MANOLIS’S WALK BACK to the station took much longer than he’d imagined. Not because he got lost – there were only so many streets, and only one memorial hall and post office that he remembered as landmarks. It was more the heat that slowed his progress, combined with an unexpected feeling of nostalgia. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it but he suddenly felt much younger, which created the illusion of having all the time in the world. He lingered on street corners, kicked a crushed beer can as if it were a football. He came across the local school, his old school, everything smaller than he remembered, play equipment, water bubblers. Stopping to smell the leaves on a heavy old ghost gum that reached across the road, he felt transported. The crisp, sweet smell of eucalyptus grounded him, helped release his tension. It all looked completely unfamiliar yet felt so recognisable.

Stumbling across a cemetery, Manolis pondered life and death, age and youth. He thought of his own son, and then considered young Sparrow. The kid projected as relaxed and carefree, but in reality was all kinds of messed up. And no wonder – he’d been shoved into a sack and beaten with a small town stick. His reaction to Manolis was itself a reaction to the prejudice he’d faced his whole adult life. It was done automatically, learned behaviour. The kid had some fight in him, and in spades, that was clear. He refused to live a lie, and was every day simply trying to play with the cards he’d been dealt. In a town like Cobb, Manolis deemed this to be worthy of the utmost respect.

Manolis spent almost an hour in the graveyard, walking casually through the rows. He always found cemeteries curiously calming, something about all those departed souls resting in peace, even though he imagined that some had died violently. He read the inscriptions on the headstones – those he could make out – and recognised more family names than he could’ve ever remembered on his own.

‘The last shirt has no pockets,’ he told himself.

In the city, Con’s grave still required work. Maria, who kept a weekly vigil to light a remembrance candle, was already bothering Manolis about it. The grave had collapsed on the day of the funeral due to heavy overnight rain and needed to be dug out again. It was now ‘naked’, as Maria called it: purely the hard Australian soil that her husband had been buried under. It needed some cover, some protection from the elements. Manolis pictured himself filling up a car boot with white stones from a landscape supply shop and taking to the task with one of Con’s old shovels. It was an interim measure before the erection of a pair of matching his-and-hers marble monuments. Con had already paid for them, over ten thousand dollars.