As I leaned back away from his finger Bette re-entered the room, but stopped abruptly when she saw Hessel standing over me.

Hessel still had his arm up, his shaking finger pointed squarely at my nose. He looked from me to Bette and back to me again, and after a moment he dropped his arm. Standing, he seemed somehow less upright than when he was sitting – his back seemed to reach up as if it meant to be strong and straight, but failed at the last moment, curving forward at his shoulder blades, pushing his head forward and his chin out.

I felt sorry for him, this old man, so proud of his youth and his exploits. For all his jokes he seemed somehow unaware that his body was catching him up, that one day, not too far away, it would bring him down.

He turned to seat himself again, but halfway through the motion he seemed to change his mind. Still standing, he turned back to me.

‘Forgive me my brutishness, Anna. I am cultured, yes, but I am still a man, you see? I am a man, and I have worries on my mind.’

‘Um, okay. That’s okay.’

‘I am just so worried about my Polly, you see. So we will have to cut this short – I apologise.’

Short?! How long had he been planning on going on for?

‘Oh! Of course. Yes. That’s fine, Hessel. Perfectly understandable.’

Hessel waited, and Bette gestured to me, ushering me out of the room first. Hessel followed us and closed the doors behind us. They came together with a solid ‘click’, then he turned and reached for his coat and his hat in a single movement and seconds later was out the door.

‘Right,’ said Bette, suddenly bright and industrious. ‘Best get all this packed away then.’

18

Despite coffee and Hessel’s extended monologue, I managed to be standing at the bus shelter when the coach arrived. The door hissed open and the same bus driver as the other night gave me an enormous smile. ‘Well, I’m glad to see you!’ he said.

And I gave a little curtsy. ‘Here I am, alive and well, and in the flesh.’

‘I should hope so,’ he said. ‘A promise is a promise. Hop in.’

I climbed the steps and the driver gave me a high-five as I passed him and sat in the same seat I had occupied on the trip down. The bus was crowded, the more civilised hour and the few services a day funnelling people together. Paddocks passed by, green and brown; cairns loomed and receded one by one; unattractive dams, scraped unceremoniously from the flat earth, held shallow pans of water around which sheep crowded and drank. It was odd to be back on the same bus that had brought me all the way from Melbourne, to go just fifteen minutes down the road. As the bus drew me along through the landscape it was as though I had rejoined my original journey again after a strange pause, an interlude in another world.