“Do we keep going, Tina?” he asked.

“Bettina,” I said, mostly from habit. Home. To Runagate, easy in the sunlight. To the garden, the chooks talking softly among themselves. Our white fence. No stories of lost towns or echoing caverns. No inconvenient memories. I smelled lemon flowers, blowing like lace curtains; frail as lace, pierced by the strong light. My mother would be awake soon.

Bloody aloof Damsons, Gwenda had said. Gary hadn’t talked to me for three years, but he was now. Your mother really wouldn’t approve.

I wasn’t the only person straining against what they had taught themselves to believe. “Yes,” I said, before I could let myself think better of it.

Gary looked worried and relieved at the same time.

“Oh, come on,” said Trish, when he didn’t turn back the way we’d come. “What are we going to do? Hope we pass someone who’s seen two men who probably don’t even exist? You’re just driving for the hell of it. I wanted to ask my dad—” She bit her lip. “I’ll miss dinner.”

“You heard Gwenda,” said Gary.

“We all did,” said Trish. “Gwenda cheated on Terrence Alleman, which is understandable, the school burned down, she blames herself and the Damsons—I’m coming around to her way of thinking on that—and she’s not all there. It’s hot. I’m hungry. I want to go home.”

“Tina doesn’t,” said Gary.

Trish swore, but this time, she didn’t turn her nose up at the wilted sandwiches.

We ate in silence and drove along back roads, jolting over corrugations, through rocky creek beds and over cattle grids, each lost in our own thoughts, losing ourselves in the trees. Once we saw a sign. “Look,” said Trish. Gary slowed. Its faded paint was peeling. A carcase had hung from it: a few shreds of dry hide remained, and vertebrae strung like beads.

“Pinnicke’s work,” said Gary grimly. “Dingo. Probably.”

“Someone has to do it, don’t they?” I asked, but no one answered. Yes, they do, I told myself. My mother rarely asked rhetorical questions. I looked away from the twisted corpse to the words on the sign. “Old Woodwild Road,” I read aloud. Beneath the sign, like stars, bobbed a single stem of lantern-bush.

“Ugh,” said Trish. Gary drove on.

The road curved across a ghost of its own drifting dust. Ahead was the rough, unsealed surface, striped gold and violet with tree shadows. The rough bark of the overarching limbs was black as blood, and the deepening yellow sun shone through the leaves like a lantern. Sudden as waking, I recognised this place.

“Here!” I said, and drummed my hands lightly on the dashboard, startling Gary. “Turn here, we’re nearly there.”

“Where?” said Trish as Gary steered us through a gap in the trees. There was no sign; the narrow way was poorly graded.