‘You know Norman could have stayed here,’ Eddie said.

‘There’s a nurse who comes,’ Lily told him. She’d told us all, but if Eddie believed her, I’m sure he was the only one.

I suppose she left Norman home alone with his radio. We knew he liked to listen to the BBC World Service. It was one of the few things she ever told us about him, and I suppose she left him food set on plates with plastic wrap and post-it notes. It was only for two days, but I worried at the ocean being where it was, a stumble away from a sliding door, a trip from a step. ‘He’s a clumsy thing,’ she’d told us many times. Bruises bloomed like ink in water beneath the flare of his shirtsleeves and trouser legs. He might not have been the man she married, but he could turn a key, lie for days unnoticed.

‘He could’ve stayed here,’ Eddie said again.

Lily nodded. ‘Maybe next time.’ But it was plain as crackers she didn’t want the two of them together anymore.

Eddie would not take the track to check on Norman. He would spend the weekend in his shed and eat alone. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he assured Rosemary, when she wondered, but it was clear he wasn’t feeling it. He was disappointed and embarrassed and worried at the why-he-wasn’t-going, which was heating up like soup.

We left just before light on the Saturday morning. Eddie stood in his open dressing-gown. Not shy to show his underpants and the high whites of his legs. The trailer had been packed, lashed and hitched the night before, and it was a Sunday market so there was no need for us to set off so soon, but Rosemary wanted to miss the traffic.

Eddie had laughed. ‘What traffic?’

‘We want to get a good start,’ she’d told him, but that wasn’t it. Rosemary wasn’t one to chase to get somewhere. ‘We’ll stop and have a proper breakfast on the way,’ she’d told Lily and me, but that wasn’t it either. There was more to Rosemary’s having volunteered to take the horses, and she would tell us when she was ready.

We left in that short time just before the birds wake, when the trill of night dulls, and the day will come and water will boil but not just yet. The streetlight at the end of the lane snapped off as we turned out onto the highway, and Rosemary slid Crowded House into the slit mouth of the CD player. It wasn’t the first time she’d played it, and she wasn’t the first person I’d heard sing along.

I remembered the day that Sonny and I drove up from Brisbane. I remembered the tapes we played and the things we talked about. Sonny sang while he drove, and I slept while he sang, and we pulled off the road every now and then to stretch our legs and eat peanut butter bread rolls and make tea.

‘This is our fresh start,’ he told me, and I believed him, and it was. ‘You don’t have to worry about anything,’ he said. ‘Leave it all to me.’

In thirteen years, I’d not been further south than the river mouth of Guilder, and when we passed the turn-off something twisted in the highest part of my stomach. I thought of Mrs Robinson and of night falling without me, darkening the windows and the lip around the caravan’s flapping door. I imagined a stranger whispering a way through my things—fingers sticky on my kitchen counter—and I broke out in a sweat. I wound the window down a crack and rested my head on the cool cold of the glass.

Rosemary woke me after two hours, and I expected then to take the wheel and the seat she’d left warm, but we were parked along three kerbside bays on a city street. Lily was sitting rod-straight with her handbag on her lap and her lips pursed tight, straining to read the small print on the window that reflected the length of the Kingswood, and the tarp-strapped trailer that stretched behind us.

‘It doesn’t look much like a cafe,’ she said, knowing full well it wasn’t. Beneath the tick of the engine cooling down there was a rattle to her chest I hadn’t heard before.

Rosemary measured her breath. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, and two raindrops plopped on the windscreen and startled us all. We should have congratulated her but we didn’t, because there was more coming. There was thunder in the distance, the light rumble that comes before a deeper crack and yawn. Purple clouds were rolling in.

Lily began nodding like a dog on a dashboard. She undid her seatbelt and shuffled across the back seat and I heard her nails tapping the window behind me, pointing to the place that was not, and had never been, a cafe. The wide venetian blinds were closed, but strands of pot plant poked between the slats and their inside edges were yellow-lit. Names and letters were embossed in gold beside the door, where days and times were printed clearly.

‘It says they’re closed Saturdays,’ Lily said.

‘They open specially. Once a month. There’s a doctor comes from Brisbane.’

‘Because the ones up here won’t do it, will they?’ Lily was blunt. ‘Why don’t you want it? Do you think he did it?’

‘Did what?’

‘The girl.’ Lily never said her name.

‘Jessie Else?’ Rosemary’s eyes were saucer-wide but then they softened. ‘It’s not that,’ she said (which wasn’t no). ‘It’s just, I don’t think I want to stay.’ She looked at me when she said it. Telling Nanna you don’t like her meatballs. She was leaving Magpie Beach, leaving Eddie, leaving us all.

Rain had begun to patter on the roof, louder on the tarp covering the trailer.

Lily slid back to her original spot behind Rosemary, and set her handbag on the seat beside her. She took out a crossword and a pen. ‘Probably for the best then,’ she said. ‘But I’ll wait here in the car, if you don’t mind.’