Her gaze was straight ahead, and she didn’t turn to look at him. ‘I’ve been working my way back to you, babe,’ she said, speaking in lyrics, as if all of life was a song.

23

QUORN,
4 FEBRUARY 2013

There was no one in at Sheila and Dora’s little house; in fact all of Quorn seemed utterly deserted. Wide empty streets, blazing blue sky, frontier architecture – it all looked strange and wonderful to Dan, and emphatically far from home. He’d switched off his phone hours ago, to hold back the intrusions of his world; then he’d slipped willingly through a narrow gap in space and time to be here in the back of beyond with Alison Connor. All the way from Adelaide he’d kept glancing across, checking her profile, and finding excuses to touch her. If someone had told him she wasn’t really there, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Devastated, but not surprised.