‘What are you talking about, Hessel?’ said Basil. ‘I haven’t said anything, and actually, it’s pretty fucking shit of both of you, all of you, to tell her that about him.’ I couldn’t follow.

‘You set the police on me!’

‘I have no idea why the police would be interested in you,’ said Basil. ‘You tell me why they’d be interested in you. What have you been up to?’

Hessel leaned his face towards Basil and made a vile sneering noise. ‘I should have known never to trust one of you,’ he said. I was shocked. Who was this person?

Basil stood up straighter, a steely look in his eye. ‘One of . . . who?’

Hessel spat on the ground at Basil’s feet. I was horrified and opened my mouth to speak, but Basil just calmly reached out and took my hand.

‘We’ll be at the gully until you can calm down, old man.’

As we walked away Hessel yelled after us, ‘You’re just like him. You’re all useless. All of you!’

Basil didn’t respond. He held my hand tightly and walked me away towards the fence. I looked back to where Hessel stood watching. Bette was clinging to the gate in the yard. And as Basil and I climbed our way through the wire of the fence, I saw Hessel give my suitcase a kick.

We stumbled across the uneven ground of the endless square paddock.

‘Where are we going, Basil?’

‘Just a bit further.’

The land looked flat, but after ten minutes all of a sudden we were standing in front of a curving line of trees, the trees Basil had pointed towards from the top of the cairn that first day. We were at the edge of a drop of two metres, an eroded wall below which a large flat area of land opened up, mysteriously hidden from anywhere else in the landscape by simple virtue of being below the level of the paddocks. A winding river stood rather than flowed down the middle of it – an unmoving watercourse, a thin snaking lake, the visible trees following the organic line of it. The only curving line in the landscape. The only thing giving the game away.

‘Down here,’ Basil said, stepping down the eroded wall to the green flat. I followed him clumsily, the clay-loam bank squishing and crumbling under my feet. It was an odd place. The water looked as though it was frozen in time and, while red gums had been left to follow the line of the river, the landscape all around it had been planted up with oaks and elms. There was not a winter leaf in sight, only the bare branches of naked English trees. An English gentleman’s park.

I sat quickly on the grass – I didn’t know where my knees had gone.

‘I don’t get any of this. What is going on? Why was Hessel –’ I felt hysterical.

Basil dropped down beside me. ‘Okay, so about Hessel . . . look, I don’t know. I think, from some little things Mum has told me, that he can do this sometimes, just be a bit of a bastard, just spout some racist shit –’ I thought of Leonie’s words that first day. Is that what you call it? Getting funny?