‘What the fuck?’ he said.

‘Basil, it’s really not cool to take a girl somewhere without telling her what the hell you are doing.’

‘I told you, I want to show you something.’

‘What? What are you going to show me? What are you going to show me that is so far away from everything I know and not tell me what you’re doing?’

‘What’s your great emergency? Why do you have to know everything? Can’t you just enjoy a surprise – someone doing something nice for you?’

‘No. I need to get back and study.’

‘Really?’ said Basil. ‘Is that all you think about?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘There are other things, you know. Other important things.’

‘Not for me. Not right now there aren’t.’ The truth of the statement landed heavily. I couldn’t fail. I had to achieve this, and I had to achieve it now. ‘I don’t expect you to understand, but there really is nothing as important to me right now.’

‘Is that why your life has run so far off into the ditch?’

‘What the fuck would you know about that?’

Basil shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Some crazy hunch. You were not such a happy chappy up the hill just before.’

‘Man, you just really push my buttons, you know that?’

‘I aim to please,’ said Basil with a bow and a flourish. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘this was where we were getting off anyway. It’s just through there. We need to walk.’ And he tossed the bike over the dug-in furrow at the side of the road, left it in the wild long grass and ducked through a fence leading into a paddock.

‘I’m not coming unless you tell me what it is,’ I said.

‘Well you can’t see it from there,’ he said, and kept walking across the paddock. ‘And I don’t know about you, but I don’t reckon this road is much to look at.’

‘Fucking hell,’ I said, then stepped through the long grass beside the bike and climbed the fence too. ‘All I seem to do here is walk around in paddocks with you.’

‘Welcome to Central Victoria,’ said Basil and waggled his hands in the air without turning around.

I ran to catch up, stumbling on the clodded earth. Ahead of us was a group of trees, and just above the leaf-level poked the roof of a small silo. In the distance over to our right was an old homestead, not at all like Bromley Cairn, but easily as old, maybe even older. It was low and hunkered down, a single storey of red brick with a verandah along one L-shaped side, with long stables at the back and five incongruous palm trees standing like sentinels around it. Twice as tall as anything around them, the palm trees’ over-long trunks bent slightly away from the prevailing winds, their straggly frond-tops waving like bedraggled pom-poms over the river red gums growing beneath.

‘Are we walking on those people’s land?’ I said, pointing to the house.