If there was any magic reception at the top of this rubble heap, I hadn’t been banking on an audience for whatever escape plan I might want to put in place or interaction with Nassim that might follow.

‘Maybe you have something better to do, Basil,’ I said, suggestively.

‘Nup!’ he said cheerfully. But thankfully, as we began negotiating the loose and slipping boulders, he quickly added, ‘Christ on a stick, you’re not worth dying for!’ and sat back against a boulder only a couple of layers from the bottom while I pushed on, pressing and stepping and testing my way up to the top, taking advantage of Basil’s instinct for self-preservation while ignoring my own.

But then just before I reached the top I sat back, panting. Gasping, actually. My body didn’t usually do this, gasp for air at the merest exertion. I wondered if this was that same siphoning off of resources that made my hands and feet feel cold. It felt good, though, sitting there with the rough stone beneath my fingertips, my body warm inside the jacket, the wind getting playful, flipping the hood off my head and turning the sweat on my brow cool. I gathered whatever resources I had and wobbled up onto the last of the rocks, thinking of the monumental effort it must have taken for those settler workers to have created this mound, and the danger they courted doing it – I shuddered to think of the injuries they might have sustained in a time of minimal medical science. Finally I sat down on top of the cairn and pulled out my phone. No bars. No fucking bars. All for nothing. I dropped my hand back into my lap, still holding the phone, and looked at the two houses facing off against each other.

The big house looked almost cut out and pasted on, but Bette and Hessel’s little house seemed embedded in the landscape, as at home as a land-formed thing, like a rock or a hill. The tin on the roof was rusted a natural ruddy brown, the cheap fibro was peeling and mottled like the bark of the three straggly gum trees that stood lonesome around it, and its thin walls visibly wobbled when the wind blew. It stood half-hidden in a tangle of weeds and shrubs and, with the yard fence framing it, it seemed like a chaotic picture of something wild painted onto the smooth canvas of the featureless paddocks around it. It was well settled into its place there and was clearly not the ‘temporary stopgap’ Hessel had claimed it was.

Beyond the two houses the main road perfectly bisected the landscape. Just a ten-minute drive down that road – according to the map on my phone – was the town with the post office where my magical package would be arriving in a few days’ time. The road disappeared in the distance, a diminishing reality, a vanishing point in the distant blue-brown hills. It was straight, the road, dead straight: everything here was straight, the fences, the roads, even the dirt side roads. It made sense – why meander when the flat land meant you could make a road go straight from a to b – but I found the lack of curves unsettling. I’d never associated ‘the countryside’ with all these straight lines.