I looked at the article again. It had been torn from its page, with greasy thumbprints dark on the grey paper. It smelled of motors and dung. I rested it back on my knees, holding it cautiously so the newsprint could not come off too much on my fingers.

Only my brothers.

I could have told my mother. But I lingered too long, and felt through the house a draught, laden with the breath of growing things. Rain, I knew as if it had already fallen on me. A serenity comes with that smell, calming the acid of doubt and regret, stirring different thoughts. The scent of sharp grass softening, the lemon tree digging its roots further into the dissolving earth, the pepperina and lantern-bush and beyond—pine, brigalow, eucalypt, the vast, uncivilising world shifting like a shaggy animal, silver-green under the clouds, dreaming, although my mother would not credit it, in memories.

LINDA’S STORY

TURNCOAT

This is a story I heard a long time later—or at least the bones of it.

Linda Aberdeen, formerly Spicer, had grown up in the city, married in the city, gone no further than the ocean for her honeymoon. The winter she headed west, she was first surprised at how far the city extended, then at how far beyond it the bus took her. Past the neat houses, the ragged houses, and the bulldozered plateaus with their spotless, pointless black streets. Beyond the dark green hills and the khaki hills. Out to where the land unrolled vast and shimmering pale, or contracted shaking and glittering into tunnels through which their bus beat on.

Winston, with their baby Patricia fussing in his arms, saw her off from the pebbled concrete transit centre early on a damp morning, for even in winter, that city was never really cold. “Why didn’t you go with her?” was a question no one would ask Winston Aberdeen as often as he would himself.

Late in the afternoon, the bus driver let Linda down onto the beaded blue-and-red pebbles outside the mechanic’s shop at Carter’s Crossing. Closed. There was a railway line but no station, a few clean cream houses set clear of the grey trees, a hall with CWA painted on it in looping blue, and the smallest wooden church Linda had ever seen.

A man sat in the open back of a battered station wagon, smoking. He was wearing scuffed sneakers instead of boots—not at all what Linda had expected.

“Darryl Scott?” she asked, checking the letter from her grandmother.

He drove her another hour—it felt longer. The bitumen ended; the wheels struck white dirt with a drumming like a racing heart.

“Sylvie doesn’t clear that track anymore” was all Darryl Scott bothered to say, when he dropped her beside the road. “You can walk from here.”