James looked too. Beyond the low rows of vans and the distant wall of enormous willows he spied the concrete span and the deep shadows it cast on the railway viaduct.

Fuck, Tony. What the fuck?

He was caught by mental pictures of his cousin locking up this ugly flat one random autumn night, walking through town to the public toilets, then leaping off that bridge because of guilt or shame or whatever it was. He forced himself to picture Tony alive and well.

‘Perhaps he rode his motorbike?‘ James asked, remembering how his cousin got around.

‘Motorbike?’ Mr Jones said, turning to look James in the eye. It was a quick scan, searching for intention, although his lips hung in a vague smile.

‘Tony always had at least one motorbike,’ James said. ‘Unless he’d sold it?’

‘Wouldn’t know,’ Mr Jones said, giving the place an offhand look on his way to the front door. ‘Let your dad know we can’t make it to the funeral, but I might be able to swing by the pub for the wake. The Joneses are praying for youse all in your time of need.’

For the third time that morning James traversed the Kippen Bridge, but it was so high above the water nothing of the parklands was visible below.

He noticed the motel was still open for business, then the abattoir showed on the left, swamped by weeds, before the road started to rise gradually. Its surface was still a patchwork of bitumen blotches from a thousand ineffective repairs. Just after cresting the edge of the upland valley that enfolded his family’s three farms, James spied the old tin-drum letterboxes and slowed to turn off the main road. A trail of dust burst upwards in his wake.

On the far side of the willow-choked creek his grandparents’ homestead appeared on the left, a couple of iron roofing sheets kicking up with the wind. The old signpost on the gate was gone, nothing to show this place was called Glen Alpine.

The hilltop afforded a view of Deloraine out to the right, swallowed by dark, freshly-tilled fields and stands of pine trees. If they were home, Doris and Bill would be watching, but James would leave them alone for now. Perhaps he and Dad could go around and see them later? Maybe today, or at least sometime over the next two days, he’d find the right time to plant the seed about Dylan and the fact that he and James shared a home in the city? James needn’t let on that they’d done so for almost ten years. That could come later, once everyone in the family knew he had a long-term partner.