Once during the night Ossie had woken, afraid the distance might have come between them. But Daise was still holding him against her breast. If he had been different, say. Ossie’s throat had began to wobble. Only then, Daise, might have turned different. So he nuzzled against the warm darkness, and was again received.

‘If you want to enough, you can do what you want,’ Meg Hogben insisted.

She had read it in a book, and wasn’t altogether convinced, but theories sometimes come to the rescue.

‘If you want,’ she said, kicking a hole in the stony ground.

‘Not everything you can’t’.

‘You can!’ she said. ‘But you can!’

She who had never looked at a boy, not right into one, was looking at him as never before.

‘That’s a lot of crap,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she admitted, ’there are limits.’

It made him frown. He was again suspicious. She was acting clever. All those pomes.

But to reach understanding she would have surrendered her cleverness. She was no longer proud of it.

‘And what’ll happen if you get married? Riding around the country in a truck. How’ll you wife like it? Stuck at home with a lot of kids.’

‘Some of ’em take the wife along. Darkie takes his missus and kids. Not always, like. But now and again. On short runs.’

‘You didn’t tell me Mr Black was married.’

‘Can’t tell you everything, can I? Not at once.’

The women who sat in the drivers’ cabins of the semi-trailers he saw as predominantly thin and dark. They seldom returned glances, but wiped their hands on Kleenex, and peered into little mirrors, waiting for their men to show up again. Which in time they had to. So he walked across from the service station, to take possesssion of his property. Sauntering, frowning slightly, touching the yellow stubble on his chin, he did not bother to look. Glanced sideways perhaps. She was the thinnest, the darkest he knew, the coolest of all the women who sat looking out from the cabin windows of the semi-trailers.

In the meantime they strolled a bit, amongst the rusty tins at Sarsaparilla dump. He broke a few sticks and threw away the pieces. She tore off a narrow leaf and smelled it. She would have liked to smell Lummy’s hair.

‘Gee, you’re fair,’ she had to say.

‘Some are born fair,’ he admitted.

He began pelting a rock with stones. He was strong, she saw. So many discoveries in a short while were making her tremble at the knees.

And as they rushed through the brilliant light, roaring and lurching, the cabin filled with fair-skinned, taffy children, the youngest of whom she protecting by holding the palm of her hand behind his neck, as she had noticed women do. Occupied in this way, she almost forgot Lum at times, who would pull up, and she would climb down, to rinse the nappies in tepid water, and hang them on a bush to dry.

‘All these pomes and things,’ he said, ‘I never knew a clever person before.’