In the dark Walpole seemed determinedly uninviting, spread out straight and flat on either side of a single highway. Had it been earlier we’d have gone on, but already we’d rejected the hospitality of two towns we might have stayed in and we were beginning to tire of our own pernicketiness. I pulled in at the first motel we saw, which happened to have a pub attached, and left Ros to go to bed. Myself, I needed a beer. In the front window of the pub was a large, professionally painted cartoon depicting what I took to be one of the eternal verities of life in Walpole. A miserable little bloke holding a packet of mentholated cigarettes (not for real men) and an empty beer glass (ditto) was shown looking up pleadingly at a gigantic ocker in a blue singlet who was in turn looking down into his own frothing Fosters. ‘PARDON ME,’ the little bloke was apologizing. ‘I’M STANDING UNDER YOUR FOOT.’

I went in, anyway, and kept a sensible distance from the only other drinker in the bar, a man in a neck-brace and a T-shirt that said, rather menacingly I thought, WALPOLE – W.A. While he and the barman discussed weapons, I read the boards on the walls recording prize catches of twenty-five different species of fish by local fishermen. Men in Walpole, I learnt, were capable of pulling in 260 pounds’ worth of shark. Yet, for all this great plunder of the seas, the only food for sale at the bar was pies, pizzas, and chicken rolls.

‘I tell you what I reckon’s good,’ the barman was saying. ‘A crossbow.’

‘A crossbow? For fishing?’

‘That’s it.’ He did a little dumb show, for the bloke with the broken neck, showing how you stand in a boat, look down into the water, and fire at the fish.

‘Yeah, well, I still reckon you can’t beat a rifle with a flash torch attached to the barrel,’ the bloke with the broken neck said.

‘Yeah, yeah, it’s good, it’s good, I grant you. But you have trouble with batteries.’

‘No, you don’t, not if you’ve got a power pack strapped to your belt.’

‘Good night,’ I said.

Back in our motel room I found Ros watching T.V. and eating apples. We had eaten nothing but apples since we’d loaded up the car with them in Donnybrook. Although I wasn’t hungry I polished three or four off myself. Then I double-locked the door, further secured it with a chair, and passed an uneasy night.