Beth

I watch the sunset mark its gradations on the water tank, a thousand versions of bronze. I had to walk up here to call Nate, reception poor in the house, as it tends to be when it’s blowing, as if the wind can stand no other voice than its own. I step out from behind the shelter afforded by the tank, and the wind sprays sand against my boots and the legs of my jeans. As a child, I imagined the desert as a shifty nomad – a thing on the move – especially as my mother repeatedly warned me it was coming and we should do everything to hold it back. She’d show me pictures of Saharan towns buried beneath dunes, with only their chimneys visible, like snorkels across the surface of a sea. And there was another photo, more local, of two women in Depression-era dresses standing either side of a tall mallee root. One of the women had a hat on and was barefoot, her feet half-buried in sand, which always struck me as strange. The other stared straight down the barrel of the camera, as if attempting to see into the future and all the questions it held. In the picture, the root ball rises about a metre above their heads. Not because they’d dug it up, but because where they stood was metres below where the surface of the land had once been, before the clear-felling of mallee removed all anchors and the topsoil blew away. My mother had shown me the photo as a lesson in the treachery of the land, never expecting that over time it would teach me the opposite. The horror captured in that image was man-made.

From up here I can get a broader view of the desert stretching to the west. Unlike the vast Saharan sand seas, our desert is a small one. At its widest point, with a good four-wheel drive, you can cross it in a day. Even less from north to south. But as every kid who grows up on a farm knows, you can drown in a small dam. And once our desert was the bed of a great inland sea. The year we studied the Cretaceous period in school, some afternoons I’d stand amid the swaying wheat on our property and try to see across time to all the ways this land had ever appeared. Hands shielding my eyes, I’d squint until the shapes blurred and frayed and suggested other eras. The chop of land-bound waves, giant plesiosaurs swimming beneath. Forests roamed by heavy-footed megafauna. Native grasslands so vast that the curvature of the earth couldn’t contain them. Not satisfied, I extended my terrain and began making regular forays into the desert adjacent to our property. In search of other times, or no time. A release from the chronology that bound me. Even then, I sensed that we were kidding ourselves. That what’s required, if we’re to have any chance in this world, is an awareness of deep time.

The wind follows me down the rise, pulls at the White Horehound that’s spread from a neighbour’s property, a rampant weed. Back at the house, the girl is curled up on the old couch that lives on the verandah. Its green corduroy busting at the seams, that couch is where I so often watch the passage of the world – at least, the microcosmic portion of it that has become my academy, place of veneration, firming ground. Her head’s resting on a faded silk cushion I brought back years ago from a holiday in Thailand, the descending light burnishing her skin the gold of a Silky Bushpea.

‘Hey, let’s get you inside,’ I say.

The girl is slow to get up. Dragging her feet, she follows me to my old room. I pull back the doona and gesture for her to get in bed. She doesn’t resist, only studies my face like she’s trying to decide whether I might eat her in her sleep. We will raise children on fairytales. And what do I know of the places where she’s lain in the nights before her arrival? Or who or what has watched over her, waiting for the moment she relinquished consciousness.

From the doorway, I do the same, her eyes trembling shut despite her best efforts, the slow in and out of her breath finally settling into a purr. Then I leave her to whatever dreams are waiting for her.

The possum shifts its sleeping position in the wall and has a good scratch. I check my phone: 10.45, but still no sign of Nate. In a frame nailed to the kitchen wall by the window, a ten-year-old version of me smiles back from a faded photo of my family in Mungo National Park, the eroded lunettes known as the Walls of China looming behind us like sandy flames. We rarely took holidays, as the farm couldn’t be left to itself. On the few occasions we managed to, my father drove us further inland. He was suspicious of the coast, where the country gave itself over to water rather than the plains on which he and my brother and I had grown up, and two generations of Mathers before that. My mother was from Queensland, where everything dripped and abundance threatened, though not in the same way scarcity does. Whenever she spoke about her birthplace, her lips would shine as if the wet memory of it had overcome her body and exited via her mouth.

Headlights bounce along the driveway and I race to open the door. Nate comes up the verandah steps, huddled against the cold, the night mineral clear. His shoulders are bulky in his wool jacket, his dark curls boyish as always and not befitting a barkeep who has to wrangle all manner of creatures, Nate the kind who, caught in a battle, would outwit the generals on both sides and find a way to end it without bloodshed.

He shrugs off his jacket, a mix of ozone and the mustiness of kegs filling the room.

‘How you doing?’ he asks.

‘All right, I guess. A bit weirded out. Not every day a kid turns up on your doorstep.’

He looks past me and rakes his fingers through his hair.

‘She’s asleep in my old room,’ I tell him. ‘Has been for a few hours now.’

‘Can I see her?’

‘Follow me.’

In the contained space of the hallway, Nate’s boots sound too loud. I halt in front of the door with my ghost name, suddenly reluctant to expose her to another human being, my faith in their capacity to act in the interest of anyone but themselves at an all-time low. But this is Nate. The one I hash out the state of the world with, when human logic seems to have reached its limit.

‘Beth?’ Nate shifts his weight, his eyes widening. No doubt this is bringing up stuff about Lil’s death.

‘I’ll go first,’ I say, turning the handle slowly.

The girl’s face protrudes from the covers, silvered by the moonlight coming through the window. Outside, the wild-sown Barley Grass is pale and tugged by the wind. And, beyond – the desert and its inhabitants, nightbirds and marsupials gearing up for hours of foraging and predation. Did they take care of her? Do they want her back?

Her small body rises and falls beneath the doona, rises and falls till the room breathes with her, the grass, the moon. Beside me, Nate hunches his shoulders forward as if protecting a small space in front of his chest.

‘She looks so … vulnerable,’ he whispers.

The girl stirs.

I nod towards the hallway. Nate follows me out, turns to take another look, the girl rolling over, dark hair caught on her features like seaweed. The whole room could be underwater, the ocean I dreamt of – before I saw the true one – still present in this room. I close the door behind us.

‘There’s a strength to her,’ I say, remembering how she’d walked barefoot across the rough gravel to the house without so much as flinching. ‘Hard to explain.’

‘You sure you don’t want to call Jesse? If a kid’s gone missing in the area, he’d be one of the first to know.’

‘When I mentioned ringing the police, she reacted in a way that made clear it’s not an option. Besides, you know my views on the constabulary.’

‘Yes, but her family must be worried sick. If it was me …’ Nate looks back towards the door and sucks air between his teeth.

‘You okay?’ I ask him.

‘Sure.’

He’s lying, but who am I to call him out? The sole benefit of pain, at least the grieving kind, is that it can be kept private. Besides, Nate always talks when he’s ready.

‘Something tells me a good home is not part of this story. She looks better now than when she first got here. She was wearing a man’s shirt. Don’t know, it could mean nothing. And there’s a fresh scar on her forearm.’

I don’t mention the blood on her shirt. It was probably just from the scratch on her collarbone – a run-in with a branch in the desert – but might make him more insistent about handing her over.

‘What are you going to do, then?’ he asks.

‘Not sure. Sleep on it? Maybe she’ll wake in the morning and tell me everything, mystery solved, and I’ll have saved her a night in a cell, or wherever they stick kids like her.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

‘You reckon, yeah? Thanks, Nate. I really appreciate you coming out here this late. The whole thing’s kind of thrown me.’

He leans against the wall. The weather of his face shifts.

‘Tell me something untrue,’ he says, calling on a phrase we coined one evening on my verandah after a long discussion about the state of the nation, and just enough gin. A night when truth seemed slipperier than its counterpart.

‘Safe as houses,’ I reply.

He nods in assent – bricks and mortar might be the best investment, but who knows what goes on inside them. Nate tugs at a whisker in his chin. He’s mulling over something. Maybe the same thing I am. Why would she go – alone, barefoot, without water – into the desert, terrain that takes special knowledge to survive? She must’ve been desperate, fleeing, or wits not intact.

And a question that’s been tracking me since I first saw her searching for water among the Tinsel Lily. How is her arrival linked to that feeling I had just before dawn?

A premonition of change.