‘Boat?’ The doctor had leaned forward. But Ned was no longer looking at him. His eyes were on the floor, and he was talking about the moment he’d rode up to the boat’s remains. He realised he hadn’t told the doctor anything else about the boat, hadn’t given his story context, but he couldn’t stop. It was all flinging out of him. How long he’d stared at the wreckage. How he’d tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter, that he’d sold it. That there was no reason for him to mourn something that wasn’t his.

And yet, he said, he still fell to his haunches, his breathing all wrong, tears muddying the dust on his face, his hands scrabbling at chunks of shattered Huon pine. He’d begun gathering the scattered parts, seeing where they’d been shorn off, trying to align them like a jigsaw puzzle. Like a puzzle from his nightmares. How, as he pushed a golden fragment into a messy wound on the hull, he’d fallen over. Couldn’t get his breaths in. What’s that called? he asked the doctor. Hyperventilating? Or just choking? How he’d lain on his back, stared up at the ironhard gums and sucked at the air until his throat seized still.

22

22

WHEN OXYGEN EVENTUALLY found its way into his lungs, Ned got to his feet, turned from the crash site and rode back to Limberlost. He felt as if a thread that ran up his spine and into his brain had been snipped clean near the base of his skull. He imagined that this was what being drugged felt like. Or being shot, or losing a limb. Occasionally he would howl at the hardwoods, bellow at the gravel. Other times he’d laugh, loud and delirious.

He considered riding past the driveway, down to the river. He thought about leaping from the mare and striding into the water, striding and then stroking and then diving to that place of clean nothingness: the cold floor of sand. A dark, shifting ceiling above him. Staying there, not coming out. But when they reached the entrance to Limberlost the mare turned into the driveway, and he let it take him home.

In the kitchen he found Maggie, told her what had happened.

Her reaction was instant: her eyes wide, her voice urgent. ‘Have you deposited the cheque?’

Ned felt his lungs tighten all over again. He threw down his sandwich and tore into Beaconsfield on the mare, tethered her outside the bank and rushed inside. The clerk at the counter told him that the cheque would take a few days to clear. Maybe a week. Ned began to sweat, to shake. He begged her to do something faster, begged her to call someone, to confirm the account.

The teller hesitated. ‘I suppose I could call the head branch. Have them check. But it’s not standard practice, you see.’