The first driver’s name was Carl. He talked non-stop. ‘It’s nice to have a bit of company, especially on the night runs,’ he said, and he went on to tell me all about his wife and children. It was reassuring that he had them, but I wasn’t interested.

With my head up against the glass, nothing but dark and dead kangaroos whizzing by, I felt like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy. She did the same thing—faked her own death to escape—but for her it was more of a running-away than the beginning-again it was going to be for me. I never wanted to be a runaway. I only wanted to be someone else, and Julia Roberts left too many loose ends.

I swapped rides and had some breakfast at a truck stop outside Gladstone, and Brian ran me to Bundaberg, where I knew I had the day to spend, waiting for the Greyhound bus that would take me back up the highway I’d spent half the night and all morning coming down.

It’s not that I didn’t trust Meg not to tell; I just wanted to cover my tracks. I wasn’t sure I’d left enough for them to believe I’d died in the fire. I wasn’t sure there wouldn’t be news stories asking people had they seen me, and if someone had, I wanted to be sure they went off looking in the wrong direction.

I cut my ponytail off in the ladies’ toilet, and I bagged it and pushed it into the sanitary bin. I bought the mildest of prescription reading glasses from a stand beside the CDs and the paperbacks, and when I got into town, I put my cap away and changed into a dress. I didn’t have a lot of clothes with me. Only odd things Eddie wouldn’t miss, and a couple of new things I’d bought in secret and been careful not to show him.

It was colder in Bundaberg than it had been back home, and I found a Kmart and bought a cardigan. I bought other things as well: cloth nappies and pins, baby singlets in different sizes, dummies and more clothes, Panadol and eye drops, antiseptic and antihistamine. I had a long list. (I had to buy another bag.)

At five o’clock, I found a pub that did counter meals and had a television, and I got fish and chips, a diet Coke, and a table on my own. The news came on at six and my heart was pounding like a mallet smashing schnitzel. A ute full of teenagers had rolled over on a farm, killing one and injuring all the others. A woman had been bitten by her neighbour’s dog. And then the factory fire was shown, blazing in the night and smouldering in daylight, and my picture flashed up, but it was only small, set in the corner of the screen behind the newsreader. It didn’t even really look like me. In it I was tanned and smiling. In the mirror above the sink in the bathroom I’d looked greeny grey and as serious as a heart attack.

The bus left just before ten o’clock. There were hours between stops and people curled up against the windows with books and headphones and pillows. I slept on and off, but I was awake when we rumbled by the turn-off to Winifred, and I realised then I must have blinked and missed the one to Maggie Beach.

The bus stopped in Townsville the next afternoon. It wasn’t a long walk to the marina, but once I got there it took me a while to find what I was looking for. There were plenty of people I could have asked, but I knew not to draw attention to myself. Even though she’d written that they would be, I didn’t completely trust that Muddy Duck would be there until I saw it tucked into its little pen, and Mary pegging tea towels to the knee-high wire fence of its rail. She looked excited to see me, waving with both hands, and that was a relief. ‘I’m so glad you came!’ she said, and she took my bags and held out a hand to help me balance as I stepped onto the deck.

‘You’re so big!’ she said, and there was a touch of worry in it.

‘Come aboard! No shoes. Dip your feet!’ Muddy called up from below, and then he was up the ladder and standing there in front of me. There was a bucket of salt water and a towel and I pushed my sneakers off without unlacing them and was embarrassed at the dirt between my toes.

‘Well, didn’t you turn out to be a dark horse?’ Muddy said. I don’t know how happy he was to have me there, but what he was set to do cost more than a favour, and I knew he was happy enough to have the money Mum had transferred the day after I’d called to ask her to.

I’d rung her from the plastic-hooded phone outside the post office.

‘I’m really not in any trouble,’ I’d told her.

‘This’ll come out of your share,’ she’d warned me. My share of whatever she had left to leave us in the end, she meant. I told her it would be all I’d ever want from her, and I think she understood then that I wouldn’t be around to ask for more.

‘So, you’re leaving then.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Does Eddie know?’

‘About the baby? Yes.’

‘About your leaving?’

‘No.’

‘Have you thought the whole thing through?’

I told her I’d done nothing but.

‘And you’re absolutely sure this is what you really want?’

‘I really am.’

‘Then don’t let anyone change your mind.’ I was surprised to hear her say that. I’d been expecting more of a lecture, but she just took Muddy’s banking details and told me it might take her a few days. She was busy at work, but she’d do her best to get to the bank between appointments.

‘Will I be seeing you?’ she asked. In Melbourne? Ever again?

‘No. No, you won’t.’

‘Is there someone else?’ she asked then.

‘No.’

‘But you wouldn’t tell me if there was, would you?’

Though I think I would have.

‘There will be,’ she said, which was kind, I thought. ‘When you’re through this next bit—which will be hard—you will find someone else. You’ll be happy. Happier than you were before—than you are now.’

‘Thank you.’

She was quiet for such a long time that I thought she might have hung up.

‘You’re going to have a very big secret to keep,’ she said eventually. ‘Make sure you keep it properly. Keep it to yourself.’ It was a quieter voice she used, a careful voice. ‘Those people who tell you they’re good at keeping secrets usually aren’t. If you want to put something away completely, you’ll have to forget it’s there. You’ll have to let it be forgotten and let go of anything and everything that reminds you of it, no matter how much it hurts.’ No matter who it hurts. ‘Whatever lie you come up with, stick to it. Even if they doubt you, even if they challenge you, keep to your story, don’t you waver. They’ll believe you in the end if you give them no choice.’

No they won’t.

‘Good luck, love,’ she finished, and there was a wobble in it, but as loose ends go, she’s tied up tight enough.

We sat downstairs around the table in the belly of the little boat. Mary made tea, then a late lunch that might have been an early dinner, and Muddy spoke for a long time, in a low voice. He’d thought of everything, and everything that could possibly go wrong. ‘Keep your head down this afternoon,’ he said, though I had to make sure people saw me leaving the marina, so when I did, I shouted, ‘Safe trip!’ and, ‘I’ll miss you!’ for the benefit of anyone who might have been watching, and then I had hours to kill quietly. There was no question where I’d spend them.

I bought a large tub of buttered popcorn and a Coke, and I took it all in, because I knew it would be a long time before I saw any of it again: the red-plum velvet seats, the squeaky wheel of the screen widening as the lights double-dimmed, the shooting sound and graphics of the Dolby logo. The boy who tore my ticket’s name was Callum. I still have the half he let me keep. ‘Enjoy the movie,’ he said. He didn’t mean it—he couldn’t have cared less—but I did enjoy Nine Months. I laughed louder and harder than anyone else in the theatre, but I probably found it funnier because I was pregnant. I went straight in to Cinema 3 for Waterworld, which—knowing what lay ahead—perhaps I shouldn’t have seen. They weren’t great movies, but they were stories you didn’t have to think too much about, which suited me fine, because there were so many other things on my mind there wouldn’t have been room for something with a complicated plot.

The second movie didn’t finish until late, and the few people I saw on my way back to the marina were heading home, climbing into cars or holding hands and walking with purpose. I would have looked the same to any of them who might have noticed me. I had my own place to be, and I was soon tucked in shadow on the high side of the grassy slope beside the main marina building.

I was comfy enough with my back against a tree. I watched a fishing boat come in and a homeless woman rummage through bins. I saw a couple of cats and heard a bird or a possum fixing itself for a night in the branches up above. I stayed there until three o’clock in the morning.

The gate securing the pontoon was wedged open ever so slightly with a fold of cardboard, and I slipped that into my pocket and let the latch click properly behind me. The boats on either side were shadowy and still, people inside them fast asleep or trying to be, while Muddy waited in the dark cockpit of Muddy Duck. He put a finger to his lips and helped me climb on board. I knew what to do. I knew where to go.

Mary found my hand and squeezed it as I pressed down the narrow steps and into the space they’d shown me the day before. There were no words exchanged, and I was asleep in minutes.

I stayed as quiet as a mouse and away from any windows in the morning. I couldn’t use the toilet while they were away clearing customs, and if anyone came back with them I was to pretend I was there to surprise my friends and wish them a safe trip, but they came back alone.

Friends really did stop by at lunchtime, and I hid in the little matchbox bathroom. ‘It’s only for storage,’ Mary told the woman when she asked to use it, and they walked together to the ablution block at the end of the pontoon instead, sharing stories of squatting over buckets on stormy seas. I sat on the closed toilet seat and puzzled over a crossword while they sat in the cockpit drinking rum and orange juice and balancing salami on their crackers. I could hear them chatting about the passage ahead, winds they might expect, reefs to avoid, sheltered bays they must be sure to visit, and ways to make their stores last longer. I didn’t know yet what a passage was or what they meant by stores.

We cast off when they left. Once we were beyond the shelter of the harbour, Muddy cut the engine and Mary leaned down the steps and banged on the door to let me know I could come out, though I knew I could only move into the main cabin. The coast was clear, but only the coast below deck. We weren’t out of the woods yet, Muddy would keep reminding us.

Their feet slapped on the deck above me. Ropes thumped and winches rattled. Sails flapped wildly then snapped tight and the boat tilted to the side so suddenly that I think I might have cried out. Cushions tumbled onto the floor and when I bent to pick them up, I fell into a seat on the downside of the table. Books strained against bungee cords, fruit and biscuits swung in hammocks, but there wasn’t even a horizon to anchor me. I’d always thought of sailboats bobbing on the ocean, but we were carving through it. The wet noise of it racing past was deafening, and on one side of the boat the portholes seemed to skim the water. On the high side, it was like someone was taking great big fistfuls of sky and just rubbing them on the glass.

I stayed below deck until nightfall with a bucket between my legs.

Mary brought me a tall mug of soup and crackers left over from the afternoon with their friends. She helped me slide into my berth and I slept better than I expected to between the bounce and smack, and Muddy and Mary’s swapping places every few hours between shifts at the helm.

By the next day we were in international waters and I was free to leave the cabin. I was shocked how calm it was up on deck compared to the noise and pitch and racket below. The ocean, a thick and inky blue, whooshed along the hull and pattered gently behind us.

All these words I learned to use: helm and head and port and starboard; galley and salon and sheet and cleat.

We passed days together in the cockpit, chatting and reading. Muddy taught me knots and the basics of sailing. Mary taught me how to live in a home that would not stop moving. In its own way Muddy Duck was like Eddie’s parents’ caravan, and the doll’s house I’d had as a little girl, with a proper place for everything and everything in its place. Outside too big to come inside, and too few things to get lost or forgotten.

I took my turn at the helm every four hours from the second day, and I stopped feeling queasy on the fifth.

I liked the night watches, though I was never really sure what to be watching for. I liked being alone beneath the stars with nothing but the froth of ocean flying by and glittering with phosphorescence. I knew they were tiny animals, but they didn’t look like anything but starlight.

One morning, Mary called me up on deck and there were dolphins off the bow and land on either side of us. Tiny pancake islands covered in palm trees. ‘Louisiades!’ Muddy called out, but I knew where we were already. He’d shown me how to take a reading from the GPS and plot a course with pencil kisses on the chart. He’d taught me how to be of use. ‘She’s crew, not cargo,’ he’d said to Mary that first night, when I was not quite asleep but looked it.

There was always a lure trawling behind us and often we woke each other in the night with the cry of Fish! and all our hands were needed to turn the boat into the wind, drop the mainsail, bring the fish aboard and club it with a winch handle.

Everyone was woken when shifts changed: the whistle of the kettle, the slide and thud of the companionway opening up or closing tight depending on wind and weather. Muddy said passages were to be endured and not enjoyed, but I did enjoy it when the weather was fine. It was the first time I’d ever really felt part of a team, capable and valued, a cog in a machine. They’d called us a team at the factory, but it wasn’t true. We only did the same thing at the same time for the same people and the same amount of money.

For a few days the sky was dirty purple and the ocean grey and broken. Squalls filled the rain tanks and rinsed us of salt. Those nights you couldn’t see the bow for rain and spray, and even in Mary’s waterproof jacket and pants I was soaked through to my underwear in minutes. Rogue waves came in sideways, crashing into the cockpit, and we buckled in turn into the harness in case one washed us overboard.

In the middle came one terrible storm, and Muddy steered us all the way through that. ‘It’s my boat,’ he said. Everything was his. Mary and I hunkered down below, wedged into corners. It was like hiding in the footwell of a roller-coaster car. Even with everything closed up tight, salt water dripped and dribbled in, sloshing down the steps when we slid open the hatch to pass up mugs of coffee. Waves cracked like thunder on the hull, and it felt as though the boat would capsize or break in two at any moment, and I cried, secretly, into a cushion. Muddy worried that the bilge pump would burn out, but it didn’t, and the third day wasn’t as bad as the first, and the day after that was better still, and soon enough there wasn’t a cloud in the sky or a breath of wind and the ocean was as level as concrete.

We opened all the hatches and portholes and pulled all the big cushions up on deck and into the sun to dry, though nothing ever dried completely, everything felt greasy—beds and clothes, plates and papers. It was the salt, Muddy said.

It took us twenty-five days to get to the Philippines. We couldn’t stop at any of the places their friends had told them to be sure to, because of me. We couldn’t take any chances. Muddy was alert if ships appeared on the horizon, and we were to wake him if we saw lights at night or if blips of any size jumped on the radar screen. I wondered sometimes if smuggling was something he’d done before, he seemed to be so good at it.

‘Have you shown anyone the note?’ was the first thing he’d said when we spoke on the phone.

Of course I hadn’t.

‘Make sure you get rid of it.’

That wasn’t hard. I’d twisted it up like a lolly wrapper and pushed it into a can of Coke someone had abandoned on the shelf.

Plan B, he’d written on the slip of paper he’d tucked into the envelope with Mary’s letter. Leave a name and number and wait. There was a phone number and I felt the tight thrill of a window opening. A thin white shoot thrust out of hope I’d thought was dead.

There was no mention of plan B in Mary’s letter which I read out loud to Eddie. She must have known that he’d expect me to, because there was no mention of my letter to her either. All those pages that I’d written late at night while Eddie was in custody. I hadn’t expected anyone to actually read them. I hadn’t thought I’d send the letter, and even when I did, I hadn’t expected a reply. Maybe a short note, a couple of paragraphs telling me to hang in there, things would all work out, but Mary’s letter was long and newsy. She wrote about their journey north, the supermarket where she worked nights stocking shelves, a cut on Muddy’s foot that had turned septic. Eddie hadn’t been interested, but he’d pretended to be.

‘You’re never going to see her again,’ he said. There’s not much point in writing back.

But I did write back. And I called the number and left my name at the office of Townsville marina (which wasn’t where Mary had told me, in her letter, they were staying).

Muddy didn’t beat about the bush. ‘There is a way you can do this,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t easy and it’s permanent.’ He was firm about that. ‘You won’t be able to go back,’ he said. ‘Not for any reason.’

‘I won’t want to,’ I assured him.

We sailed into Pabo Bay early one morning. Roosters were crowing, smoke rising beyond huts that stood in a clearing between a million palm trees. There was a cow on the beach and a couple of dogs. Two men waded through the shallows with a fishing net between them and, on seeing the sailboat, their shouts carried across the morning-misty water.

‘Muddy Mary!’ they shouted. ‘Muddy Mary!’

Children ran to the water’s edge, and while we motored in close and anchored, young men paddled out in dugout canoes. Space was made for us between them, and we were ferried ashore, where we were met by Mary’s parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. It seemed like she belonged to everyone, and they passed her between them with hugs and thanks to God. They shook Muddy’s hand and slapped his shoulders and they smiled at me as they chattered in Tagalog with Mary throwing in English here and there for me to pick up.

‘This is Bella,’ she said.

Eyebrows shot up and women touched their fingers to foreheads and hearts. I knew already that the name I was to take belonged to Mary’s sister first.

‘She’s a teacher,’ Mary lied.

‘If you can read and write, then you can teach,’ Muddy had said. We’d gone over the plan many afternoons. ‘You have your baby, stay for a couple of years, learn the language, be of use, and then you leave as someone else.’ He never said Mary’s dead sister, but it was understood. ‘Play your cards right,’ he was fond of saying.

Mary’s mother took my hands in both of hers. ‘You are welcome here,’ she said. She hadn’t guessed yet that I’d be staying. Mary would tell them later: when we had eaten the feast that was yet to be prepared, when the men had drunk the whisky that I’d brought, and dresses had been divided between aunts. The children would be shooed away and Mary and Muddy and the closest of the family would talk privately while I shared the washing-up with women I would come to know.

A proposition would be made, and they would accept.

‘You will love her,’ Mary promised them.

‘She’ll work,’ Muddy said.

‘It won’t be a free ride,’ he’d warned me many times, but I’d never have expected it to be.

‘It’s not a resort,’ he’d told me in our very first conversation on the phone. ‘It’s bare bones basic.’

‘I can manage that,’ I had assured him.

Muddy and Mary left early the next morning. They’d be back in a fortnight, but it was more important than usual for them to enter the country straight away and properly in Manila, Muddy said. They took a long list from Mary’s parents, and shorter ones from uncles, but no one gave them money except me. What would this new life cost? A good generator, two mattresses, a roll of lino, fuel and food and fishing nets, four dive masks and two spear guns, nails and chainsaw blades and a pair of gumboots.

I stood alone on the cool sand and watched Muddy Duck motor out and past the palm-tipped point. On a distant island, rising through low cloud, was the perfect triangle of an old volcano. I knew that I would learn its name and the language of its people. I would come to know the sounds and smells and tastes of this new place. I would get used to a thinner mattress, bitter coffee, cold water. I would join the songs and prayers and laughter that had filled the evening before. I would grow. I would have my baby surrounded by warm women with capable hands, and I would give her a name all to herself, tie no memory to her for threads to reach back and take root.

I knew it would not be easy every day, that I would need to work and try and there would be tears, and at times I’d wonder whether I had made the right choice.

I knew there’d be no going back to who I’d been before.

I knew that Rosemary Lamb was gone forever.

But I knew, too, that this would be a better life than she had ever dreamed of. A richer life than anything she’d conjured in the middle of the night. It would be fuller, and prouder, for my own dreams hitched behind it.

Sunrise spread before me golden orange, and Muddy Duck cut a clean line, smaller now and in silhouette. I stopped waving and turned towards my new home, where an aunt whose name I could not quite remember was stepping carefully around a net already cast and drawn and laid out for the early morning sun to dry. She came towards me with a smile so wide it raised the apples of her cheeks and crinkled the corners of her eyes.

‘I have something for you,’ she sang softly. ‘Maybe you’re a little bit lonely? Maybe you need a little friend?’

And she handed me the puppy in her arms.

‘You give him a name,’ she said, ‘and you feed him, and you love him, and he will be yours.’

It was the last piece of a Cinderella jigsaw. I took him with tears in my eyes and I knew right away what I would call him.

‘Hello, Richard.’

‘Richard!’ She laughed, but she was not laughing at me. ‘Ooh-la-la, Richard Gere!’ She fanned her face with one hand while the other tapped her chest. ‘Richard Gere!’ she sang again, walking away now with tilting hips and hands still fluttering. Laughter light on the early morning breeze, and shadows long as the sun broke the horizon.