soon we had birds again. But it didn’t last long.

  In the last week of May, a heat dome rolled in from the east. It was as if the breath of the five deserts had settled over us. For several days there was hardly any breeze, just this cell of heavy, immoveable, superheated air. It sent the afternoon temperature into the mid-fifties, like a summer’s day. It began to feel like an occupation. As if a new dispensation had come to stay. But then a wind got up. Bringing no relief. It was desolate. Fiery. Hard. So laced with grit, it battered your skin through your clothes till you danced and yelped. It blasted the walls and tore at the sails. Our houses yanked and groaned at their moorings.

  Soon it was impossible to leave shelter. Even under the cowls, leafy greens began to wilt. And so did our birds. We’d shuttered the flock on the first day, but as the heat lingered and the wind intensified, you could hear their low keening from the house. It was the sound of a single suffering creature. At night, when it was safest to go down, we misted them to keep them alive, but you could see their wattles shrivelling. And the way they gulped, wide-eyed – it was as if the air had become too hot and thick to breathe.

  Our plants fared no better. In the growsheds, manes of corn silk were rippling and crisping in the heat. On the last night before the lightning arrived, I walked the aisles feeling flayed and sore, hand-watering pods and binding stems in wet rags as brittle threads of corn silk and dried seedheads lashed my face and neck. The tomatoes slumped on their stakes like the aftermath of a mass execution. The air began to taste of salt and soon it smelt, sickeningly, of ozone. No need to explain what that smell means to the likes of us.

  When the first cracks came down in the east, I rushed to the door and saw a light in the compound. Another flash revealed my mother running. She was hunched low, zigzagging like a comrade under fire, headed for the bunker. Which was, I knew, where I should be headed. Where I should have been already.

  But I stood on the deck. Hesitating. In the east, across the gulf, the sky was strobing in constant barrage. Seconds later the first salvo of bolts speared down at the edge of the compound. And the chlorine reek set off a spasm of panic in me. I froze. For how long, I don’t know. But then I heard my mother’s voice above the din. The fear in it. The need of it.

  I ran. Bursts of lightning seemed to ricochet inside my skull. And the hail set in before I was halfway to the bunker. Fists of ice. Bouncing white in my path, raising dust, pounding, beating my skull, shoulders, hips, kidneys. Right at the hatch, as I stumbled across the buttress of sandbags, I copped one final clout on the chin and fell down the ladder like a sack of beans.

  While the pummelling overhead intensified and my mother checked my neck and then my pulse, I lay conscious but stunned. Around us ice skittered in the shaft, clinking, thudding. My mother climbed the ladder, closed the hatch, and came back to lie beside me in the melting slurry. She wept. And while the ice storm thundered on, I thought of the birds, the plants, my house. And, absurdly, of the sagas. Everything I had left in the world was being stoned to death.

  Then it was over. No rain followed. We were spared a deluge, at least. But when we crept out, bruised and bewildered, into the sudden quiet, what we saw by torchlight was every bit as bad as the devastation of a flood. All our sails lay in shreds, our films were reduced to lattice, the roofs of our buildings were perforated or inverted completely, and our birds and plants lay bludgeoned beneath a rubble of glistening, melting ice. And our shiny new array? Every panel shattered.

  It was all destroyed. The stuff I’d inherited; every structure I’d built with my own hands; every plant I’d raised and every creature I’d nurtured, pounded to tatters in minutes. In those first moments of near stupefaction, it looked like the end.

  But disastrous as it was, that storm was not fatal. At any other time in my life, a catastrophe of such magnitude would have broken me. And there was no mistaking how deeply it affected my mother. I’d never seen her so shaken. Or so bereft. Which was startling in itself. For a few days she seemed punch-drunk.

  My reaction was different. For reasons I couldn’t explain, or even understand, I felt myself at a remove. And although this sort of devastation was exactly what I’d been dreading as I cowered underground beside her, once I was topside and actually walking through the wreckage, I felt strangely resigned. To the implacable fact of it. The lost labour and trade. The months and likely years of rebuilding required. Even the previously unthinkable option of walking away and leaving it all behind.

  It wasn’t that I was numb with shock. No, I was angry and resentful. But not wounded. This was a massive setback, easily the worst I’d ever experienced, and yet my response was entirely pragmatic. Impersonal. And who knows – perhaps, having been scorched by the events of summer and the calamity that triggered them, I was simply incapable of the old feelings.

  For the first time in my life, I found myself needing to steady my mother, to coach her, stiffen her resolve. I walked her through the debris, managing to mark out the difference between mess and ruin. For amidst the rubble – once you looked – there was stuff that could be salvaged. It took hard work to convince her we could recover. I wasn’t always convinced myself. But the sight of her so impotent and forlorn was alarming enough to motivate me.

  Meantime, all around us, others found themselves beyond all hope. The storm sparked the first significant exodus from the district in two generations. Left with little or nothing, many of the surviving families – homesteaders and hamlet-dwellers alike – gave up and moved south. We could resist that urge, my mother and I. Not because we were more sound than those who migrated. But because we were luckier. Unlike most, we had buffers. The best water holdings on the plain. Years of seed stock in dry storage. My old solar panels, which had mostly survived. And the secret providence of the Service. Even so, my mother seemed chastened and listless. I knew it would be a slow road back.

  For the rest of that winter we had no choice but to live underground. It was better than nowhere, but it was bloody hard on the spirit. For a week or so, in desperation, I tried my chances topside with a jerry-rigged lean-to near the wreck of my house, but without cooling or even fans, the roasting afternoons wore me down. With the dread of heat fever stalking me, I was forced to retreat to the bunker and my mother.

  We began the rebuild by restoring power. Then we turned our attention to the larger problem of the growhouses. My mother’s frames were largely intact, and the footings were still sound. We beat metal sheets flat to fit the half walls and gable ends. And we were able to cobble together enough fabric mesh from both our places to make one full sheath. It took longer to finish the cowling, but we got there. Although the result of all this work was not pretty, it did the job. We dragged windblown snarls of irrigation hose in from the gibber plain, rehung the misters, wired up the fans, and within a fortnight we were nursing a few stripped trees and bedraggled plants back to life. Seed trays were loaded. A few emaciated bees found their way back to shelter. It was a start.

  At my end of the compound, things took a little longer. Even with such a handsome stockpile of materials to hand, I was well short. I asked around in the hamlet and in the market square, but given the general devastation, good building supplies were scarce.

  I knew there was no choice but to drive south to one of my old depots, but I was reluctant to leave my mother. And there was no chance of convincing her to accompany me. So, as discreetly as I could, I began measuring, making lists, and setting aside some meagre supplies for a road trip, all the while trying to work up the juice to break the news to my mother. But before I could, a tanker truck rumbled into the compound one afternoon.

  I heard it long before I saw it. The noise sent a shudder through me – it wasn’t so different from the racket of the ice storm. By the time I got my head up out of the bunker hatch, the big rig had pulled up near what was left of my place. The driver jumped down. I scuttled out into the hard sun to meet him.

  He was tall, dark-skinned and walked with a limp. The high jauntiness of his hat was explained by the turban it perched upon.

  I heard you have water to trade, he said.

  Here, I said. Step into the shade.

  No time, he said, and I saw his lower teeth were made of metal.

  How much do you need?

  I can take fifteen thousand litres.

  What d’you have for trade?

  Whatever you need, he said, surveying the ruins of my winterhouse.

  I have a list, I said, as my mother emerged from the shade of her growhouse and proceeded to cross the compound toward us.

  Okay, he said, turning for the truck.

  What d’you mean, okay? I said, striding to keep up.

  You’ll get everything you need. Just be at the Nine Mile at sunset.

  Shit! I can’t go today.

  Those are the orders.

  As he reached for the door, I saw the melted web of skin where his sleeve rode up.

  I can’t leave her.

  Where’s your outlet?

  How long will I be gone?

  You know they don’t tell us.

  You’re taking the water now?

  That’s the orders.

  My mother arrived as the rig was backing up to the pump head.

  What is this?

  A stroke of luck, I said. We just scored some materials.

  I don’t see anything.

  I’m going to collect them now.

  Who is this character? He’s not local.

  I shrugged.

  You’ve gone soft, she said.

  The driver got down and I helped him hook up. He greeted my mother with deference, but she ignored him.

  Where is this material? she asked me.

  I’ll be a day or two, maybe more.

  She considered this. And as she pursed her lips I saw that the skin around her mouth and cheeks had lost its tautness. She’d aged without me noticing.

  I’m sorry to leave you on your own, I said. But we need to get sorted quickly.

  I’ve been here alone before, she said. Imagine I’ll do it again. I’ll survive. Just don’t get robbed.

  He won’t get robbed, said the driver.

  My mother walked away without replying.

  She’s old-school, I said apologetically.

  No kidding.

  He ran the pump for a few minutes and then capped the head.

  That’s hardly even a cube, I said.

  That’s the order. I can’t stand here for an hour.

  But you can’t just drive off now. She’s not an idiot.

  You’ll need the water for the labour, he said.

  What labour?

  You need to be done inside a month, so you’ll have to trade for help.

  She won’t agree to that.

  Not my problem, he said, heading for the cab. You’ve got some klicks to cover, so best get ready.

  It was another delivery job. We flew south to Perth, in darkness. Set down on a ship, took delivery of a tonne of cargo cases, and lifted away again. Went high and east, across the city, which was just a spatter of light below. I couldn’t help but think of Sun, but I knew it’d do me no good.

  We sailed beyond the hills and set down in a scrim of flares around a gravel pit. With the help of a ground crew, we loaded the cases onto waiting trucks and rose back into the night. No one said what the cargo was. I assumed it was materiel.

  I was out and back inside forty-eight hours. The day after I got home, with a load of first-rate construction materials, a convoy came down the drive hauling more.

  It took my mother less than two days to concede that even with such windfalls we’d never finish the rebuild on our own before the season turned. Previously, a concession like this would have been inconceivable. But she was changed. Diminished, really. We drove into the hamlet together to make it known that we’d trade water for labour.

  It was viscerally uncomfortable to have strangers on the property from first light till midday, six days a week, but we were both back in our own houses by early September. The films went up the week after, soon followed by the sails and awnings.

  We had a few brief weeks to enjoy our homes again, but by early October the heat was too much. Like everyone else still left on the peninsula, we yielded and went below.

  Every summer is hard. Goes without saying. But having spent so much of the winter underground already, that was a particularly tough one. Our situation was much improved, and I was grateful for that. I felt confident this would not be a season of madness like the summer before, but it was an especially lonely time.

  I suppose this was when I began to accept the idea that Sun was unlikely to return. It was a long process, but I let go. Until then I’d nursed secret hopes she’d see through the gossip, or at least come back to confront me; that despite her fury there’d be some chance of getting through to her.

  Since she’d gone, one calamity had landed on the heels of another. Each new loss compounding those that came before. And together they demanded a frenzy of unrelenting action that ate up every waking thought. There’d been no space for calm reflection. I was either grafting madly or asleep. But now, with the workload finally tapering, my mind began to clear. This presented its own challenges. With more time to think, I couldn’t afford to be overcome with grief and longing, so I learnt to corral my thoughts. It wasn’t so different to the ways in which I’d kept my two selves distinct as an operator. I reserved a piece of the night, the kindest hour, for writing to Sun and Ester. Messages neither would ever read, but which I still felt I needed to ‘send’.

  They were not florid letters. That sort of thing just wasn’t in me. But I did confess my regrets and offer heartfelt apologies – on my own behalf and for my mother – sensing now, with some distance, how fixed and impervious a pair we must have been to contend with. I didn’t attempt to explain myself. Didn’t dare. It felt reckless to write even this much. I had to do it in secret, when I was certain my mother was asleep. I wrote them on the back of Association chits. Rolled them tight. Stuffed them into the metal pipe of my bedframe.

  They weren’t all sorrowful, these notes. Sometimes they catalogued my most precious memories of our time together. Moments we shared in the rock shelter. The miracles of wildflowers after rain. Ester’s tiny fingers against the furry stems of tomato bushes. And just the confident sound of Sun’s voice as she drew up some arcane bit of knowledge like sweet water from a well.