You could pin your business card to the wall, add your photo to a gallery, hang your bra, even, in an underwear jungle hanging from the roof. There was a set of stoplights, operational, and a bowling alley beside the men’s chunderama. Pop’s finger traced the red line from Pimba to Coober. ‘Lotta bloody nothing.’

Back in the shed, the gaps had seemed smaller, but now each had to be worked for. Neville Bluff and Glendambo, thousands of strokes of a mapmaker’s pen that didn’t show the endless boredom or pointless conversations needed to fill the hours, and miles.

‘All that today?’ Peter asked.

‘Today.’ He stretched his hand, finger to pinkie, one-and-a-half times, to show us. ‘Still up to it, Ern?’

‘Don’t worry about me, Doug. How you feelin’?’

‘Never better.’ He glowed, but then dimmed. Dropped his shoulders and said, ‘I’ll go fill up.’

Peter drove, Pop beside him, me and Ern in the back. Pete was efficiency, upright, ten-to-two. Pop saw it all: ‘That one must be Rocky Hill.’ Indicating.

I chose Lawrence; Ernie, level four Superword; Pop, the promise of progress towards gold. There were a few outcrops, granite perhaps, but the thought of a seven-mile reef? ‘This is the way Lasseter must’ve come,’ I said to Pop.

He looked back. ‘I reckon.’

‘Musta felt like this, eh?’

‘How?’

‘Like it was getting closer?’

This didn’t seem to excite him.

‘Phar Lap outstation … abandoned. Mount Brady.’ But then he took out the new directions, laid the crumpled sheet on his map, and descended, again, into doubt.

We arrived in Coober Pedy early afternoon. Firstly, through a moonscape of tailings and shafts. We stopped, examined a few, and Pop said, ‘Best place to dump a body.’

A million shafts, according to the information bay on the way in. Then, low, growling fish shops and explosives stores. Another school, with even fewer promises of Byron on his pony.

‘Lotta black fellas,’ Pop said, as he studied them.

‘Don’t know if I’d like to live here,’ Peter said.

Karl and Paddy, Slobodan, Giovanni and Giuseppe, loading their utes, driving towards imagined fortunes. Ruptures in the earth where underground homes and shops dared to test the temperature, although it wasn’t so bad today. Making a fruitcup-coloured town of up-and-downs, sinking gyms and submerged love nests, brave government offices sitting stiff-shouldered in the sun.

We parked outside a row of shops and Pop bought a chicken. We sat al fresco breaking it apart. I got a drumstick, and Coke, and Peter settled for wings, and a little breast. Pop wasn’t hungry. He noticed a phone and said, ‘I s’pose I better face the music. Wish me luck.’

Ten minutes later we’d finished, and Pop was still talking, and a couple of local kids (shoeless and shirtless) had asked for money. Ernie had said, ‘Piss off,’ but Peter had given them some change, because you couldn’t afford to make enemies in a small town.

Peter said, ‘I wonder what she’s saying?’