‘Studying to study.’ The driver laughed. ‘That’s why I left school early. Too much studying just to study more. I felt like doing.’

‘I can understand that. The HSC is pretty nuts.’

‘HSC?’ the driver said. ‘New South Wales then?’

‘Oh, um, yes.’

‘You’re a long way from home.’

‘Hmm.’

I caught the coach driver frowning slightly as he drove on, looking back to the road. He wasn’t that old. Not as old as I’d first thought. Maybe thirties. I looked out at the road too. Through the front glass the headlights spotlit the hard bitumen as it stretched away into the dark, an artist’s canvas to the busy brushstrokes of falling water. The air on all sides of the coach cocooned the two of us in our sudden silence with a wet wool of driving droplets.

And then the driver’s eyes were on me again in the mirror. There was thought going on behind those eyes. Concern, maybe. But all he said was, ‘Well go on then. Turn it around and give us a proper look.’

I manoeuvred the object around: a print from an old anatomy book, three skulls – the front and back views with a profile view below, numbers and labels and tags on each area. Printed large, heavily framed. The driver’s eyes moved back and forth from the straight road to the mirror as he studied the picture.

‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Yeah, cool. I like it.’ He paused. ‘But then,’ he went on, ‘I’m seeing it in the mirror so maybe I’m not getting the whole anatomical correctness thing.’

‘No, skulls are perfectly symmetrical, most vertebrate bodies are, so you’re getting the full effect.’

‘Ha!’ He shook his head. ‘“Vertebrate.” “Symmetrical.” Yeah, you’ll be a doctor alright.’

I turned the picture back around and looked at it, and at the small handwritten inscription in the corner. Let’s touch now before it is too late. Let’s love now before the flesh leaves our bones. I touched it briefly with my fingertips.

‘It’s also a memento mori,’ I said.

‘Say again?’

‘A memento mori.’

He laughed and looked back at the road. ‘Well that time I heard, but I still didn’t get it.’

The coach slowed, and through the opposite windows a single house-light glided into view in the otherwise unpopulated darkness.

‘This it?’ he asked.

‘I . . . I guess so.’ I got out my tablet and matched our blue dot with my dropped red pin. ‘Yes. That’s it.’

‘And you’re expected, you say?’

‘Mm-hmm.’ I nodded assent.

‘Would’ve been nice of them to put an outside light on for you. Oh well. Here, let me help you.’ The pistons on the doors hissed and the cold air rushed into the cabin as the driver hefted my suitcase and picture down the stairs. ‘Well at least the rain’s cleared off,’ he said, stepping out into the darkness at the side of the road. ‘Just in time – I can feel a bit better about that at least. Though that’s when it gets really bloody cold around here, when the rain clouds clear and the stars come out. No hills anywhere to keep in the heat. My lord, bitter. You got a heater in your room over there?’ The driver nodded in the direction of the dimly lit window over the road.