“That battered old station wagon, grinding along the road. I don’t know what he was doing there. He picked me up in the headlights. I didn’t think he was going to stop at first. When he got the story straight, we drove through the paddock to the wreck. He parked with his lights full on it. I remember him in stained jeans and a torn shirt. All I could think was stained and torn by what? I didn’t know what he did for a living.

“I sat in the passenger seat and shivered in the dark. I remember wishing he hadn’t left his door open.”

“Bad things happen just as much by day, Dad says,” said Trish. “Especially out here.”

At least at night, I thought, you know why you can’t quite see the things you glimpse from the corner of your eye. At least you can’t see the trees. I barely remembered my father’s face now. Why could I see him so vividly when Gary described him? It was as if the boundaries of memory had been moved.

“Mitch and Chris were big and loud even then, but Mr Scott wasn’t—still, he waded away with a torch like he wasn’t scared of anything. I wanted to warn him about the drumming I’d heard, like hooves. I was thinking of the stories of the bone horse and the megarrity, and all those animals people see but never catch. Then a hand touched mine and I yelled.”

Trish, listening more than she pretended to, swore.

“It was Tina,” Gary said. “She was in the back seat. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said. Mum didn’t like me taking the school bus when Mitch and Chris were on it—I wasn’t meant to hang around the Scott kids. It had never been a problem; we hadn’t exactly been friends. But wild Tina Scott said, quite calm, ‘It’ll be all right. Dad’ll fix it.’”

The strange Damson boy, shivering in the passenger seat, his bare shoulder bony in the faint back-glow of the headlights. But that would have been a long way from Runagate, and I was a town girl.

“Did he?” said Trish.

Gary shook his head. “He said there wasn’t anything there. Maybe Uncle Davy had just been stunned. Maybe he’d dragged himself into the bush. I don’t know. They never found anything. Not even the other bottles.”

I remembered the feeling of the upholstery under my hand, the clunk of the door-latches, the sag of the ceiling lining tented around the light. My father—Dad—pocketing a knife as he slid back into the driver’s seat.

“You are the worst, Gary Damson,” said Trish. “Why are you only telling us all this now?”

“Just making conversation,” said Gary. “We’re here.”

Trish elbowed me. “Gate.”