When all the few people were assembled at the graveside in their good clothes, Mr Brickle opened the book, though his voice soon suggested he needn’t have.

‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ he said.

And Ossie cried. Because he didn’t believe it, not when it came to the real thing.

He looked down at the coffin, which was what remained of what he knew. He remembered eating a baked apple, very slowly, the toffee on it And again the dark of the horse-stall swallowed him up, where he lay hopeless amongst the shit, and her coming at him with the barrow. What do you want? he asked straight out. I came down to the showground, she said, for a bit of honest-to-God manure, I’ve had those fertilizers, she said, and what are you, are you sick? I live ‘ere, he said. And began to cry, and rub the snot from his snivelly nose. After a bit Daise said: We’re going back to my place, What’s-yer-Name – Ossie. The way she spoke he knew it was true. All the way up the hill in the barrow the wind was giving his eyes gyp, and blowing his thin hair apart. Over the years he had come across one or two lice in his hair, but thought, or hoped he had got rid of them by the time Daise took him up. As she pushed and struggled with the barrow, sometimes she would lean forward, and he felt her warmth, her firm diddies pressed against his back.

‘Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live,’ Mr Brickie read.

Certified was the word, decided Councillor Hobben looking at that old Ossie.

Who stood there mumbling a few Aspirations, very quiet, on the strength of what they had taught him as a boy.

When all this was under way, all these words of which, she knew, her Auntie Daise would not have approved, Meg Hogben went and got beneath the strands of wire separating the cemetery from the dump. She had never been to the dump before, and her heart was lively in her side. She walked shyly through the bush. She came across an old suspender-belt. She stumbled over a blackened primus.

She saw Lummy Whalley then. He was standing under a banksia, twisting at one of its dead heads.

Suddenly they knew there was something neither of them could continue to avoid.

‘I came here to the funeral,’ she said.

She sounded, well, almost relieved.

‘Do you come here often?’ she asked.

‘Nah,’ he answered, hoarse. ‘Not here. To dumps, yes.’

But her intrusion had destroyed the predetermined ceremony of his life, and caused a trembling in his hand.

‘Is there anything to see?’ she asked.

‘Junk,’ he said. ‘Same old junk.’

‘Have you ever looked at a dead person?’

Because she noticed the trembling of his hand.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Have you?’

She hadn’t. Nor did it seem probable that she would have to now. Not as they began breathing evenly again.