It didn’t take Rosemary and Eddie long to build their house. Eighty-one days of hammering and drilling, scraping and grinding. They’d raise an arm in greeting, but they never came to call with a casserole or hands that needed shaking. Eighty-one days, and once they’d finished it looked like it had been there all along.

A cabin with baskets strung along its eaves and wide, wooden steps around a wide, wooden deck might have looked odd in Winifred, where doors were shut and windows matched and roofs were painted, but out where we were, it was only in the way, settled as it was in the clearing at the end of the road.

I had to pass by to get to the highway to catch the bus on Thursdays. I could have cut through the bush, and I often did, but autumn dirt was sticky, and tangles pulled holes in my tights.

‘Did you come in on a broom?’ Catherine asked, and though I knew she only meant it as a joke, I was embarrassed and ashamed, so I walked past the cabin carefully and quietly to get to our unsealed road.

Sometimes I’d see the Lambs, rubbed up close together on the steps like cats. Her mug was iris blue, and her toenails were always painted. I watched him tuck strands of her hair behind her ears or wrap them back around her ponytail. I watched him lift her feet into his lap, hold her hand and turn the gold band on her finger. She chewed the pen she used to do the crossword and left crusts on her plate.

They never noticed me creeping by, and that suited me just fine.

There’d been few voices but my own since Sonny died. There’d been no man-made sounds but those that came from me: the soft clatter of cutlery in a sink of soapy water, the chop-chop-chop of a knife on a board, the tink-tink-tink of a teaspoon on the lip of a cup, the scratch of dust and daddy-long-legs swept across a floor. My floor. My mug. My board. My sink. One knife, one fork, one spoon.

The Lambs brought a hammer tapping and the whirring of a sander; calls in to lunch, calls out for another beer, a hand for a minute, a time double-checked. They brought a smell of sawdust and coffee, burnt toast and beeswax, and other smells I didn’t know, to mingle with the paraffin and possum, eucalyptus, jasmine and the cold-tea smell of coral spawning through the early summer months.

They brought country music.

Some nights I stood in shadows that hugged the trees and watched Eddie whirl Rosemary in circles beneath a swinging blue light that zapped the bugs which must have bothered them. He held her waist as tenderly as you’d cup a broken bird. More than once (twice, fifteen times), I woke up stiff in a crumbled bed of twigs and leaves, lights long snuffed, and Rosemary and Eddie tucked away behind a flutter of curtains and wind chimes.

Some nights when I couldn’t sleep, or if the moon was full, I’d walk around the tip of the headland, across the rocks and to the far side, where the Englishwoman lived. It’s all I knew her as: the Englishwoman (the Butcher, the Baker). As it turned out, all anyone ever knew about her was her accent.

I stood so far away she’d not have seen me even if she looked, but the house had been empty for many years before she’d come to claim it, and I’d been close enough to press my face against its walls and lie still and flat on the porch that wrapped around it—planks wide and windswept where they faced the ocean, thick with leaves and cobwebs on the side where they did not. Before the Englishwoman came, storm shutters battered up against windows built to slide and let as much of outside in as possible. An artist built it, Catherine said, positioned it for light and isolation, but moved to the city after all to settle for the opposite. One pipe emptied a kitchen sink and another drained the bath, either side of a wall or not, I couldn’t tell. Cable ties and shade-cloth patches kept snakes from travelling in and rings too loose for fingers from washing away. A water tank stood up on stilts, so gravity filled taps, and solar mats warmed water. I would have liked to wander through, imagining the artist there. I would have liked to look for signs of others who came after—growing children marked on a pantry door. It would have been a small house for a family (one bedroom, I was sure), but you never know; a lot can be going on inside a house you wouldn’t know from walking two, three, fifteen times around it.

When the Englishwoman came, she brought a generator. She lay a mat beside the door and planted flowers in pots she placed to catch the rain the gutters missed.

Sonny said it was a waste of space and energy to grow a thing you couldn’t eat, or tend to animals you couldn’t milk or breed or roast. That’s what it was about, he said, living where we did, the way we chose to live: pickling the fruit we picked, and scrambling the eggs we found with gentle fingers, warm and soft and safely lain in hay we’d set in boxes. We didn’t bring a lot of money with us; savings—Sonny’s mostly—which bought the caravan and a car to tow it. We took things strangers set on verges to be taken—timber, tiles and garden chairs, a tin bath and a table—and we did without the little things that others took for granted: frozen food and air conditioning, television, bright lights and refrigeration. We cooked on gas and lit the night with kerosene and candles. Grey water went on the garden and peelings fed the worms. Showers were short in summer, a wet cloth rinsed and run through cracks and creases. If the tank ran dry, we’d top it up with drums that Sonny filled at work. Winter rains let us draw the tub and six turns of the kettle warmed it. Cold nights were thick with blankets.

If the council came to check on rumours, they did not move us on. We were not the squatters they might have imagined. We’d lain a slab and dug the long drop properly. Sonny’s wages went on food and fuel and treats—a slab of beer a fortnight, and a bottle of Jack Daniels now and then.

There was always a light on in the Englishwoman’s house. No matter what time of night or early morning. Sonny would have said that was a waste as well, but he was long gone when she got there. I thought she must have trouble sleeping too, and wondered what she worried might creep up on her without it.

It wasn’t hard to make a way along the rocks, with the sea falling away to one side while the bush grew thinner on the other. It wasn’t a cliff, but it was far enough to fall, steep and slippery enough on an outgoing tide to break an arm or worse.

It was dry but not too bright the night I came across Rosemary Lamb. I watched my feet for most of the way until the ground softened and spread enough to let things grow and be grabbed. I looked up then, and there she was only steps in front of me, moon-blanched, at the point of the headland where we could see down to the light of the Englishwoman’s house, and up the coast to the lamp the council lit beside the boat ramp at Milligan, and back into the shelter of Magpie Beach and the lantern that swung on my own front porch.

I might have turned and headed straight back to it and the sanctity of home and all within if she hadn’t already seen me, if it hadn’t seemed to me that she was waiting.

‘Hi,’ she said. It hung between us like something that wanted taping back.

We stood for a while side by side in moonlight and silence, staring out at nothing and everything else.

‘Sometimes I find it hard to sleep,’ she said.

Sometimes I find it hard to sleep. I’ve known nights I wished for death so hard I cried myself unconscious and woke up disappointed.

‘Sometimes I lie awake just wondering where there is apart from this. Do you ever wonder that?’ She turned to face me, and I didn’t know whether to nod a lie or let my head shake honestly because I hadn’t for many years. In the end I only closed my eyes.

After Sonny left, I felt nothing for a long time but a cold vacuum of Doesn’t Matter. I sat on the same rocks and let the tide wash in and over me until I was cold enough to need to move, and some nights I simply moved into the water until little waves that shone white in the moonlight broke over my face, but something always kept me from letting go completely. If I’d been a stronger person, I might have put a gun to the roof of my mouth the way Mrs Carney did, or strung a thick rope from a strong limb, but I could not commit to that. Something held me. Hope, perhaps. Faith. It’s not that I believed in God so much; I think I simply lacked the faithlessness for suicide.

Sergeant Scanlan saved me in the end. I never knew why it was he came to Magpie Beach that afternoon, but he didn’t expect to find me there. ‘I thought you’d have gone home long ago,’ he said. He thought someone would have come for me. Wrapped me in a blanket and taken me away. Taken me home. Taken me back. But no one did. Had I hoped they would?

When he returned, he brought his wife. ‘She’s not all there,’ he whispered to her, which was true enough, because everything I’d ever been had died with Sonny.

‘The first step’s always the hardest,’ Catherine said. She brought with her bread and books and asked me could I use a little money. Would I like a little job?

‘I’m not very good with numbers,’ I told her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re a reader, so I’m guessing you’re pretty good with words.’

‘Catherine’s the librarian,’ Sergeant Scanlan said. There was pride in the palm of the hand that warmed her shoulder, and she blushed; and I nodded as if I didn’t know already, but who else did he think might have stamped the books I borrowed?

He drove me to town the following Thursday, and Catherine met me in the library’s great glass doorway with a hug that rubbed in circles like a mother’s. ‘Time will heal,’ she promised, but it never did.

I drove myself to town the following Thursday, and every Thursday after that, until one morning the car wouldn’t start, and then I caught the bus.

Rosemary was gone when I opened my eyes. I watched her bend and straighten as she slipped across the furthest rocks, and when the black of gum trees had pulled her in, I picked my own way home to Mrs Robinson, and tried to sleep without dreaming.

I saw her often when I walked after that, so that I began to walk to see her and wonder what it was she missed that made her ponder what there was beyond the darkness. I didn’t question why she couldn’t sleep. I’d often seen her with her coffee in the morning, tugging at a custard-coloured shirt, so I guessed that she kept odd hours long before Catherine told me.

‘I hear the Cole Girl’s moved out your way,’ she said, and I must have nodded. ‘Works out at the factory, I hear. Nights, I believe. Four on, four off. Same shift as old Jan Spencer.’

I knew about the hard hats and the hairnets, and later I would learn that Rosemary cleaned and disinfected, and drove a ride-on sweeper with rolling brushes that soaped and scrubbed the factory floor.

As a figure on the headland, she became as familiar as the light that burned in the house on the other side, and I thought about that often—about the Englishwoman and Rosemary Lamb and me—six eyes wide open in the middle of the night. I thought: Here is a way in which we are the same, the three of us. I thought: Here is a way in which I am the same as other people.