That was three days ago. They had been standing in the kitchen, with the smell of burning goat’s milk. Frida had walked in, winced at Sylvie, and left. Frida knew what was happening. Sylvie had told them already, because Frida and Sylvie still had a thing together, too. Harlow smiled exaggeratedly. He had a funny, privileged kind of intelligence, a restless energy she had found infuriating and lovely when they first met. She still found it that. His mind skipped along like a puppy with all that theoretical Marxist bravado. Then he would suddenly slip into profound depression and be gone from her for days. He’d reached out and tried to touch her face.

‘Babe, don’t pretend to misunderstand me,’ he said.

She stepped back. ‘I understand you, mate. Don’t you worry.’

So here she was. Alone for the first time in what felt like ages. Pregnant, in a derelict motel in the middle of nowhere. Strangely, she didn’t feel depressed. Tired, but not depressed. Maybe even kind of alive. The day before yesterday felt like a long time ago, as if weeks had been drained from her.

She watched a dog trot across the carpark and disappear behind a low wall. Then another dog, smaller than the first, with a faint limp. Since leaving Sydney, her vision had become more acute. Edging out of the city, hours earlier, passing through the endless checkpoints and mounds of uncollected garbage, she had felt thrillingly awakened to such seemingly insignificant moments: a shirtless man dancing in his apartment, three dirty feet protruding from the doorway of a tent on the footpath, an enormous piece of wet lettuce rising slowly into the air above the traffic lights, while a booming voice declared, Never Less than Fresh. Sylvie had imagined an enormous man strapped to a chair, a giant, forced to repeat this phrase indefinitely. And then a little girl had come begging towards her through the stalled traffic. A nine- or ten-year-old girl with the expression of a thirty-year-old woman, haughty and determined, hefting her baby brother on her hip as she moved from car to car, beneath the lettuce.

The door behind her kept banging. A dog barked again, closer this time. The day had suddenly become cold. Sylvie’s legs were cold. The sun had gone down behind the motel. She shouldn’t hang around. Scavengers prowled places like this. Teams of dusty men. She walked back through the carpark. On the other side of the road, above the grey fields, the sky looked like an old painting: unreal white clouds at even distances. Flat, pleasant blue between them.