Ali knew she was right: Michael had been with her; he’d driven her up there. But he hadn’t been party to that conversation, and she hadn’t told him afterwards either, because this was her Year Zero, the very start of their marriage, the sparkling, clear-cut early days when she’d reinvented her life so completely it was sometimes hard to recognise herself. And oh, how Michael had hated that visit – Sheila and Kalvin’s little house, the smallness of everything, the cheek-by-jowl ordinariness. He’d spent most of the time in the garden pretending to study the herbaceous border. When Ali came outside to find him he’d said, ‘Thank God, now let’s get the hell out of Dodge.’

Now, Sheila reached for Ali’s hands and clasped them tight, and for a few moments Ali submitted to the searching intensity of her gaze, until a young woman in a denim apron approached their table from inside the café and saved her.

‘Hey,’ said the waitress. ‘How you goin’?’

‘Great, thanks,’ Ali said, tugging her fingers free from the emotional urgency of Sheila’s grip.

‘Good to hear. Can I get you ladies anything to eat?’

‘Ah, no thanks,’ Ali said.

‘Yes, we’ll have some raisin toast, Megan,’ Sheila said. ‘We’ve had a heart-to-heart here, and we need the sustenance.’

‘Raisin toast for two?’

‘Oh no, none for me,’ said Ali.

Sheila said, ‘Raisin toast for two, Megan darling,’ and she winked at the waitress, who smiled and raised her eyebrows at Ali in a sort of helpless apology before turning from them and going back inside. Ali looked at Sheila and said, ‘Sustenance? We already had Dora’s special honey granola today.’

‘I know, but there’s something about you makes me want to feed you up,’ Sheila said. ‘Also, I’m terribly greedy.’ She laughed and slapped the top of the table, making the coffee cups bounce in their saucers and scaring the cockatoos; they flung themselves upwards, and their beating white wings were huge and quite startlingly beautiful against the hard blue sky.

Over dinner that night, Dora proposed a trip north, two hours’ drive, maybe a little less, up the outback roads to Wilpena Pound. It turned out Dora could fly a plane as well as drive a train, and there was a Cessna she could borrow; she could take them up for a bird’s eye view from the little airfield out there.

‘It’s not my plane, it belongs to Clancy,’ she said, as if this information clarified everything.

‘Nephew,’ Sheila explained, and Dora nodded.

‘That’s right, so will I give him a call?’

Ali wasn’t sure: she thought it all sounded irregular, if not actually illegal, but Stella just said, ‘Awesome,’ and Sheila was already dragging the Esky from the cupboard under the stairs to give it a wipe down inside. So Dora rang Clancy, and very early the next morning they set off in Ali’s car, the Esky packed with bottled water in case, Sheila said, the car blew a gasket in the Never Never. The town was still sleeping as they left it behind, and the sun hung tremulously low on the horizon.