I didn’t pass another car as I made my way back along Redfern Street. The quietness didn’t strike me as strange. Perhaps the city was quieter in those days, or perhaps it’s just my memory. I can’t say. The sound had occurred on that section of Lawson Street which crosses over the rail lines. I remembered standing there often when I was living in one of the foster homes that marked my childhood like fence posts; I used to pull myself up onto the brick wall and stand there as the trains passed underneath.

I got out of the car and leaned against the brick wall. It was exactly as I remembered it. There was more light here than at the park, and I pulled myself up onto the wall as I used to do almost every school-day afternoon. It was a strange sensation, as if something also pulled itself up within me, and I swayed a little. I looked down to where the tracks disappeared in the distance, swallowed by the lights of the larger city beyond. I climbed down from the wall and looked around. There was no dog to be seen. I looked again at the Volvo’s front panel. In the streetlight it appeared to me now that there might be tiny filaments of blood around the rim of the dent, but I couldn’t be sure. In all the years I owned the car I don’t remember ever washing it.

On the road behind where I had parked I noticed what looked like a mark. When I bent down to examine it more closely I was overcome by a momentary vertigo. A week after I was placed in their care, I was taken by my first foster parents to look at a small cave in the country south of their property near Katherine, a place my new father would often take me later when he went hunting for roos. When I turned on the torch he had given me, it seemed to me as if I had wakened a zoo full of hibernating creatures come out of the darkness in which they had slept for a thousand years. There were hands, larger than my own, stencilled in ochre, and kangaroos and crocodiles and snakes and fish, not painted onto the surface of the rock, but rather like apparitions that had come up through the rock somehow to be seen. Everything was getting confused in my mind. There was blood on the road: it had dried to the colour of those apparitions in the cave. And the creature that had left it – where was it, if not an apparition itself, gone back into the road?