The rock is Ayers Rock, Uluru. Mrs. Porter’s son, Donald, has brought her out to look at it. They are at breakfast, on the second day of a three-day tour, in the Desert Rose Room of the Yullara Sheraton. Mrs. Porter, sucking voluptuously, is on her third cigarette, while Donald, a born letter writer who will happily spend half an hour shaping and reshaping a description in his head, or putting a dazzling sheen on an ironical observation, is engaged on one of the airy rockets, all fizz and sparkle and recondite allusions, that he can barely wait, once he is out of town, to launch in the direction of his more discerning friends. In a large, loose, school-boyish hand, on the Sheraton’s rich notepaper, he writes:

To complete the scene, only the sacred river is missing, for this resort is surely inspired by the great tent city of Kubla Khan. Nestling among spinifex dunes, it rises, like a late vision of the impossible East, out of the rust-red sands, a postmodern Bedouin encampment, all pink and apricot turrets and slender aluminium poles that hum and twang as they prick the skyline. Over the walkways and public spaces hover huge, shadow-making sails that are meant to evoke, in those of us for whom deserts create a sense of spiritual unease, the ocean we left two thousand miles back.

So there you have it. The pitched tents of the modern nomads That tribe of the internationally restless who have come on here from the Holy Land, or from Taos or Porto Cervo or Nepal, to stare for a bit on an imaginable wonder—when, that is, they can lift their eyes from the spa pool, or in pauses between the Tasmanian Salmon and the Crme Brle…

Mrs. Porter is here on sufferance, accepting, with minimal grace, what Donald had intended as a treat. Frankly she’d rather be at Jupiter’s playing the pokies. She takes a good drag on her cigarette, looks up from the plate—as yet untouched—of scrambled egg, baked beans, and golden croquettes, and is astonished to find herself confronting, high up on the translucent canopy of the dining-room ceiling, a pair of colossal feet. The fat soles are sloshing about up there in ripples of light. Unnaturally magnified, and with the glare beyond them, diffuse, almost blinding, of the Central Australian sun. She gives a small cry and ducks. And Donald, who keeps a keen eye on her and is responsive to all her jerks and twitches, observing the movement but not for the moment its cause, demands, “What? What’s the matter? What is it?”

Mrs. Porter shakes her head. He frowns, subjects her to worried scrutiny—one of his what’s-she-up-to-now looks. She keeps her head down. After a moment, with another wary glance in her direction, he goes back to his letter.

Mrs. Porter throws a swift glance upwards.

Mmm, the feet are still there. Beyond them, distorted by fans of watery light, is the outline of a body, almost transparent—shoulders, a gigantic trunk. Black. This one is black. An enormous black man is up there wielding a length of hose, and the water is red. The big feet are bleeding. Well, that’s a new one.

Mrs. Porter nibbles at her toast. She needs to think about this. Between bites she takes long, sweet drags on her cigarette. If she ignores this latest apparition, she thinks, maybe it will go away.

Lately—well, for quite a while now—she’s been getting these visitations—apparitions is how she thinks of them, though they appear at such odd times, and in such unexpected guises, that she wonders if they aren’t in fact re visitations that she herself has called up out of bits and pieces of her past, her now scattered and inconsiderate memory.

In the beginning she thought they might be messengers—well, to put it more plainly, angels. But their only message seemed to be one she already knew: that the world she found herself in these days was a stranger place than she’d bargained for, and getting stranger.

She had wondered as well—but this was only at the start—if they might be tormentors, visitors from places she’d never been, like Antarctica, bringing with them a breath of icebergs. But that, she’d decided pretty smartly, was foolish. Dulcie, she told herself, you’re being a fool! She wasn’t the sort of person that anyone out there would want to torment. All her apparitions did was make themselves visible, hang around for a bit, disturbing the afternoon or whatever with a sudden chill, and drift off.

Ghosts might have been a more common word for them—she believes in ghosts. But if that’s what they are, they’re the ghosts of people she’s never met. And surely, if they were ghosts, her husband, Leonard, would be one of them.

Unless he has decided for some reason to give her a miss.

She finds this possibility distressing. She doesn’t particularly want to see Leonard, but the thought that he could appear to her if he wanted and has chosen not to puts a clamp on her heart, makes her go damp and miserable.

All this is a puzzle and she would like to ask someone about it, get a few answers, but is afraid of what she might hear. In the meantime she turns her attention to Donald. Let the feet go their own way. Let them just go!

Donald looks sweet when he is writing. He sits with one shoulder dipped and his arm circling the page, for ever worried, like a child, that someone might be looking over his shoulder and trying to copy. His tongue is at the corner of his mouth. Like a sweet-natured forty-three-year-old, very earnest and absorbed, practising pot-hooks.

Poor Donald, she thinks. He has spent his whole life waiting for her to become a mother of another sort. The sort who’ll take an interest. Well, she is interested. She’s interested, right now, in those feet! But what Donald means is interested in what interests him, and she can’t for the life of her see what all this stuff is that he gets so excited about, and Donald, for all his cleverness, can’t tell her. When she asks, he gets angry. The questions she comes up with are just the ones, it seems, that Donald cannot answer. They’re too simple. He loses his cool—that’s what people say these days—but all that does is make him feel bad, and the next moment he is coming after her with hugs, and little offerings out of the Herald that she could perfectly well read for herself, or out of books! Because she’s made him feel guilty.

This capacity she appears to possess for making grown men feel guilty—she had the same effect on Donald’s father—surprises her. Guilt is not one of the things she herself suffers from.

Duty. Responsibility. Guilt. Leonard was very strong on all three. So is Donald. He is very like his father in all sorts of ways, though not physically—Leonard was a very thin man.

Leonard too would have liked her to take an interest. Only Leonard was kinder, more understanding—she had almost said forgiving. It wasn’t her fault that she’d left school at thirteen—loads of girls did in those days, and clever men married them just the same. Leonard was careful always not to let her see that in this way she had failed him; that in the part of his nature that looked out into the world and was baffled, or which brought him moments of almost boyish elation, she could not join him, he was alone.

She was sorry for that, but she didn’t feel guilty. People are what they are. Leonard knew that as well as she did.

Donald’s generation, she has decided, are less willing to make allowances. Less indulgent. Or maybe that is just Donald. Even as a tiny tot he was always imposing what he felt on others. His need “share,” as he calls it, does have its nice side, she knows that. But it is very consuming. “Look at this, Mum,” he would shout, his whole tiny body in a “You’re not looking! Look!”

In those days it would be a caterpillar, some nasty black thing. An armoured black dragon that she thought of as Japanese-looking and found particularly repulsive. Or a picture of an air battle, all dotted lines that were supposed to be machine-gun bullets, and jagged flame. Later it was books—Proust. She’d had a whole year of that one, that Proust. Now it was this Rock.

High maintenance, that’s what they called it these days. She got that from her neighbour, Tess Hyland. Donald was high maintenance.

“What’s up?” he asks now, seeing her dip her shoulder again and flinch. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” she snaps back. “What’s the matter yourself?”

She has discovered that the best way of dealing with Donald’s questions is to return them. Backhand. As a girl she was quite a decent tennis player.

She continues to crouch. There is plenty of space up there under the cantilevered ceiling, no shortage of space; but the fact that twenty feet over your head the splayed toes of some giant black acrobat are sloshing about in blood is not an easy thing to ignore, especially at breakfast. She is reminded of the roofs of some of the cathedrals they’d seen—with Leonard it was cathedrals. They visited seven of them once, seven in a row. But over there the angels existed mostly from the waist up. You were supposed to ignore what existed below. They hung out over the damp aisles blowing trumpets or shaking tambourines. Here, it seems, you did get the lower parts and they were armed with hosepipes. Well, that was logical enough. They were in the southern hemisphere.

Donald is eyeing her again, though he is pretending not to. They are all at it these days—Donald, Douglas, Shirley. She has become an object of interest. She knows why. They’re on the lookout for some sign that she is losing her marbles.

“Why aren’t you eating your breakfast?” Donald demands.

“I am,” she tells him.

As if in retaliation for all those years when she forced one thing or another into their reluctant mouths—gooey eggs, strips of limp bread and butter, mashed banana, cod-liver oil—they have begun, this last year, to torment her with her unwillingness to do more than pick about at her food. When Donald says, “Come on now, just one more mouthful,” he is reproducing, whether he knows it or not, exactly the coax and whine of her own voice from forty years ago, and so accurately that, with a sickening rush, as if she had missed a step and fallen through four decades, she finds herself back in the dingy, cockroach-infested maisonette at West End that was all Leonard was able to find for them in the shortage after the war. The linoleum! Except in the corners and under the immoveable sideboard, roses worn to a dishwater brown. A gas heater in the bathroom that when she shut her eyes and put a match to it went off like a bunger and threatened to blast her eyebrows off. Donald in his high chair chucking crusts all over the floor, and Douglas hauling himself up to the open piano, preparing to thump. To get away from that vision she’s willing even to face the feet.

She glances upwards—ah, they’re gone!—then away to where an oversized ranger in a khaki uniform and wide-brimmed Akubra is examining the leaves of a rainforest shrub that goes all the way to the ceiling. For all the world as if he was out in the open somewhere and had just climbed out of a ute or off a horse.

“You shouldn’t have taken all that,” Donald is saying—she knows this one too—”if all you’re going to do is let it sit on your plate.”

Dear me, she thinks, is he going to go through the whole routine? The poor little children in England? What a pain I must have been!

In fact, she doesn’t intend to eat any of this stuff. Breakfast is just an excuse, so far as she is concerned, for a cigarette.

But the buffet table here is a feature. Donald leads her to it each morning as if it was an altar. Leonard too had a weakness for altars.

This one is garishly and unseasonably festive.

A big blue Japanese pumpkin is surrounded by several smaller ones, bright orange, with shells like fine bone china and pimpled.

There are wheatsheaves, loaves of rye and five-grain bread, spilled walnuts, almonds, a couple of hibiscus flowers. It’s hard to know what is for decoration and what is to eat.

And the effect, whatever was intended, has been ruined because some joker has, without ceremony, unceremoniously, plonked his saddle down right in the middle of it. Its straps all scuffed at the edges, and with worn and frayed stitching, its seat discoloured with sweat, this saddle has simply been plonked down and left among the cereal jars, the plates of cheese, sliced ham and smoked salmon, the bowls of stewed prunes, tinned apricots, orange quarters, crystallised pears …

But food is of no interest to her. She has helped herself so generously to the hot buffet not because she is hungry and intends to eat any of this stuff but so she’ll have something to look at. Something other than it.

It is everywhere. The whole place has been designed so that whichever way you turn, it’s there, displaying itself on the horizon. Sitting out there like a great slab of purple-brown liver going off in the sun. No, not liver, something else, she can’t think quite what.

And then she can. Suddenly she can. That’s why she has been so unwilling to look at it!

She is seven, maybe eight years old. Along with her friends of that time, Isobel and Betty Olds, she is squatting on her heels on the beach at Etty Bay in front of their discovery, a humpbacked sea creature bigger than any fish they have ever seen, which has been washed up on this familiar bit of beach and is lying stranded on the silvery wet sand. Its one visible eye, as yet unclouded, which is blue like a far-off moon, is open to the sky. It is alive and breathing. You can see the opening and closing of its gills.

The sea often tosses up flotsam of one kind or another. Big green-glass balls netted with rope. Toadfish that when you roll them with a big toe puff up and puff up till you think they’d burst. But nothing as big and sad-looking as this. You can imagine putting your arms around it like a person. Like a person that has maybe been turned into a fish by a witch’s curse and is unable to tell you that once, not so long ago, it was a princess. It breathes and is silent. Cut off in a silence that makes you aware suddenly of your own breathing, while the gulls rise shrieking overhead.

They have the beach to themselves. They sit there watching while the tide goes out. No longer swirling and trying to catch your feet, it goes far out, leaving the sand polished like a mirror to a silvery gleam in which the light comes and goes in flashes and the colours of the late-afternoon sky are gaudily reflected.

And slowly, as they watch, the creature begins to change—the blue-black back, the golden belly. The big fish begins to throw off colours in electric flashes. Mauve, pink, a yellowish pale green, they have never seen anything like it. Slow fireworks. As if, out of its element, in a world where it had no other means of expression, the big fish was trying to reveal to them some vision of what it was and where it had come from, a lost secret they were meant to remember and pass on. Well, maybe the others had grasped it. All she had done was gape and feel the slow wonder spread through her.

So they had squatted there, all three, and watched the big fish slowly die.

It was a dolphinfish, a dorado, and it had been dying. That’s what she knew now. The show had been its last. That’s why she didn’t want to look at this Rock. Just as she wouldn’t want to look at the dolphinfish either if it was lying out there now. No matter what sort of performance it put on.

She finds herself fidgeting. She stubs out the last of her cigarette, takes up a fork.

“My mother,” Donald writes to his friend Sherman, offering yet another glimpse of a character who never fails to amuse, “has for some reason taken against the scenery. Can you imagine? In fact it’s what she’s been doing all her life. If she can’t accommodate a thing, it isn’t there. Grand as it is, not even Ayers Rock stands a chance against her magnificent indifference. She simply chain-smokes and looks the other way. I begin to get an idea, after all these years, of how poor old Leonard must have felt.

“The hotel, on the other hand, has her completely absorbed. She devotes whole mealtimes to the perusal of the menu.

“Not that she deigns to taste more than a bite or two. But she does like to know what is there for the choosing.”

He pauses and looks up, feeling a twinge at having yet again offered her up as a figure of fun, this woman who has never ceased to puzzle and thwart him but who still commands the largest part of his heart. He knows this is odd. He covers himself by making her appear to his friends as a burden he has taken on that cannot, in all honour, be thrown off; an endless source, in the meantime, of amusing stories and flat-footed comments and attitudes.

“What would Dulcie think of it?” his friends Sherman and Jack Anderson say, and try, amid shouts of laughter, to reproduce one of her dead ordinary ways of looking at things, without ever quite catching her tone.

She eludes them—”One for you, Dulcie,” Donald tells himself—as she has for so long eluded him.

He watches her now, fork in hand, pushing baked beans about, piling them into modest heaps, then rearranging them in steep hills and ridges, then using the prongs of the fork to redistribute them in lines and circles, and finds himself thinking of the view from the plane window as they flew in from Alice: a panorama of scorched, reddish rock that must have been created, he thinks, in a spirit of wilfulness very like his mother’s as she goes now at the beans.

He smiles. The idea amuses him. His mother as demiurge.

He continues to watch, allowing the image to undergo in his head the quiet miracle of transformation, then once more begins to write.

* * * * *

Mrs. Porter sits in the tourist bus and smokes. Smoking isn’t allowed of course, but there is nobody about. She has the bus to herself. She has no qualms about the breaking of rules.

The bus is parked in the shade but is not cool. Heated air pours in at the open window, bearing flies. She is using the smoke to keep them off. Outside, the earth bakes.

To her left, country that is flat. Orange-red with clumps of grey-green spiky bushes. It, the Rock, is a little way off to her right. She does not look.

People, among them Donald, are hauling themselves up it in relays; dark lines of them against the Rock’s glowing red. Occasionally there is a flash as the sun bounces off a watch or a belt buckle, or a camera round someone’s neck. Madness, she thinks. Why would anyone want to do it? But she knows the answer to that one. Because it’s there.

Except that for most of the time, it hadn’t been—not in her book. And what’s more, she hadn’t missed it, so there! When they drew maps at school they hadn’t even bothered to put it in! She had got through life—dawdling her way past picket fences, barefoot, in a faded frock, pulling cosmos or daisies through the gaps to make bouquets, parsing sentences, getting her teeth drilled, going back and forth to the dairy on Saturday mornings for jugs of cream—with no awareness whatsoever that this great lump of a thing was sitting out here in the middle of nowhere and was considered sacred.

She resents the suggestion, transmitted to her via Donald, that she had been missing out on something, some other—dimension. How many dimensions are there? And how many could a body actually cope with and still get the washing on the line and tea on the table?

That’s the trouble with young people. They think everything outside their own lives is lacking in something. Some dimension. How would they know, unless they were mind-readers or you told them (and then you’d have to find the words, and they’d have to listen), what it felt like—that little honey-sack at the end of a plumbago when it suddenly burst on your tongue, or the roughness of Dezzy McGee’s big toe when he rubbed it once on her belly while she was sunbaking at the Townsville Baths. “Waddabout a root, Dulce?” That’s what he had whispered.

She laughs, then looks about to see if anyone has heard, then laughs again. Eleven she was, and Dezzy must have been twelve. Blond and buck-toothed, the baker’s boy.

All that seems closer now than this Rock ever was. Closer than last week.

Plus a butcher-bird her uncle Clary owned that was called Tom Leach after a mate he’d lost in France. Which was where—a good deal later of course—she lost Leonard. It could whistle like a champ. And a little stage set, no bigger than a cigar box, that belonged to Beverley.

Buss’s mother, that consisted of a single room with walls that were all mirrors, and little gold tables and chairs, and a boy in silk breeches presenting to a girl in a hooped skirt a perfect silver rose. It played a tune, but the mechanism was broken so she never got to hear it. She had pushed her face so close once, to the tiny open door, that her hot breath fogged up all the mirrors, and Beverley Buss had said, “Look, Dulce, you’ve made a different weather.”

Cancer. Beverley Buss, she’d heard, had died of cancer. Beverley McGowan by then.

She had loved that little theatre, and would, if she could, have willed herself small enough to squeeze right in through the narrow doorway and join that boy and girl in their charmed life that was so different from her own barefooted one—she bet that girl didn’t have warts on her thumb or get ringworm or nits—but had managed it only once, in a dream, and was so shocked to be confronted with herself over and over again in the seven mirrors, which were only too clear on that occasion, that she burst into tears and had to pinch herself awake not to die of shame in front of such a perfect pair.

So what did this Rock have to do with any of that?

Nothing. How could it? It wasn’t on the map. It wasn’t even on the list—there was a list, and you had to find out where the names belonged and mark them in. Capes, bays, the river systems, even the ones that ran only for a month or two each year. You marked them in with a dotted line. But this Rock that everyone makes such a fuss of now wasn’t on the list, let alone the map. So there!

It certainly wasn’t on her map. Her map, in those days, was five or six cross-streets between their weatherboard, her school, the open-air pictures where coloured people sat on the other side of a latticed partition, and the Townsville Baths. Later, in Brisbane after the war, it was the streets around West End as she dragged Douglas and pushed Donald, up to the shops and then back again in the boiling sun, her route determined by the places where you could get a stroller over the kerb.

Big grasshoppers would be chugging past, and at nesting time you had to watch out for magpies. Nothing to see on the way. A stray dog sniffing then lifting its leg in the weeds round a lamp-post. Roadmen at work round a fenced-off hole. A steamroller laying a carpet of hot tar, and that smell, burning pitch or hellfire, and the fellers in army boots and shorts at work beside it, most of them leaning on shovels or sitting on one heel with a fag hanging from their lip, waiting for the billy to boil over a pile of sticks. The tar smell thinning at last to the peppery scent that came through a paling fence. Dry stalks in a spare allotment.

Sometimes she stopped off to have morning tea with her only friend at that time, a Chinese lady called Mrs. Wau Hing.

Mrs. Wau Hing had a cabinet in her front room made of carved cherrywood, with shelves and brackets and applique ivory flowers, chrysanthemums and little fine-winged hummingbirds. It was beautiful. Though you wouldn’t really know what to do with it. Mrs. Wau Hing called it decorative.

Mrs. Wau Hing called her Blossom (which was silly really, but she liked it) and gave her chicken in garlicky black sauce to take home, which Leonard said “different.” Too different for her, but never mind, it was the thought.

What pleased her was the fine blue-whiteness of the bowl her friend sent it home in, with its design of pinpricks filled with transparent glaze.

When she went out barefoot in her nightie to get a glass of water at the kitchen sink, there it was, rinsed and shining in the wooden rack along with her own familiar crockery.

So what did the Rock have to do with any of that? Or with the stones she had in her kidneys in 1973?

These days, mind you, it’s everywhere. Including on TV. Turns up dripping with tomato sauce as a hamburger, or as a long red-clay mould that starts to heave, then cracks open, and when all the bits fall away there’s a flash-looking car inside, a Ford Fairlane—stuff like that. Its red shadow turned into a dingo one night and took that baby.

Suddenly it has plonked itself down in the middle of people’s lives like something that has just landed from outer space, or pushed up out of the centre of the earth, and occupies the gap that was filled once by—by what? She can’t think. Movie stars? Jesus? The Royal Family? It has opened people’s minds—this is Donald again—in the direction of the incommensurable. What a mouthful! It is exerting an influence. Well, not on her it isn’t! She gives it a quick dismissive glance and takes another deep drag on her Winfield.

Cathedrals. With Leonard it was cathedrals. As soon as the war was over and the big liners were on the go again he started planning their trip. They made it at last in 1976.

Cathedrals. Great sooty piles at the end of crooked little streets, more often than not with something missing, like the veterans they made a space for, mutils, on every bus.

Or on islands. Or high up on cliffs. Leonard’s eyes went all watery just at the sight of one of them and she felt him move quietly away.

He wasn’t religious in a praying way. When Leonard got down on his knees each morning it was to polish his boots—Nugget boot polish was what he believed in. The smell of it hung about in the hallway long after he had taken his briefcase and hat and run off to the tram. But with cathedrals, she’d decided, it was the gloom that got him. Which had been brewing there for centuries, and connected with some part of his nature she recognised, and felt soft towards, but had never felt free to enter. She associated it with the bald patch on top of his head, which you saw, or she did, only when he got down on his knees in the hallway on a sheet of newspaper, and held one boot, then the other, very lovingly to his heart, and stroked it till it shone.

She felt such a surge of tenderness for him then. For his reliability, his decency. And for that bald spot, which was the one thing she could see in him that he couldn’t, a hidden weakness. That’s the sort of thing that got her. But cathedrals, no thanks!

When she did manage to feel something, other than a chill in her bones that was like creeping death, was if the organ happened to be playing, or the sun, which was rare enough, was dropping colours from a stained-glass window on to the stony floor, in a play of pink and gold.

As for the proportions, as Leonard called them, well, she didn’t go in for height, she decided; all that gave you was a crick in the neck. What she liked was distance. A good long view towards the sunset, or at a certain soft hour at home, towards an empty intersection, and if you got a glimpse of something more it would be the way the hills blurred off into blueness beyond the last of the flashing roofs. You would feel small then, in a way she found comforting.

What really put her off was when Leonard, half lying in one of the pews, with the guide laid open in his lap and his arms extended along the wooden back, rolled his eyes up, like suffering Jesus or one of their Catholic saints. Where, she wondered, had he got that from? As far as she knew he was a Methodist.

As they moved on from Cologne to those others—the French ones—she’d taken against the cathedrals, started to really resent them.

The way you can resent a teacher (that Miss Bishop in third grade for instance) who has got a set against you and decided you’re a dill, or some little miss at the bank.

She had never had to worry, as some do, about other women, but she’d felt then that Leonard was being stolen from her. The moment they pushed through the doors and the cold hit her heart, she felt the change in him. Lying awake at his side in poky rooms, she would stare up at the ceiling and have to prevent herself from reaching out to see if he was still there.

She began to feel a kind of dread. The sight of yet another of those Gothic monsters looming up out of a side street and opening its stone arms to him was more than she could face.

But when it happened it wasn’t in a cathedral but in one of the hotels, and for two days afterwards she sat waiting in the room beside their ports, eating nothing, till at last Donald arrived to reclaim her and take his father home.

“It’s something you should see,” Donald had told her, speaking of this Rock.

“Why?”

“Because you should, that’s all.”

“You mean before I die,” she said, and gave a rough laugh.

It’s what Leonard had said. “I want to see Cologne Cathedral before I die.” But after Cologne he had got in another six.

“Are there any more of these things?” she asked of the Rock. “Or is there just the one?”

Donald gave her a hard look. He wondered sometimes if she wasn’t sharper than she let on.

She had come out here to please him. He was easily pleased and she knew that if she didn’t he would sulk. It was a break as well from the unit, and from having to show up at Tess Hyland’s every afternoon at five thirty—the Happy Hour—and listen to her complaints about the other owners and what the dogs were doing to her philodendrons.

Tess Hyland had been a convent mouse from Rockhampton when, in all the excitement after the war, she was recruited by UNRWA and went to work in the DP camps in Europe, then spent twenty-five years as a secretary at the UN in New York, where she had picked up a style that included daiquiris at five thirty in the afternoon and little bits of this and that “crackers.”

Five thirty, the Happy Hour. Personally it was a time she had always hated, when a good many people might think seriously of cutting their throat.

She would also miss out, just this once, on babysitting her three grandchildren, Les, Brett and Candy, on a Saturday night, and her drive in the back seat of Douglas’s Toyota on Sunday afternoon.

They had given her a room out here with an en suite, and the menu, even at breakfast, “extensive.” It was only three nights.

The first thing she’d done when Donald left her alone in the room was to have a good go-through of the cupboards. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but people, she knew, were inclined to leave things, and if there was a dirty sock somewhere, or a suspender belt or a used tissue, she wouldn’t feel the place was her own.

The drawers for a start. There were two deep ones under the table where they had put her port, and two more at the end of the long cupboard. When you opened the cupboard a light came on. There was a good six feet of hanging space in there, with a dozen or so good hangers. Real ones, not fixed to the rail so you couldn’t walk off with them like the ones in France.

But all that hanging space! All those shelves and drawers! Who had they been expecting? Madame Melba? How many frocks and matinee coats and smart little suits and jackets would you have to have, how many hankies and pairs of stockings and undies, to do justice to the facilities they had provided? She had brought too little. And even that, when she opened her port and looked at it, seemed more than she would need. And why were there two beds? Both double.

In the fridge, when she looked, and in the bar recess above, was all you would need to put on a good-sized party: cans of VB, bottles of Carlsberg, Cascade, champagne, wicker baskets packed like a Christmas hamper with Cheezels, crisps, Picnic and Snickers bars and tins of macadamia nuts and cashews.

So what am I in for? she wondered. Who should I be expecting? And what about those double beds?

Casting another panicky glance in the direction of so many tantalising but unwelcome possibilities, she fled to the en suite and snicked the lock on the door.

The whole place gleamed, you couldn’t fault them on that. Every steel bar and granite surface gave off a blinding reflection. There was a band of satiny paper across the lid of the lav. You had to break it to use the thing. Like cutting the ribbon on a bridge.

You could crack your skull in here. That’s what she thought. Easily. It was so shiny and full of edges. Or fall and break a hip.

She settled on the rim of the bath and considered her predicament. Just stepping into a place like this was a big risk.

Suddenly she saw something.

On the floor between the gleaming white lav and the wall was a cockroach, lying on its back with its curled-up legs in the air. It could hardly be the victim of a broken hip, so must have died of something the room had been sprayed with, that was safe for humans—well, it had better be!—but fatal to cockies and such. She got down on her knees and took a good look at it.

Cockroaches, she had heard, were the oldest living creatures on earth. Survivors. Unkillable. Well, obviously you could kill individuals like this one, but not the species. They would outlast anything. Even a nuclear explosion. She sat back on her heels and considered this.

The cockie statistics were impressive, but when it came to survival you couldn’t beat people, that was her view. People were amazing. They just went on and on. No matter how poor they were, how pinched and cramped their lives, how much pain they had, or bad luck, or how unjust the world was, or how many times they had been struck down. Look at Mrs. Ormond with her one breast and that husband of hers who was always after the little boys. Look at those fellers in Changi and on the railway—Dezzy McGee had been one of those. Look at that cripple you saw down at the Quay, in a wheelchair with his head lolling and the snot running down into his mouth. Living there—sleeping and all—in a wheelchair, with no other shelter, and young fellers running in off the ferries in relays to wheel him into the Gents and put him on the lavvie and clean him up afterwards at one of the basins. Look at the derros with their yellow beards and bare, blackened feet, shifting about among the suits in Martin Place. They were all up and moving—well, not that one in the wheelchair—pushing on to the next day and the next and the one after, unkillable, in spite of the bombs and the gas chambers, needing only a mouthful of pap to live on, like those Africans on the TV, and the least bit of hope. Hanging on to it. To life and one another.

She took the cockroach very gingerly by one of its brittle legs, used the side of the bathtub to heave herself upright, went through to the bedroom, and tossed it out into a garden bed. Something out there, ants or that, would get a meal off it. Good luck to them!

But when she turned back to the room and saw the wide-open empty cupboard with its blaze of light she regretted it. She could have thrown the cockroach in there. A dead cockroach was all right. It wouldn’t have disturbed her sleep. Not like a dirty sock.

She closed the cupboard door and squinnied through a crack to see that the light was off, then sat very quietly on one of the beds. Then, after a moment, shifted to the other.

She was saved by a light knocking at the door. Donald. Afternoon tea. But when she came back the problem was still there. All that cupboard space, the second bed.

She did what she could by distributing her belongings in as many places as possible—one shoe in one drawer, one in another, the same with her undies, her four hankies, and the things from her handbag: lipstick, a little hand mirror, an emery board, half a roll of Quick-Eze, a photograph of Donald and friends from the Arts Ball in Shanghai, another of Les, Brett, and Candy in school uniform. But it looked so inadequate after a moment or two, so hopeless, that she gathered everything up again, put it back into her handbag, then repacked her port and left it to sit there, all locked and buckled, on the rack, as if only her unclaimed luggage had arrived in the room, and she as yet had acquired no responsibilities. Then she stretched out fully clothed on one of the beds and slept.

* * * * *

“What now?“

Donald had lowered the novel he was reading and was watching her, over the top of his glasses, slide down, just an inch at a time, between the arms of the yielding silk-covered lounge chair. They were in one of the hotel’s grand reception rooms after dinner.

“What now what?” she demanded.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she told him. “Getting comfortable.”

Dim lighting, the lampshades glowing gold. Outside the beginnings of night, blue-luminous. The long room suspended out there in reflection so that the lounge chairs and gold-legged glass-topped tables floated above a carpet of lawn, among shrubs that might simply have sprouted through the floorboards, and they too, she and Donald and some people who were standing in a group behind them, also floating and transparent, in double exposure like ghosts.

Meanwhile, shoes off, stockinged feet extended, slumped sideways in the welcoming softness, she was getting her right hand down between the arm of the chair and the cushion, almost to the elbow now, right down in the crease there, feeling for coins, or a biro or lost earring. You could find all sorts of things in such places if you got deep enough, as she knew from cleaning at home. Not just dustballs.

Once, in a big hotel at Eaglehawk Neck in Tasmania, where she had gone to play in a bridge tournament, Tess Hyland had found a used condom. Really! They must have been doing it right there in the lounge, whoever it was, late at night, in the dark. She hoped her fingers, as they felt about now, didn’t come across anything like that! But she was ready—you had to be. For whatever.

The tips of her fingers encountered metal. She slipped lower in the chair, settling in a lopsided position, very nearly horizontal, like a drunk, and closed her fist on one, two, three coins, more—and a pen, but only plastic.

“For heaven’s sake,” Donald exploded.

Maybe she looked as if she was having an attack. She abandoned the pen. With some difficulty she wiggled her fist free and, pushing upright, smoothed her skirt and sat up, very straight now and defiant. Donald, with a puzzled look, went back to his novel but continued to throw her glances.

She snapped her handbag open, met his gaze, and, very adroitly she thought, slipped the coins in. Two one-dollar pieces, a twenty cents, and some fives. Not bad. She estimated there were about thirty such armchairs in the lounge, plus another half-dozen three-seaters. Up to a hundred dollars that would make, lurking about as buried treasure in the near vicinity. Quite a haul if you got in before the staff.

She wondered if she could risk moving to the third of the armchairs round their table, but decided she’d better not. Donald was already on the watch.

What pleased her, amid all these ghostly reflections, was that the coins down there in their hidden places, like the ones she had just slipped into her purse, maybe because they had slipped deep down and smuggled themselves out of sight, had retained their lovely solidity and weight. That was a good trick.

What she had to do was work out how she might manage it.

* * * * *

Mid-morning. They were out under the sails beside the pool. Donald was writing again. She wondered sometimes what on earth he found to say. She had been with him all the time they were here. Nothing had happened.

On the wide lawn bodies were sunbaking, laid out on folding chairs, white plastic, that could also become beds, their oiled limbs sleek in the sun.

Three Japanese boys who looked like twelve-year-olds, and not at all the sort who would rape nuns, were larking about at the deep end, throwing one another over and over again into the pool. They were doctors, down here, Donald had discovered, to celebrate their graduation.

Four women in bikinis that showed their belly buttons and yellow-tanned bellies—women as old as herself she thought—were at a table together, sipping coloured drinks. They wore sunglasses and a lot of heavy gold, though all one of them had to show was a stack of red, white, and green plastic bangles up her arm. She recognised her as a person she had spoken to once before, maybe yesterday. She was from a place called Spokane. Or was she the one from Tucson, Arizona? Either way, she had found their encounter disturbing.

Spokane! She’d never heard of it. Never even knew it existed. A big place too, over four hundred thousand. All learning to talk and walk and read and getting the papers delivered and feeling one another up in the backs of cars. This woman had lived her whole life there.

What you don’t know can’t hurt you, her mother used to say. Well, lately she’d begun to have her doubts. There was so much. This Rock, for instance, those people in the camps. All the time she had been spooning Farax into Douglas, then Donald, these people in Spokane or Tucson, Arizona, had been going to bed and the others into gas ovens. You couldn’t keep up.

“Where is it?” she had asked the woman from Tucson, Arizona, who was perched on the edge of one plastic chair with her foot up on another, painting her toenails an iridescent pink.

The woman paused in her painting. “Well, do you know Phoenix?”

“What?”

“Phoenix,” the woman repeated. “Tucson is a two-hour drive from Phoenix. South.”

“Oh,” she’d said.

So now there was this other place as well. She’d never heard of either one. But then, she thought, these people have probably never heard of Hurstville!

Still, it disturbed her, all these unknown places. Like that second bed.

There were six old men in the spa, all in a circle as if they were playing ring-a-ring-a-rosie, their arms extended along the tiled edge, the bluish water hopping about under their chins.

They were baldies most of them, but one had a peak of snow-white hair like a cockatoo and surprisingly black eyebrows, in a face that was long and tanned.

Occasionally one of them would sink, and as he went down his toes would surface. So there was more to them than just the head and shoulders.

These old fellers had not lost their vim. You could see it in their eyes and in the champagne that bubbled up between their legs. The spa was buzzing. Most of it was these old guys’ voices. It was like a ceremony, that’s what she thought.

She shifted her chair to hear them better.

“Tallahassee,” she heard. That was a new one! “Jerusalem.”

She pretended to be looking for something under her chair, and trying not to let Donald see, jerked it closer to the spa. These old fellers were up to something.

Gnomes, is what she thought of. The gnomes of Zurich. Shoulders, some of them with tufts of white hair, long faces above the boiling surface. Hiding the real source of things, the plumbing. Which was lower down.

She had never fathomed what men were really up to, what they wanted. What it was they were asking for, but never openly, and when they didn’t get it, brooded and fretted over and clenched their jaws and inwardly went dark, or clenched their fists and beat one another senseless, or their wives and kiddies, or rolled their eyes up and yearned for in a silence that filled their mouths like tongues.

The pool was whispering again.

“Odessa,” she heard. “Schenectady” Then, after a whole lot more she couldn’t catch, very clearly, in a voice she recognised over the buzzing of the water, “unceremonious,” a word she wouldn’t have picked up if she hadn’t heard it on a previous occasion.

Unceremonious.

* * * * *

Mrs. Porter stood in the middle of her room and did not know which way to turn. Each time she came back to it, it was like a place she was stepping into for the first time. She recognised nothing.

When something like that happens over and over again it shakes you. As if you’d left no mark.

It wasn’t simply that the moment she went out they slipped in and removed all trace of her. It was the room itself. It was so perfect it didn’t need you. It certainly didn’t need her.

She thought of breaking something. But what? A mirror would be bad luck.

She picked up a heavy glass ashtray, considered a moment, then flipped it out the window. Like that cockroach. It disappeared with a clunk into a flower bed.

Well, that was a start. She looked about for something else she could chuck out.

The one thing she couldn’t get rid of was that Rock. It sat dead centre there in the window. Just dumped there throbbing in the late sunlight, and so red it hurt her eyes.

To save herself from having to look at it she shut herself in the bathroom. At least you could make an impression on that. You could use the lav or turn the shower on and make the place so steamy all the mirrors fogged up and the walls lost some of their terrible brightness.

The place had its dangers of course, but was safe enough if all you did was lower the toilet lid and sit. Only how long could a body just sit?

Unceremonious.

He had saved that up till the last moment, when he thought she was no longer listening, and had hissed it out, but so softly that if she hadn’t had her head down trying to catch his last breath she mightn’t have heard it at all.

What a thing to say. What a word to come up with!

She thought she might have got it wrong, but it wasn’t a word she could have produced, she hardly knew what it meant. So what was it, an accusation? Even now, after so long, it made her furious.

To have that thrown at you! In a dingy little room in a place where the words were strange enough anyway, not to speak of the food, and the dim light bulbs, and the wobbly ironwork lift that shook the bones half out of you, and the smell of the bedding.

One of her bitterest memories of that dank little room was of Leonard kneeling on that last morning in front of the grate and putting what must have been the last of his strength into removing the dust of France from the cracks in his boots. His breath rasping with each pass of the cloth. His body leaning into the work as if his blessed soul depended on the quality of the shine.

And then, just minutes later, that word between them. “Unceremonious.”

For heaven’s sake, what did they expect? How many meals did you have to dish up? How many sheets did you have to wash and peg out and fold and put away or smooth over and tuck under? How many times did you have to lick your thumb and test the iron? How many times did you have to go fishing with a safety pin in their pyjama bottoms to find a lost cord?

Angrily she ripped a page off the little notepad they provided on the table between the beds and scribbled the word. Let someone else deal with it, spelled out there in her round, state-school hand.

She opened a drawer and dropped it in. Unceremonious. Posted it to the dead.

Then quickly, one after another, scribbled more words, till she had a pile of ripped-out pages.

Dimension, she wrote.

Bon Ami.

Flat 2, 19 Hampstead Road, West End, she wrote.

Root, she wrote, and many more words, till she had emptied herself, like a woman who has done all her housework, swept the house, made the beds, got the washing on the line, and, with nothing to do now but wait for the kiddies to come home from school and her husband from work, can afford to have a bit of a lie-down. She posted each page in a different drawer until all the drawers were occupied, then stretched out on one of the beds, the one on the left, and slept. Badly.

Back home in her unit, dust would be gathering, settling grain by grain on all her things: on the top of the television, between the knots of her crocheted doilies, in the hearts of the blood-red artificial roses that filled the glass vase on her bedside table.

On one petal of each rose was a raindrop, as if a few spots of rain had fallen. But when you touched the drop it was hard, like one of those lumps of red-gold resin they used to chew when they were kids, that had bled out of the rough trunk of a gum.

If it was rain that had fallen, even a few spots, her things would be wet and the heart of the rose would have been washed clean. But what she found herself sitting in, in her dream, was a slow fall of dust. Everything, everything, was being covered and choked with it.

Well, it’s what they’d always said: dust to dust—only she hadn’t believed it. The last word. Dust.

It worried her now that when she’d made her list she had left it out, and now it had got into her head she’d never be rid of it. She’d just go on sitting there for ever watching it gather around her. Watching it fall grain by grain over her things, over her, like a grainy twilight that was the start of another sort of night, but one that would go on and on and never pass.

The Hoover, she shouted in her sleep. Get the Hoover.

She woke then. On this double bed in a room from which every bit of dust, so far as she could see, had been expunged.

And now, at last, the others arrived.

One of them lay down beside her. She refused to turn and look, and the bed was wide enough for her to ignore him, though at one point he began to whisper. More words.

The others, a couple, lay down on the second bed and began to make love, and so as not to see who it was who had come to her own bed, and most of all not to have to listen to his words, she turned towards them and watched. They were shadowy. Maybe black.

She didn’t mind them using the bed, they didn’t disturb her. Probably had nowhere to go, poor things. And they weren’t noisy.

She must have gone back to sleep then, because when she woke again the room seemed lighter, less thick with breath. She was alone.

There was a humming in the room. Low. It made the veins in her forehead throb.

She got up and went, in her stockinged feet, to the window.

It was as if something out there at the end of the night was sending out gonglike vibrations that made the whole room hum and glow. The Rock, darkly veined and shimmering, was sitting like a cloud a hundred feet above the earth. Had simply risen up, ignoring the millions of tons it must weigh, and was stalled there on the horizon like an immense spacecraft, and the light it gave off was a sound with a voice at the centre of it, saying, Look at this. So, what do you reckon now?

Mrs. Porter looked at it askance, but she did look. And what she felt was an immediate and unaccountable happiness, as if the Rock’s newfound lightness was catching. And she remembered something: a time when Donald had just begun to stand unsteadily on his own plump little legs and had discovered the joy of running away from her towards a flower he had glimpsed in a garden bed, or a puppy dog or his brother’s red tricycle. When she called he would give a quick glance over his shoulder and run further. Suddenly unburdened, she had had to hang on to things—the sink, Leonard’s Stelzner upright—so as not to go floating clean off the linoleum, as if, after so many months of carrying them, inside her body or on her hip, first the one, then the other, she had forgotten the trick of letting gravity alone hold her down.

Now, looking at the Rock, she felt as if she had let go of something and was free to join it. To go floating. Like a balloon some small child—Donald perhaps—had let go of and which was free to go now wherever the world might take it. She glanced down. She was hovering a foot above the carpet.

So it had happened. She was off.

Immediately she began to worry about Donald. She needed to get word to him.

That did it. She came down with a bump. And with her heart beating fast in the fear that it might already be too late, she made for the door. She needed to reassure him, if he didn’t already know, that she hadn’t really minded all those times when he’d hung on to her skirt and dragged her off to look at this and that. So full of need and bullying insistence, she saw now, because if she didn’t look, and confirm that yes it was amazing, it really was, he couldn’t be sure that either he or it was there.

She had gone grudgingly, and looked and pretended. Because she had never given up the hard little knot of selfishness that her mother had warned would one day do her in. Well, her mother was wrong. It had saved her. Without it she would have been no more than a space for others to curl up in for a time then walk away from. All this, in her newfound lightness, she understood at last and wanted to explain to the one person who was left who might understand it and forgive. Still wearing the frock she had lain down in, she flung the door open and, barely hearing the click as it closed behind her, stepped out into the hotel corridor. Only then did she realise that she did not know the number of Donald’s room.

“You fool, Dulcie,” she told herself. The voice was Leonard’s. In these latter years, Leonard’s had become the voice she used for speaking to herself. It made her see things more clearly. Though Leonard would never have said to her the sort of things she said to herself. “Stupid woman. Bloody old fool.”

She walked up and down a little. All the doors looked the same.

She put her ear to one, then to another, to see if she could hear Donald’s snoring, but behind their identical doors all the rooms preserved an identical breathless silence.

A little further along, beside the door to a linen closet where she had sometimes seen a trolley stacked with towels and the little coloured bottles and soap packs that went into the various bathrooms, there was a chair. In a state now of angry alarm, she seized occupation of it and sat, commanding the empty corridor. She’d been too quick off the mark. She needed to sit now and have a think.

But the corridor, with its rows of ceiling lights and doors all blindly closed on their separate dreams, gave her the creeps. She felt breathless.

She made for a small flight of stairs at the far end that went down to a door, and when she opened it, and it too clicked shut behind her, found herself outside the building altogether, standing in her stockinged feet on stone flags that were still warm. The warmth came right up through her, and all about were night-flowering shrubs, and bigger trees with boughs that drooped. She took a good breath. The air was heavy with scent—with different scents. Night insects were twittering. All was clear moonlight, as still as still.

She began to walk—how simple things could be!—enjoying her own lightness and wondering if she wasn’t still asleep and dreaming. Only in dreams did your body dispose of itself so easily. She walked on springy lawn. But they must have been watering it, because almost immediately her stockings were soaked. She sat down on a low wall and peeled them off, and when she looked back gave a little laugh at the look of them there on the shadowy grass. Like two snakeskins, a couple. That’ll make ‘em guess!

Soon she was in a car park, empty but flooded with moonlight, then out again into soft sand. Red sand, still with the warmth of the sun in it, but cooler when you worked your naked toes in. Luxurious. She waded to the top of a dune and let herself go, half sliding, half rolling, till she came to a stop and was on level ground again. She righted herself and, seated in warm sand, checked for broken bones. All around her the bushes, which were spiky and had seemed dull by day, were giving off light like slow-burning fireworks. Big clouds rolled across the moon, thin as smoke, then darker. There was a twittering, though she could see no birds. Everywhere, things were happening—that’s what she felt. Small things that for a long time now she had failed to notice. To see them you had to get down to where she was now, close to the ground. At kiddie level. Otherwise there were so many other things to demand your attention that you got distracted, you lost the habit of looking, of listening, unless some kiddie down there dragged at your skirt and demanded, “Look, Mum, look.”

That twittering for instance. She knew what it was now. Not birds but the Station Master’s office at Babinda. It was years, donkey’s years, since that particular sound had come to her, yet here it was. Must have been going on all around her for ages, and she was too busy listening to other things to notice.

Babinda.

For a whole year after she was married, with Leonard away in New Guinea, she had been with the Railways, an emergency worker while the boys were at the war. Those were the days! She was off the shelf, so that was settled, and she had no domestic responsibilities. She had never in her life felt so free. She loved the noise and bustle of the Station Master’s office when things were on the go; the buzzing and tinkling when the First Division was held up by floods below the Burdekin or when, outside the regular timetable, a Special came through, a troop-transport with all the boys hanging out the windows wolf-whistling and calling across the tracks to where she was walking up and down with a lantern, to ask her name. Then the long sleepy periods when nothing was happening at all and you could get your head into Photoplay.

The Station Master, Mr. O’Leary, was a gardener, his platform a tame jungle of staghorns, elkhorns, hoyas, maidenhair ferns in hanging baskets, tree orchids cut straight from the trunk. He was out there in all weathers in his shirtsleeves whispering to his favourites. “Hullo, ducky,” he’d be singing, “here’s a nice drop of water for you. That’s a girl! You’ll enjoy this.”

She’d pause at her knitting to listen to him. He used the same tone when he was talking to her. It made her feel quite tender towards him. But he was always respectful—she was, after all, a married woman.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, when everything was at a low point and even the bush sounds had dropped to nothing, he would talk of his son Reggie, the footballer, who had been in her class at primary school and was now a POW in Malaya. Reggie had played the mouth organ, that’s what she remembered. A chunk of honeycomb at his lips and his breath swarming in the golden cells, that’s what she remembered. The Flight of the Bumble Bee.

“It’s a blessing his mother’s already gone,” Mr. O’Leary would tell her softly while the light slanted and turned pink. “At least she’s spared the waiting. Once you’ve got kiddies, Dulce, you’re never free, not ever. I spend half my time asking myself what he’s getting to eat, he’s such a big feller. If he’s got a mate an’ that. I’m only half here sometimes.”

She listened and was sympathetic but did not understand, not really. Douglas and Donald were still way off in the future, waiting there in the shadows beyond the track; they had not yet found her. But she liked listening to Mr. O’Leary. No one had ever thought her worth confiding in, not till this. She felt quite grown up. An independent woman. She was all of twenty-three.

Under the influence of the many unscheduled trains that were running up and down the line, all those lives the war had forced out of their expected course, she was led to wonder what direction she herself might be headed in. Odd, she thought now, that she had never considered her marriage a direction, let alone a terminus. But that was the times, the war. Everything normal was suspended for the duration. Afterwards, anything might be possible.

“You won’t find me stickin’ round once the war is over.”

This was Jim Haddy, the Station Master’s Assistant. “No fear! I’ll be off like a shot. You watch my dust!”

At sixteen, Jim Haddy was the most amazing boy she’d ever come across. He was so full of things, so dedicated. He thought the Queensland Railways were God and got quite upset if you threw off at them or said things like “You know the theme song of the Queensland Railways, don’t you? ‘I Walk Beside You.’ ” He thought Mr. O’Leary “slack” because when they went out with their flags and lamps and things to wave a train through, he left the tabs on his waistcoat unfastened. Jim was a stickler. He did not roll his sleeves up on even the muggiest days. Always wore his soft felt railway hat. And his waistcoat, even if it was unbuttoned in front, was always properly buckled at the sides.

He was a soft-faced kid who got overexcited and had, as Mr. O’Leary put it, to be watched. He knew all there was to know about the Royal Houses of Europe, and talked about the Teck Mecklenburgs and the Bourbon Parmas as if they owned cane farms down the road, and Queen Marie of Romania and King Zog as if they were his auntie and uncle. He spent a lot of the Railway’s time settling them like starlings in their family trees on sheets of austerity butcher’s paper.

“What a funny boy you are,” she would tell him dreamily as she leaned over his shoulder to watch.

The summer rain would be sheeting down, a wall of impenetrable light, and when it stopped, the view would be back, so green it hurt your eyes, and the earth in Mr. O’Leary’s flower beds would steam and give off smells. The little room where they sat at the end of the platform would be all misty with heat. She’d be thinking: When I get home I’ll have to take Leonard’s shoes out of the lowboy and brush the mould off. “Where is Montenegro?” she’d ask, and Jim was only too happy to tell, though she was none the wiser.

That boy needs watching.

But she had lost sight of him. Like so much else from that time. And from other times. She was surprised now that he had come back, and so clearly that as she leaned over his shoulder she caught the vinegary smell of his neck under the raw haircut.

“What happened to you, Jim Haddy?” she found herself asking in her own voice, her feet in the powdery red soil. “Where are you, I wonder? And where are Queen Marie and King Zog?” She hadn’t heard much of them lately either.

“I’m here,” she announced, in case Jim was somewhere in the vicinity and listening.

She looked about and saw that she was in the midst of a lot of small grey-green bushes, with daylight coming and no landmarks she could recognise.

“My God,” she said to herself, “where? Where am I? This isn’t my life.”

Off in the distance a train was rumbling in over the tracks: a great whooshing sound that grew and grew, and before she knew it passed so close to where she was standing that she was blown clear off her feet in a blaze of dust. It cleared, and she realised that high up in a window of one of the carriages as it went thundering past she had seen her own face, dreaming behind the glass and smiling. Going south. She picked herself up and got going again.

The Rock was there. Looming. Dark against the skyline. She made for that.

The sun was coming up, hot out of the oven, and almost immediately now the earth grew too hot to walk on. The bushes around her went suddenly dry; her mouth parched, she sat down dump. There was no shade. She must have dozed off.

When she looked up again a small boy was squatting in front of her. Not Donald. And not Douglas either. He was about five years old and black. He squatted on his heels. When her eyes clicked open he stared at her for a moment, then took off shouting.

When she opened her eyes again there were others, six or seven of them. Shy but curious, with big eyes. They squatted and stared. When she raised a hand they drew back. Dared one another to come close. Poked. Then giggled and sprang away.

At last one little girl, older than the rest, trotted off and came back with some scraps of bread and a cup full of water. The others looked on while the little girl pushed dry crusts into the open mouth, as if feeding a sick bird, and tipped the cup. The cup was old and crumpled, the child’s fingers rather dirty. Oh well, she thought, it’s a bit late to be worrying over my peck of dirt.

She swallowed, and the children watched as her old throat dealt with the warmish water, got it down.

She saw that it was a test. To see what she was. Old woman or spirit.

No need to look so puzzled, she told them, though not in so many words. It’s just me, Dulcie MacIntyre. It’s no use expecting anything more. This is it.

But they continued to watch as if they were not convinced.

She lay like a package while they sat waiting. As if, when the package finally unwrapped itself, it might contain something interesting. Oh well, she thought, they’ll find out. If they’re disappointed, that’s their lookout.

After a while she must have seemed as permanent and familiar to them as any other lump of earth because they got bored, some of them—the littlies—and went back to whatever game they’d been playing when that first one interrupted them, shouting, “Hey, look what I found! Over here!”

But two or three of them stayed. Watching the old lizard turn its head on the wrinkled, outstretched neck. Slowly lifting its gaze. Shifting it north. Then east. The dry mouth open.

They fed her dribbles of water. Went off in relays and brought back armfuls of dry scrub and built a screen to keep the sun off, which was fierce, and moved it as the sun moved so that she was always in shade. She had never in all her life felt so closely attended to, cared for. They continued to sit close beside her and watch. They were waiting for something else now. But what?

“I told you,” she said weakly, “it’s no good expecting anything more.” They had been watching so long, poor things. It was a shame they had to be disappointed.

They must have waited all day, because at last she felt the sun’s heat fall from her shoulders, though its light was still full in the face of her watchers. Then a shadow moved over them. The shadow of the Rock. She knew this because they kept lifting their eyes towards it, from her to it then back again. The Rock was changing colour now as the sun sank behind it.

The shadow continued to move, like a giant red scarf that was being drawn over them. The Rock, which had been hoarding the sun’s heat all day, was giving it off now in a kindlier form as it turned from orange-red to purple. If she could swing her body around now to face it, to look at it, she might understand something. Might. But then again she might not. Better to take what she could, this gentle heat, and leave the show to these others.

I’m sorry, she chuckled, I can’t compete.

She was beginning to rise up now, feeling even what was lightest in her, her thoughts, drop gently away. And the children, poor things, had their eyes fixed in the wrong place. No, she wanted to shout to them. Here I am. Up here.

One of the little ones, sitting there with a look of such intense puzzlement on his face, and baffled expectation, was Donald. I’m sorry, Donald, she said softly. But he too was looking in the wrong place.

The big dolphinfish lay stranded. The smaller waves no longer reached it. There were sand grits in its eyes, the mouth was open, a pulse throbbed under its gills. It was changing colour like a sunset: electric pink and mauve flashes, blushings of yellow-green.

“What is it?” Betty Olds asked. “What’s happening to it?”

“Shush,” Isobel told her.

So they sat, all three, and watched. The waves continued to whisper at the edge of the beach. The colours continued to play over the humped back and belly, flushing, changing, until slowly they became less vivid. The pulsing under the gills fluttered, then ceased, and the flesh, slowly as they watched, grew silvery-grey then leaden.

“What happened?” Betty asked again. “Is it dead now?”

“I think so,” Isobel told her. Then, seeing Betty’s lip begin to quiver, put her arm around her sister’s shoulder and drew her close. “It’s all right, Bets,” she whispered. “It was old.”

Dulcie said nothing. She too was breathless. This was a moment, she knew, that she would never forget. Never. As long as she lived. She also knew, with certainty, that she would live for ever.