‘They don’t have butcher birds in Port Wakefield.’

‘They got ’em everywhere.’

‘They’re on the east coast.’

‘Rubbish. They’re all over the place.’

‘Who cares?’ Pop said, flicking meat from his hand, wiping it from his mouth. ‘This is the worst fuckin’ pie I’ve ever eaten.’

Everyone laughed, but Ernie was determined it was a butcher bird. He swooshed the gulls and threw it a crust, but a gull swooped and took it, and he chased it a few steps and said, ‘Piss off, yer little cunt.’

We all watched.

‘Pardon,’ he said. ‘Slipped out.’ He tried again, almost delivering the crust to the bird. Happy with this, he returned, sat and finished his pie.

We continued, stopping at Snowtown for drinks and more prostate relief, and Port Pirie, because Pop insisted we walk down Ellen Street and find the shoe shop his great-grandfather used to run. Saying to me, ‘Have I ever told you about him, Clem?’

‘No.’

And surely he would’ve. The family history had been thoroughly surveyed.

‘Maybe it was this place?’ he said, studying what was now a laundromat, Ernie asking if we should get going, Peter unconcerned.

‘Shoes, you reckon?’ I said to Pop.

‘Yeah.’ He looked up and down the street. ‘I reckon it was Pirie. A shoe shop. I remember coming as a kid and …’ But then, like he wasn’t so sure: ‘Or was it Crystal Brook? Maybe not shoes. Maybe he sold clothes, or fabrics? That was him. Mum said …’ Staring into the laundromat.

‘Should we keep moving?’ Ern asked.

Driving north. When the radio dropped out Pop switched on his tranny (which, he explained, reached further). Stock prices and country music, as we headed up the scoliotic spine of the country. The land flattened and the horizon crumbled, little salt grains dissolving in the haze, as the offing floated towards us, retreated, found new features, came to meet us again.

Peter was determined to help with modern history. The Russian Revolution, although nothing could be further from my thoughts. ‘Three reasons why the Bolsheviks won?’

‘Lenin?’

He waited. In some places people had put up fences, but they’d rusted through, fallen, tangled with phalaris and rotten posts. ‘Why’d they bother?’ I asked.

‘What?’ Pop.

‘Farming. You can see it wouldn’t work. What’s to drink?’

Troughs, overturned and broken, waiting for stock that had wandered off years ago. Loading ramps along deserted roads. Signs of optimism.

‘Keep going,’ Peter said.

‘The peasants were starving. They’d had enough. Lenin says, Blah blah, they say, Righto, let’s have a go at that. Then (reason number three) along comes the war, and the Tsar can find plenty of money for that, but as for feeding them …’ I didn’t care. School, exams, a future sitting in a small room writing numbers in a large book seemed distant and depressing.

‘Of course, Marx’s ideas had already spread through Russia,’ Ernie said.