‘I need to know how Caleb is.’ Stephen had held Caleb even before me, as a white-wrapped bundle of boy in the delivery suite.

‘He’s all right.’

‘I’ve tried to call.’

I didn’t know how to respond.

‘Phoebe? Did you hear that? I’ve tried to call.’

‘Twenty-seven times,’ I guessed.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Are you all right? Phoebe?’ A muffled sound, Stephen’s hand covering the mouthpiece while he spoke to someone else. ‘Phoebe? I’m coming home… coming over.’

I was startled to hear my own laughter. ‘There are roadblocks.’

‘I’m coming.’

‘Well, good luck.’

I clicked the phone off. Five years ago, when Stephen’s mother Claire died, leaving this place to Caleb, her only grandson, it was meant to give him a good start in life. Claire believed in family as intensely as Caleb, even if Stephen had missed this gene.

If Caleb faced trial, Stephen could be destroyed. Had he ever been sufficiently involved in his son’s life? Exhausted, I thought of the virgin births of myth. Mary, for instance. And Gaia, who bore two sons on her own. Then I thought of children who killed their fathers. Kronus’s wife trained their youngest child to kill him. Art history and myth provided many answers. The Caleb I thought I knew might be as illusory as the bunyip, or long lost and extinct like marsupial tigers and lesser bilbies whose bones had returned to dust in the soil beneath our house’s big white footprint.

I sighed. My scalp itched. That shower.

Moments later I pushed suds into my scalp. When had I washed it last? Two days ago? Water circled my toes, grey with ash. Two days was a lifetime. Many lifetimes. Over a dozen. Maybe a dozen lives were over.

Not because of Caleb.

I stayed in the shower until the water ran clear. Despite the hour, I needed to rest. I collapsed into my bed. Brock Shepherd on the radio would have to wait.

Of all the places in the world, my exhausted dream took me to a long-ago museum visit, where Little Caleb was intrigued by the skull of an ancient, extinct giant marsupial. ‘A bunyip?’ he asked.

He had such an imagination! ‘It could be!’ I said.

I woke. In my notebook, between new snatches of lyrics and tunes, I drew the skull we’d seen on that long-ago day, putting flesh on it, and a body and claws and feathers. I wasn’t an artist like Caleb, my picture was more doodle than sketch, but it was the doodle of our own bunyip, whose creek-side home was now a pile of rubble topped with a misshapen tin roof.