Then a friend was pulling her by the elbow, needing to talk to her, and she was gone, sucked into a group of people Ned was trying to place from his childhood. As she went, he felt the pull of her. The hooks in him. He gazed at the grass at his feet, then at the black wall of cliffs rising in the distance, cutting into the clouds.

When the pit was dug, a fire was built in its centre. Twigs and kindling were placed into the flames, then the chunks of green eucalypt that had been hacked apart by the choppers. The stones gathered from the riverbank were tossed into the embers, with more logs placed over them so that coals would form and cover every piece of rock. The fire burned down, was built up, burned down, built up. Red-winking coals accumulated. A truckload of other men swerved into the paddock, fresh crates of beer sliding in the tray of the vehicle.

Through all this Ned felt the hooks catch, yank, tear. Spent gallons of energy avoiding the urge to look for her, watch her. The effort drained him; he couldn’t follow what people were saying to him, couldn’t concentrate on the details of people’s lives, what they’d done while he was on the mainland. Nothing stuck in him; every conversation passed through him, insubstantial as smoke. He wished Jackbird was there to do the work of talking.

After an hour or so the rocks had reached a temperature his second cousin was happy with. He began shouting more instructions, pointing and gesticulating. The men lurched into action. With metal-pronged rakes they dragged the ashes and coals and rocks from the pit. None of what was happening made sense to Ned. He squinted at the smoking pit, the smoking rocks.

‘Still not going to lend a hand?’ She had approached him from the side; he hadn’t seen her coming. There was an edge to her voice. An inscrutable scrunch to her face. Ned felt tested, unaware of what the test was. Felt her eyes on him, waiting. He twisted a heel. Shook his head.

‘Why not?’

He was about to say something about the state of the other men, the hazards of fire and booze, but stopped himself, realising that they might be her friends or family. All he could manage was: ‘I don’t want to.’

She kept studying him. Cocked her head, crossed her arms. Her eyes nailing into him. ‘What do you want?’

When he couldn’t answer she glanced at the fire pit, announced that the food would take hours, that she was hungry, that she wasn’t going to wait around all night for dinner. She left with a group of other young women, not saying goodbye to him, to anyone.