Ned felt her shiver against his arm, and at the shaking of her flesh he began to remove his coat. She had softened during the courtship, peeling off layers of sternness the closer they came to each other. He was still getting used to the touch of her. The nearness of her. They’d spent the previous night in the highlands, in another second cousin’s cabin on a fog-drenched sheep farm. The night before that had been their first together, but as it had come at the end of the wedding day, a day of meandering speeches and frenzied dancing and countless toasts, they’d collapsed into the sheets exhausted, drunk, untouching. So it wasn’t until that second night, on the sheep farm high on the rocks of the island’s roof, that they removed each other’s clothes.

Ned had slept with women during his year as a rouseabout’s picker-upper, after evenings spent in the grand country pubs of the interior. Often they were older women who’d liked his lack of words, his smile. But these encounters were always rushed, mechanical, awkward. Always he’d woken alone. And when he recalled them, even the most stirring of these memories were dulled by the vats of beer he’d drunk beforehand.

He’d never known the touch of sober skin. Hadn’t known the slowness of it. The gentleness, the rhythm. That the pleasure of it all ran far past the pure physicality and into the hours afterwards, those hours of talk and non-talk and blanket-wrapped closeness. In the lanolin-tainted air of the highland cabin he’d felt the heat of her breath on his shoulder, felt the tick of the pulse in her wrist through the flesh of his chest. Remembered her on the dairy farm, asking what he wanted. Felt a swelling expansion within the shadowed corners of himself. He wondered at the course his life had taken and was taking. Couldn’t recognise himself in the high darkness. All sorts of things seemed possible; all kinds of evolutions and journeys lay open, their paths raked clear, their stones washed in blinding light.

In the morning they’d felt for each other and found a way to break the frame of his cousin’s bed. He had wanted to fix it; she had laughed and made him leave a note declaring they’d found it that way. Afterwards he’d driven them across the plateau, through white-fingered fog, through ghostly stands of cider gums, through thick-needled pencil pines, through plains of buttongrass and tarns, through old rock and fresh lichen, until the road twisted and dived into a golden valley. Here, at winter’s end, thousands of wattles had unfurled their gaudy colours. As they descended from the heights their vision was swarmed by the yellow fuzz. Every slope, every scree, every patch of forest, every glimpse through every window was a scene of flowering gold.