Sorry, babe. Not yet.

Yeah.

She touches the borderless edge of the photograph. Coop with a smudge of chocolate on his mouth, squinting into the camera with the bluest eyes, the whitest lashes.

She chokes down the thought that she hasn’t seen his eyes for weeks. His eyelashes probably won’t ever grow back.

10

Laura

It’s dark at seven, true dark, long past the brief twilight that softens edges, makes spectres of eucalypts and basketball hoops and stop signs. On the table near the back door are two shapes that weren’t there when she left this morning. One moves at her approach. Lithe, sure, across the table.

What are you doing out here in the cold, Allee-Cat?

He leaps down. The security light clicks on, old and clunky and only one of its floods working.

The other shape is a small foam esky, the kind Cooper used to take to the football, and in about the same condition—scratched and pitted, as though someone has picked away at the foam with their fingernails.

Laura tucks it under her arm with Wendy Casley’s envelope and takes them inside, shouldering through the door and in the process failing to keep the cat from slipping through. Too tired to bother chasing him out.

She shivers and looks at the open fireplace, but it’s no use, she can’t bring herself to light a match. The single-bar electric heater is a poor substitute. She flicks on the switch and waits for the ticking bar to glow orange.

Allee-Cat bumps at her knees.

All right, steady on. You’re not supposed to be in here, anyway.

Sitting on the sofa in front of the heater, she thinks of Avril, driving in to the hospital—or maybe already there, thin and stretched and gowned in whites for the night.

Dr Meagher is coming to see her on his evening rounds.

Laura realises her fist is pressed to her sternum, as though holding something in. Her ribs, a bony corrugation just beneath the surface. How much weight has she lost? It doesn’t matter.

She glances at the esky.

Gideon had turned up on the doorstep a week after their first conversation. A petition in one hand, something to do with Landcare and the local council. In the other hand, the same esky sitting on her table now. Over a glass of Pinot Gris, their talk had moved from the shire’s lack of resolve, to their work, families, and on to cats. A committed environmentalist who owned a cat?

He’d shrugged, palms up helplessly. I’ve a theory we’re each allowed one hypocrisy. He jerked a thumb. He’s mine.

When she reminded him he’d promised to explain the cat’s name, he told her about Warder Clyde Allee. A US biologist of the early twentieth century, and one of the first interested in ecology. A new science then.