I rode to Milligan with Eddie at nine o’clock.

‘I’ll be right from here,’ he said, pulling up and climbing out at the top of the rise that ran down to the boat ramp. ‘It can be a bit of a tricky turn at the bottom,’ he told me, though we both knew that it wasn’t.

There was a tag on the bail of his new reel, and I reached across and snapped it off.

His friends were down there already. Waiting by their tinnies, rods leaning against their eskies: one, two, three, four in a row at the end of the squat little dock that sat beside the boat ramp like a Mars bar. I imagined they’d jig for squid on the way out. Put their lines in closer to the mangroves.

I watched Eddie trip down the shallow hill, his swag bumping on his back, and I watched them welcome him into the fold, a couple of them looking up and around while he waved loose fingers vaguely in my direction, telling them what? I doubt it was the truth. These were men whose wives were on the P & C; neighbours who brought each other’s bins in and mowed each other’s lawns, and celebrated children’s birthdays at the barbecues on the edge of the lake. It would have cost Eddie to tell them who it was behind his wheel.

I drove the Kingswood back to Magpie Beach, and sat up most of the night smocking a tiny dress, sinking into sleep from time to time but trusting the alarm I’d set to wake me up at half past two. And at half past two, I brushed my hair and teeth and set out to pick up Rosemary.

Half a moon shone grey-white on a dry and empty road. Cicadas whirred in the bush, and night air washed against me as I drove with windows wound right down and the radio playing softly. As the hour rolled over, a request show began, and I turned off the highway and started along the factory road that bordered the south bank of Lake Carney. I slowed right down in case of kangaroos, hoping I might see the ball of another echidna. This was their time, their place.

A woman called in to the radio station, requesting a song played at her wedding, needing to remember the best day since her divorce had come through that morning. Funny the things that stay with us. It was my aunt Mae’s wedding song as well. She and our new uncle Ken swayed barefoot while we all stood in a ragged ring around them. She’d ruined her shoes in the car park, and the hem of her dress was puddle-grey. By the chorus, other couples had begun to dance, and my mother pushed me into the glittery light where my brother caught me and saved me the humiliation of being alone. I suppose she would have danced with our father, if either of them had been sober enough to stand.

Was I singing along when I noticed the patch of sky ahead glowing a dull, bruised orange? For a moment I thought the sun was rising, but it was the wrong direction, too early, and this sunrise flickered like a candle in a draught.

I had just enough time to realise the factory was on fire before a string of cracks cleaved the still night, and flames shot high, cannoning burning chunks towards the stars. Blazing debris splashed into the lake and fell blanket-muffled in the bush. Hard edges rang as they landed on the road ahead.

I pulled the car up like a horse, blood pulsing the length of my neck. The engine stalled, but the radio kept playing.

Smoke matted that purple-gold sky, and clouds of embers drifted to settle like snow. The trees ahead were stark now in silhouette, as fire raged beyond.

I don’t know how long I sat in the flame-licked treacle of that night.

Cars and trucks screamed down the road that ran along the far side of the water. Still mine was the only car on the quiet side of the lake. The town would wake to sirens, people asking their partners groggily, ‘Do you hear that? Must be a big accident somewhere.’

They always came quietly when they came to us in the night, their blues and reds colouring the rubble on the front grass like splats of paint. If a man beating his family was worth waking a neighbourhood, then ours would never have slept.

Spot fires sprang up around me, trees crisp-crackled and collapsed in clouds of flaming dust, and then I saw her jogging along the verge towards me. There was no doubting it was Rosemary. One hand pressed against a stitch in her side, while the other supported her stomach, and with no arms free to swing for balance, her foot slipped on the verge every couple of strides, and the bag on her back threatened to push her headfirst into the ditch.

I was so shocked that I didn’t even start the engine. She had to run all the way to the passenger-side door.

‘Let’s go,’ she panted.

Her mouth was bleeding, but still I didn’t move right away. It was all I could do to speak, and I’m sure it was barely a whisper.

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘I am,’ she said, and she smiled weakly. Two of her teeth were missing. Her lip was quivering. Her hands were shaking. ‘Meg, we have to go now. Please.’

I turned the key with clumsy fingers and dragged the Kingswood into a three-maybe-more-point turn.

Rosemary reached across and killed the headlights. ‘Until we get onto the highway,’ she said. She shrugged the pack from her back and dropped it in the footwell, and she slid right down on the seat, bracing herself on her elbows and tilting her chin to get her breath back.

I knew she wasn’t coming home, but still I hoped all of that short and darkened distance to the highway, where I snapped the headlights on and the indicator down. She reached over for the second time and flicked it up, turning us right, away from Magpie Beach, away from Winifred and Carney County. South, towards Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and the rest of the world.

‘Please, Meg,’ she said. ‘This is the only way.’

While I drove, Rosemary took a zip-lock bag from the glove box and pressed a wad of sterile gauze into her mouth. Then she threw her bag into the back seat and climbed after it. She pulled a roll of banknotes out of her sock, swapped her boots for sneakers and the custard-coloured top for a Rolling Stones t-shirt I’d never seen her wear. She tucked her ponytail into a plain grey cap.

‘Where will you go?’ I asked.

She thought about telling me. It was in the pause that hung in the dark space between us in the time it took her to answer, but, ‘I’ll be okay,’ is all she said.

‘If you need—’ I stumbled on my words like I hadn’t for a long time.

‘I know,’ she interrupted, with a hand on the back of my seat. Perhaps she was reaching for my shoulder. ‘I won’t be coming back, Meg,’ she said softly. ‘You understand.’ It wasn’t a question. It didn’t need to be.

The odd car lit us up coming the other way, and when it did, she dipped out of sight. Her shoulder and chin shone in the rear-view mirror, in the sliding white, like a side of bacon whipping through Tom’s—now Eddie’s—slicer.

‘Say when,’ Tom used to say, lifting a slice off the scales before he pushed the button, and winking his good eye. I didn’t know what Eddie did. I hadn’t been in for a long time.

Those were the days, my grandmother would have said. It’s what Lily used to say when she remembered Calcutt, but they were days I didn’t really cherish at the time. Slipping the bacon in its pearly paper packet into my basket, and unwrapping it at home to lay slice by smooth, pink slice in a pan for a man I loved with all my heart and to whom I owed everything. Happy isn’t enough. We should cherish more.

I wished Eddie upriver with a fish on his line, and a dripping beer, and two or three more hours before his sky caved in.

At five o’clock Rosemary sat up and busied herself checking and re-checking the seat and floor to make sure nothing of her was forgotten. She reached forward then and hung a thin chain lightly round my neck, lifting my hair to clasp it carefully.

‘I was waiting for your birthday,’ she said, ‘but we’ve been friends more than a year now, so I must have missed it.’

Friends.

I didn’t thank her. I couldn’t, but I didn’t need to, and I didn’t need to glance down to know it was a charm I’d touched at the market in Theodore. A moonstone set in a hammered silver sun.

I would have driven her anywhere, but she asked me shortly after to pull over.

There are so many things I wish I’d told her in that last hour and a half, and in the ten minutes we spent together on the highway’s dewy verge. Words that haunted me in the sleepless weeks that followed, but which I couldn’t find in the grey light of that early morning, though I scratched and pulled and tried so hard to press sentences together.

I cherish the memory of her small hand in mine as we waited for lights to find us; sweet expectation on her face in the swoop of cars that didn’t stop; the shadow of her thumb passing over the tarmac like a bird.

It was a semitrailer that finally slowed to pick her up. It took a lot of road to stop completely, so she had to run as best she could to catch up and climb in. The hug we shared was years too short and our goodbyes spilled shallowly on the grass.

‘Your turn next,’ she shouted as she pulled herself up into the cab. She hung there from the handle, one foot inside and out of sight already, while the other dangled mid-step, its lace undone.

My turn to leave, she meant. Magpie Beach and everything that kept me there, and everything I’d be as long as I stayed.

I would have left right then and there. I would have run and climbed up and into the cab beside her if only she’d beckoned. But she just waved, and the heavy door slammed shut behind her, and the semi hissed and revved and eased itself back on its way, and I watched its red tail-lights grow smaller and smaller and finally disappear completely, swallowed by distance or a dip in the road, and Rosemary Lamb was gone.