Should he, or shouldn’t he? Between first and second thoughts Hirsch was climbing the fence and trudging up to the house. The wind was fierce. It reached deeply into his bones and the eucalypts bent to it, moving above his head in a ceaseless rushing sound. A shut-up look about the house, curtains drawn on every window. No vehicles that he could see. He knocked: no answer. He didn’t like this. He didn’t want to do this.

Not a place abandoned, though. The veranda was clean, pot plants healthy, garden beds weeded, window glass spotless. No mould on the downpipes. And a sheepdog in a kennel watched him, unconcerned. Chooks pecked and scratched in the backyard. A little pink tricycle stood neatly in the carport. The householders are out, Hirsch thought. They’ll need to come back and feed the dog.

Leave a note? And then, alerted by a hint of a whisper of a sound or a movement, Hirsch took a second look at a caravan parked inside an open implement shed at the far end of the farmyard.

He crossed the yard. It was an older style of caravan on rotting tyres. Subject to the weather blowing in, because here at last was the grime and mould. A slip bolt had been mounted on the door, wire grilles over each window. As nice a prison as you could hope for.

Hirsch knocked and said hello and didn’t wait but slid open the bolt, opened the door and stepped inside.

CONSOLATION CHAPTER 2

2

AND JERKED BACK reflexively. He turned, took a bite of the chilly fresh air blowing in from the wider world, stepped down to hook the door flush against the metal flank and tried boarding the caravan again, swimming against a rank tide—piss and shit odours drilling into his sinuses.

Shallow-breathing, he slid open a couple of windows for the cross breeze and took stock. Down at the bottom end was a mattress and a tangle of blankets. Closer to, on a grubby fold-out table between bench seats, was an atlas, a dictionary, foolscap booklets and pens and a wooden ruler in a glass jar. On a nearby sink, a plastic bowl ready to be washed, one pale maggot of cooked rice glued to the rim.

Hirsch scanned the rest of the interior. The walls—a thin metal skin that would be no defence against midwinter temperatures—were finger-marked and mostly bare apart from a scrawled-upon whiteboard mounted between overhead cabinets halfway down the room. He saw that it was a list of rules in black and red, the words butting furiously against each other:

Bad behaviour is not rewarded in this family

Remember who is boss (hint: its not you)

You fit in with us, we do not fit in with you

You break it you fix it

Learn to take no for an answer

It might surprise you to know your not the centre of the universe