Wayne’s version of easy-going Australian masculinity was less friable. He sat with his shoulders rounded, staring at the road, chatting to whoever wandered up the bus to talk to him. He was a bit anxious about what was going to happen when double-decker buses were introduced. ‘There’s talk about them putting stewards on,’ he said. ‘But they’ll probably be poofters like on Qantas. Qantas won’t employ you unless you’re gay. They reckon poofters treat passengers with more sensitivity and understanding.’

I enjoyed his ‘more’.

A runty little West Australian woman with colourless hair joined him for some technical conversation. Dot – I think she said her name was Dot – was the sort of woman who likes to know and talk about what a man likes to know and talk about. She discussed the cost of the bus with Wayne, and its gear system, and its air-cushion suspension. Somehow or other they got on to wildlife. Wayne described a snake he’d driven over the other day. It was stretched across the road and was so big that he could see neither its head nor its tail. ‘Ah,’ said Dot, ‘that’d be a king brown.’

‘Could have been,’ Wayne agreed.

‘It’s a good idea,’ Dot told him, ‘if you’re driving along and you hit a king brown to slow down and make sure you see its remains through your rear-view mirror. Otherwise it might have wrapped itself around your differential and will travel home with you. When you park your car it will hop off and come inside your house. I guess you can’t blame the snake. It’s just self-preservation. I learnt to drive on a 4-wheel drive, which is a good introduction. I think a lot of people just drive to show off.’

‘I hate showing off,’ Wayne said. ‘When I’ve got passengers, anyway. If I’m going to show off I do it on my own.’

‘Right,’ said Dot.

Also on the bus was a lean, crazed American, who was carrying about forty paperback thrillers in his rucksack. I’d watched him sorting them out, in order of reading preference and therefore accessibility, at the terminal in Darwin. Already, after only a couple of hours, he’d got through about eight of them. He was wearing very little – just a brief pair of ragged denims and a maroon singlet. Considering how much hair he had growing in his armpits I believed he ought to have worn a shirt. When he raised his arm, to get down another book, I found it necessary to look away. It occurred to me that he might have been Jewish – there was a Saul Bellow somnolence in his eyes – or half-Jewish, half-Puerto Rican, if there was such a thing. I didn’t initiate any of the usual secret salutations of brotherhood, though. He’d gone wild, this one. And I don’t, as a rule, hit it off with feral Jews.