It only took a few minutes for town to become desert. More red sand, low shrubs dipping their feet in waterless creeks, a couple of small trees. More troughs, with their own pumping stations, and stock roaming the fenceless landscape. Like no man, or animal, or truck, needed geography. Pop took the new directions from his pocket and studied them. I didn’t say a word. It seemed like a little bit of gold in a very big country.

‘What d’you reckon?’ I said to him.

‘Don’t reckon nothin’.’ But he was lost, caught up, confused. With a couple of numbers that didn’t add up to what they ought to.

‘Good to have a plan B,’ I said.

‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

Which revealed a hill with its top sliced off.

Peter said, ‘How d’you reckon that happened?’

‘Erosion,’ Ernie replied.

‘Like that?’

‘The wind, over centuries.’

‘I reckon someone did it.’

‘Who’d do it? Who’d want the top of a hill?’

Niggles, minor arguments, silence. Even this morning, as we woke to a chorus of suffocated farts, Pop saying, ‘Come on you lot, we gotta get going.’

‘What’s the time?’ Ernie had asked.

‘Six.’

‘Why so early?’

‘I told you, six hundred kilometres before lunch.’

‘Nother half-hour?’

‘No, up.’

‘Seig fuckin’ heil.’

Pop had thrown a pillow at him. ‘If you want we can put you on a bus home. It’s not too late.’

Showers, rolled swags, me and Pop packing the trailer, and Pop saying, ‘Some bastard’s stolen the camp oven.’ We’d searched, but it had gone. Pop: ‘Miserable fuckin’ dump of a town. One night and they’ve gone through our stuff.’ But there’d been more. Some of the food, including the dry goods. So, we’d had to stop at Coles on the way out of town, all of the time Pop saying, ‘Dump like this. You’d think they’d just dynamite it, and plough it inta the ground.’

Pop was still studying directions, occasionally surveying the flatness, and returning to latitude and longitude.

‘Nice to have the Rosies back,’ Peter said.

Ern didn’t respond. He was working on a crossword, licking his pencil, writing and scribbling out.

‘Long time,’ I said.

‘Guess they thought it was time to face the music.’

Pop looked up, like we’d said it about him. Then returned.

‘Musta had bad memories,’ Peter said.

‘Vicky told me Tina didn’t want to come home, but she made her. She couldn’t stand the place they lived in.’

‘Good-lookin’ kid,’ Ernie said. ‘If I was fifty years younger … You should try yer luck, Clem.’

‘Too busy with study.’

‘Bullshit. I seen yers, goin’ round the shop together.’

‘Doesn’t mean I’m tryin’ my luck.’

‘Doesn’t mean yer not. You could do a lot worse.’

‘We’re just friends.’

They laughed. Ernie said, ‘Friends, eh?’

‘Friends.’