And then there was another voice, Leonie’s.

‘Danny? Danny. It’s me, sweetheart, it’s Leonie.’ And I heard the man’s voice. A cough and then a worried fragile note. Nearly a whisper.

‘He was hurting them.’

‘I know, honey, it’s alright.’

Danny.

A man. Not a memory, not a ghost at a window.

Danny. Mum’s brother, all grown up. Danny, Basil’s dad. Danny was alive and Danny was Basil’s dad.

17 January 1996

That day

As Leonie had stood a moment longer on the roadside to enjoy watching Danny walk away from her, she’d had no presentiment, no prickling dread; she just remembered a pure and luxurious joy, the feel of silt and sun on her skin and the pleasure of watching him move his body as he walked: the body of her friend, her lovely lover.

But she heard nothing from him all the next day. It was weird. He usually arrived on her doorstep at some point during the day, with some new guitar lick to show her, or a new song she just had to listen to. Or he’d prank call her – two and a half rings, the phone cutting off halfway through the third ring, their signal to meet at the gully. But there was nothing. So she’d pranked him instead and headed down to the gully herself.

She’d waited there with the sun bouncing off the water, that water that had seen terrible history, the history not written in books, and still she felt no dread. And when after an hour Danny hadn’t shown up she went home again. Because it was weird, yes, but she wasn’t alarmed yet. Something must have come up, that was all. There would be time for it to become clear. He’d have something to tell her, probably. Some great story. Something funny, or sweet; something Danny-idiosyncratic.

She thought about calling his house, or even heading over there.

But then she remembered, she couldn’t.

Hessel had seen them. Hessel would kill her.

So she went home and tried not to sit by the phone that wasn’t ringing. She watched Blue Heelers with her family, her father giggling about all the blue-eyes and the way they all lived in the unluckiest town in the world, crime per capita, and her mum muttering about him in a few words of language before telling him in English to shut the hell up, she was trying to watch. Leonie’s mother was really into Blue Heelers – she hung on every word, gasped at the dramatic reveals, cried when characters died or had their hearts broken, and her dad liked to watch it because he got to joke about all the blue-eyes, an especially great joke because he had blue eyes himself and people were always a bit sus on his Aboriginality – it was a running joke between them all.

Danny’s eyes weren’t blue. They were the most complicated shade of green. The green of the water in the gully. The green of the new leaves on young eucalypts. Why hadn’t he called? she thought.