Past the sign for Deloraine, with its fifties-style lettering, the lane levelled off where bare paddocks on either side always copped the wind shearing up from beyond The Mulgas. At the end of a flat section of road, the gate into his childhood home stood closed.

As he braked, James noticed the heavy chain wrapped around the fat timber post, the lock glinting like the head of a snake. The Mulgas’ old sign was gone too. When he emerged from the car, nothing felt familiar apart from the sudden attention of blowflies.

Even from this distance he could see the place wasn’t the verdant retreat he recalled. In the twenty years since he’d seen it, the homestead had diminished from encrusted white weatherboard to what looked like bone, belted by wind. The only new addition to the cluster of low buildings was the beige plastic water tank.

Running to the blue horizon, fields and gullies were dotted with only a few stands of trees tinged predominantly with the colours of struggle and drought. James’s ears filled with the competing air movements from either end of the valley, sounds of grass moving, and wire worrying at metal.

Beyond the fence and a little off the gravel lane he saw the old tank. It had taken a battering, crushed by a gale that might have blown it up the slope from the house. He shimmied up the straining post and launched himself over onto home soil. Only the thud of his insignificant landing announced his return.

In the shade of old blackberry canes that had thirsted for the last of the water, James discerned something that appeared like an ancient inscription in the old metal. He’d be able to read it if the surface was wet, so he spat on his hand. The iron went iridescent blue under his saliva and the words appeared: ‘Brandt, The Mulgas, via Kippen’, as though it had been written yesterday.

There it was again, the chance to split himself in two. The real James could just walk to the family farm and start explaining why Tony had killed himself, or the spineless shell could just say nothing.

He started to walk while he made up his mind which it would be, and immediately the stones on the driveway started wreaking havoc on his good shoes. He made better progress pushing through the grass at the side, but the immediate prickle of burrs invaded his ankles through his socks.

So he struck deeper into the grass to where the black soil mixed with the bright red of gravel and the grass was stunted. Stopping to take in the sagging fences of the old tennis court bowed by hungry honeysuckle, James inadvertently stood on an ants’ nest, only noticing when a few tickled their way up inside his jeans.