MY FATHER KNEW HOW to remove the evil eye, a knowledge that was gifted to him by his mother. There were some who accused my yiayia of being a witch. I think that such a slur arises from the jealousy and suspicion which gives way to that most detrimental and poisonous of devastations in village life: gossip. Gossip is fear and gossip is judgement, and it is also that ruthless banishment from community and honour with which the outsider or the rebel or the dreamer is punished for their transgressions. There was an element of the magical about my father, in his ability to return to an antediluvian world. For indeed, all peasant and village lore and magic is in that sense existing before the Great Flood, in which—we are told in ancient Hebrew apocrypha—not only sinful men and women were drowned in God’s wrath but also the titans and goblins and sprites and centaurs and changelings of all the ancient worlds. A friend or neighbour would knock on our door, sometimes even in the middle of the night if their anguish was acute, and my mother would put the briki on the stove, start brewing coffee, while my father would ask our guest for a piece of cloth they had been carrying with them all day, maybe a handkerchief, a shawl; once I saw a man unbutton his shirt, lay it carefully over the back of the kitchen chair and start removing his singlet, apologising shyly to my mother as he did so. If the visitor had no cloth to give, then my father or my mother would hand over a kitchen towel and the woman or the man or child would drape the towel over their shoulders and wait; we would all wait until my father declared that enough time had passed—an understanding of the temporal nature of the spirit world comprehensible only to himself—and then he would take the handkerchief or shawl, singlet or kitchen towel, lay it across his knee, mark a measure with his thumb and extended little finger, as if he were a tailor chalking his fabric, and then he would begin his incantation. I recognised a few words—the calling to the Panayia, the plea to Her son—but all the other words were unfathomable to me; and it is in this way that I perceived, even at a young age, that they were rooted in a language much more ancient than those which spoke the stories and words of the Bible. Often, the guest would thank my father profusely after this incantation, offer a God Bless to my mother, tousle my hair and leave. Other times, if the guest’s pain was so profound, their mood so dark and grim that one could sense it in the house—as if by straining my ears I could hear the shallow and unhappy breaths of that spirit; and surely, by the raising of the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck, by the cold flush of the perspiration on my skin, I could detect the physical being of such despair—my mother would announce, ‘The viper has entered the house.’ And at such times, it would mean that my father would have to repeat his rites one more time or a third time or even a fourth or fifth time, until finally he himself was dripping in sweat and his own breathing was rapid and hoarse, for he was fighting with the beast, wrestling with that serpent, until finally, roaring out the Holy Mother’s name one last time, he pronounced that She had conquered. And we all felt it, the furious retreat, the whipping of its tail in its fury, as the snake slithered out of the body of the poor possessed woman or man or child and out of the house. The relief was such that often we would all break out in laughter.

Nostalgia blinds us to grief. I am writing a largely merry recollection of childhood. It was not always so, and certainly not so for the adults who I make characters in my imagination. Yet it was not a blighted childhood, not the misery of some. The peasant world has secret routes and highways across the seven continents, is a form of protection even when one has to wrench oneself from it, flee it to escape the more prosaic and earthbound terrors of gossip and small-mindedness. Those gifts of family and heritage stick to you; and if you do not reject them wholesale in order to enter modernity (for myself the choice was preordained by the force of my desire, and it is why desire is the pivot of all my obsession, of all my revolutions; and even that arising was preternatural, was not necessarily secured to reason: the whiff, the reeking perfume of Stavros’s scent as he raised his arm and I smelt his sweat), then they are there to guide you even in the squall of the most unmooring of tempests or the most precipitous of narrow paths along towering cliffs. I did not understand my father’s spells, but I memorised phrases and I used them to emerge from the fog of narcotic senselessness, of moments when I came closest to annihilation. They are gifts forgotten in the exodus from the village to the city, and I doubt they can extend past the third generation: the clamour of the urban is too loud, too fast, who can hear within it? In some Scandinavian or Frankish or Saxon past, Paul and his brother Andy, their mother and their grandfather would have had peasant roots such as mine. Paul divined the menace, saw how it possessed and doomed his brother. He had no knowledge to combat it. Such knowledge had long been forsaken, forgotten and condemned as nonsense. And the consequences are lives that are blasted.

My father entered the netherworld through his knowledge, and through his intuition. His ministering for me, his care, allows me to do the same. A different route and possibly a different mirror. But the netherworld, nevertheless.

I need to return home. Simon’s trepidation was clear in the measured remoteness I heard in his voice. In the very early days of our falling in love, I had misinterpreted it as emotional reticence, but I had come to understand that it was a necessary protection for himself, a means of guarding against the intensity of emotions, when they come to overwhelm us: his speaking distantly meant that, as if by a supreme effort of will, he was challenging his fears, denying them ground to gain root. And in that strange yet comforting manner by which habits and tics and mannerisms are transmitted in a couple—that prosaic occurrence, say, of finishing each other’s sentences or finding oneself gradually imbued with the anxiety of their phobia (Simon now has a trepidation of reptiles he never felt before he met me, and my breath now shortens when I find myself in a crowded lift or in the middle of a dense mob)—I no longer am aggrieved or made defensive by his reserve at such a moment. Instead, I understand that these are precisely the times he requires comfort. ‘Mate,’ I said, ‘I’ll come home. I have a few things to finish off tomorrow and then I’ll leave first thing Thursday morning.’

His relief now was no longer guarded.

‘Thanks, Chris,’ he said quietly. ‘I miss you. I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

As soon as I hung up, I did something which I have not done since I came to this idyll by the ocean: I fired up the laptop and started to scroll through the information feed of the world. For a good hour I was lost in unending images and words, the distraught and outraged and disturbing interpretations and reflections on what had occurred.

At first, this immersion was sobering. The stark and shocking abruptness of the violence; and then, as with the unravelling of a piece of wool from an old jumper, the picking of one strand of yarn that spirals and unthreads and in no time results in a disorderly spool, so that finding the original thread becomes impossible, the misfortune of the carnage is lost in commentary—partisan, threatening and galvanising—that attempts to make sense of what is truly and ultimately insensible: the cruelty that we humans are capable of; such an impossible task, to find the original thread of chaos. And the equally human and therefore understandable, if unattainable, desire to qualify the terror by comparison. Is it worse than the desperate citizens of a besieged city running the gauntlet of sniper fire in order to secure a meal? Is it equal to the apocalypse inaugurated by two planes flying into the centre of the world’s tallest buildings? Will it humble us as did the last pandemic?

Lost in the vortex myself, I could imagine Simon at home, or with our friends or families, all watching the screen, shouting over each other, cradling each other in their fear, trying to explain it to the young children, arguments already emerging, online and certainly already between ourselves, arguments of economics and justice and history which, already, even within twenty-four hours of the cataclysm, are hardening into sureties and certainties, are now circulating in a feverish whirl of electronic activity in the hive of the internet, so that already Economics and Justice and History become emboldened, shield and armour, as do Compassion and Equality and Liberty, brandished as weapons, lances held high in the air to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. I click from looking through that mirror that is the computer screen into which one can only look darkly, for there are no guides—no Virgil, no Eurydice, no Heurtebise—and I log on to my email. There are requests, polite but insistent, enquiring if I could immediately, straight away, is it possible to have it filed by tomorrow, wanting my opinion, my perspective, my words on what has just occurred. None of this needs more words. And with that enlightenment, I switch off the computer.

My father did not pass on his ancient knowledge to me; instead, he passed it to my brother, who has sharper instincts than do I. My brother can intuit the danger in this world in a way that I cannot. What I can do, a different gift my father gave to me, arising from my observation of him being still in his garden—for even when hoeing and digging and planting and watering he was quiet and still—is sit in the silence. I light a camphor coil to ward off the mosquitoes. On the deck, I sit and close my eyes and give myself over to the silence.

No, not silence: the world is never mere silence; it is always music and song. The chatter of two lorikeets that have alighted on the deck’s railing, their insistent chirping sounding belligerent, as if they are a couple in querulous disagreement; and through the trees, the raucous squawk of a cockatoo, answered by another from somewhere behind the house. The ocean too, with its constant and reassuring pulse, is a faint choral that never ends, never disappears. There are also human sounds: the clunking of the truck wheels as they cross the bridge; the buzzing drone of a lawn mower; the muted electronic percussive beats emitting from the car speakers of maintenance men working on a street below; and the intermittent barks, sharp and quick, of a dog, as if it keeps guard between the borders of the natural and the human-made world, its nature divided between the untamed of the first and the domesticity of the latter. And it is that snapping yelp of the dog that pierces my consciousness and I shake my head, come to, as if I have been awoken from sleep. I had disappeared into the sound. The greens and blues and greys and whites and blacks, the buds of a hydrangea in the garden next door, the flush of yellow on the skins of the fruit hanging on the lemon tree.

Knowing that I must return home, all I want is to plunge into the ocean. And as I kick off my runners, pull off my socks, unbuckle my belt and fling my jeans on the bed, strip off my jocks and put on my bathers, I realise that even within a matter of a week—has it only been eight days since I arrived here?—I have fallen into rituals. This undressing, the careful preparation of the bag I will take with me to the beach; my book, my reading glasses and my sunglasses, the bottle of sunscreen; and then there is the buckling of my sandals, going back out to the deck, pulling the beach towel from the railing and shaking it over the garden below, the fine grit of sand and salt forming an almost translucent vapour that sinks over the rosebushes and shrubs. I fling the towel over my shoulder, lock the back door and head to the car. Only as I turn the key in the ignition do I recall some of the images I had glimpsed on the computer screen, and I wince at the memory. I had forgotten all about the most recent calamity visiting the world in the retreat into nature’s song and music. Then, as I turn right at the end of the street, and as the inlet appears at the bottom of the hill, the cloud that has been placidly sitting across the face of the sun chooses at this very moment to divide, to become two formidable forms in the sky, their glacial separation completed precisely as I make the turn so that on either end it is as if their fingers are touching then slipping away from each other: and it is now, through the ensuing chasm, that the sun is victorious, and the inlet glistens and flickers as if it is a lake of diamond, and the sight overwhelms and is rapturous and I release a gasp. The terrible injustice of nature, equal part beauty and equal part cruelty, and so oblivious to tragedy: I am defeated and conquered, and I surrender to its beauty. All I can experience is joy.

Every writer of fiction is selfish. It is one of the first choices we make, when we submit to the claims of our vocation. This time, knowing that I no longer had the luxury of another week to explore the surrounding coast, I head north out of town, thirty or so kilometres, to an idyllic bay Simon and I had discovered on a previous holiday. It is a section of a narrow peninsula bordered on the north by a long rocky expanse of cliffs, desolate, battered by the ferocity of the southern Pacific Ocean, and on the south by silt estuaries where a river rushes down from the mountain and empties into the sea. Almost equidistant between the two ends there is a tiny cove, a hull of soft, dazzling white sand, and when the sun is out, the sapphire waters are clear and safe. We were here in the height of summer one year and for most of the day we were the only people on the beach. Just before we left, a young surfer arrived, waving to us as he passed by. I recall him still, the eagerness with which, his board under his arm, he ran into the waters; the fine dash of him as he lay on the board and paddled beyond the breakers.

I park the car on the side of the road. There is no one else here. I hurry down to the beach and plunge into the water.

After drying myself, I spread out the towel, sit cross-legged on it and look out to sea. The swim was invigorating. The sun is already beginning to warm me up, and as the last drops of water evaporate, there is a slow flush of heat tangible just under my skin. I know I should search in my bag for the sunscreen, yet I resist that obligation, the rebelliousness of that opposition striking me as youthful. And with that realisation—inhaling the bracing salt-crusted air, my lungs expanding and contracting effortlessly and with ferocious appetite, the tautness of the muscles on my arms and along my calves still distended from the efforts of my strokes in challenging the pummelling, advancing tide—for the smallest of infractions of the rationality and laws of space and time, it is not myself who is sitting on the beach, exhausted but elated, intoxicated by his battle with the waves. Rather, I am the young surfer, and mine is his body: his straight back; the square bulk of his chest and torso, tapering to the slim, almost feminine camber of his hips; those neat cups of his buttocks, no fat visible under the tight cling of his swimmers; the long equine length and nimble sprint of his slender legs as he ran to meet the waves. Then I look down. To the cluster of grey thatch on my chest, the rolls of my belly, the solid and pale slab of thigh revealed through the gape of my shorts; and as if my corporeal self chooses to claim victory over my mental self in that brusque awareness—that I am not young, that I am this old man sitting on the beach—all visions of the young surfer disappear, time and space return to their authority and the sun’s rays stab my skin. Wearily, I reach into my bag for the sunscreen.

In turning to reach my lower back, a contortion that demands some dexterity and which I accomplish, but with an old fella’s embarrassing snort and grunt—and on that beach, alone, I giggle at myself for the outlandishness of the joy in releasing an inelegant sound—I chance to look away from the sea and up the beach to the road where I have parked the car. And I notice what I don’t believe pricked my consciousness before: the scorched thin trunks of the she-oaks. Soot clings to the bark, yet that layer is being shed, as if the trees are sloughing off the violent memories of the fires that so recently ravaged these forests, this coast, this land; and instead, emerging in their new skins of mottled brunette and silver bark, they are releasing their first green buds among the sharp bristles of their leaves. By next summer, the last of the burnt epidermis will be gone. The evidence erased. The memory submerged.

Some writers wish to howl. They will demand testimonies and they believe they must uncover the past. Some writers wish to mourn. They will seek justice and they will atone. Some writers want to forget. They will write stories set before the fires, or conjure fantasies occurring in worlds that are existent long after. I no longer have the confidence to apportion blame and I no longer have lust for either punishment or self-flagellation. I offer you this image of the trees, vital and vigorous in their rebirth. I turn back to gaze upon the ocean, force myself to recall the images on the screen, the anxiety in my lover’s voice, the truth that the world of humans is again being bedevilled by terror and venality and crisis; yet the reflection doesn’t even last half a breath, for the sea dashes and crashes and ripples along the pure white sand of the beach, and there is an eagle soaring up high over the water, hovering, searching the deeps for the silver flash of a fish’s scales; and the sun’s heart remains beating and this tide has been surging and abating, like the most diligent and disciplined of sculptors, forging and chiselling and forming this coast for an eternity, and it will continue to do so long after the ages of testimony and uncovering, the eras of justice and atonement and even the centuries of forgetting are gone.

It is to this coast that Paul returns. He too has passed through a mirror, and it is both reflection and refraction. For it must be that the sculptor of this coast is also the blacksmith who has hammered and wrought the surfaces where the Pacific Ocean kisses and tumbles into, shatters and sledges the American coast. That is the mirror. The deflection in the image, what he saw in his encounters in that world, was a life lived in shadow and darkness; a life that would have been his if he had remained. If he had not found the succour and grace and understanding of Jenna; if they had not been blessed by the sturdiness and rightness and gentleness of their son, Neal.

•

Drowsily, Paul presses the screen to retrieve the flight map. The continent’s eastern contours come into view. And with that glimpse of Australia’s outline, he starts to cry. It is not an exaggerated form of grief—no convulsions, nor does he moan—but he is grateful for Conrad’s generosity, that he is isolated in the lavish comfort of the reclining business-class seat. Across the aisle a young woman is asleep; she has her blanket pulled up to her chin and is wearing the black cotton eye mask supplied by the airline. Her snores are quiet, of a purring faintness that suggests a feline pliability and grace. Even if she had been awake, the luxuriant distance afforded by the seating would most probably have made her oblivious to Paul’s muted anguish: he has the top of his hoodie dropped low over his brow and nose, his body is curled into itself. It is not that he is ashamed of his sorrow; but the long years of circumspection and secrecy over his life and all that he holds dear make him wary, distrustful of broadcasting emotion.

He pushes back the hood from his face, wipes his eyes, looks through the window. In less than two hours they will be arriving in Brisbane. From behind the drawn curtains of the cabin he can hear the clinking of cutlery, the rattle of the food and drink carts as they are stacked with trays.

There is a yawn, long and languid. The young woman across from him is stretching out her arms. She then drops them to her side, nimbly raises the blanket and draws her hands within the folds. Her snores resume.

It was her hands that had broken Paul’s heart. They are long, with tapered fingers, her skin that purple black that is defiantly, indisputably African. This young woman is svelte, has nothing of Cynthia’s plumpness, and Cynthia’s skin is lighter, with the sweetness and shine of maple syrup. And yet, those fingers: he remembers Cynthia’s hands holding his face as she was kissing him, the warmth of those fingers, the sharpness of those long nails as they softly prodded his cheeks. It was in this association, made lazily, turning from the panorama of the universe outside the aeroplane’s window to glance casually at the passenger across from him, seeing that she had fallen asleep and then noticing her hands, struck by that one and only resemblance to Cynthia, and from that reminder returned to the ugliness and squalor of their grandfather’s house—it would only ever be their fucking grandfather’s house!—and also then recognising the distance between the sleeping woman, flying business class, a gleaming diamond ring on her finger, that cruel distance of money and advantage that cleaves the world, the sharpest of blades, that he remembered smashing his brother’s phone, and he reflected on the quagmire that is addiction and narcosis and how he must never ever return to it; recalled too the desperate longing for companionship that he gleaned looking across to Andy’s face, and so of the ruthlessness and rightness of the escapes he had made. And he thought too of the child in Cynthia’s womb and how it was coming into the world; and next to him, the beautiful hand of a sleeping young woman as they both flew like birds, like gods, above the peaceful sea: that is how the tears had begun.

He feels blanched, his body tingles with sleeplessness, as he navigates the rituals of disembarkation. He once more gives a silent thanks to Conrad as an immigration official glances at his ticket and politely ushers him into the express lane. Paul turns to look back at the queue of weary economy travellers shuffling along slowly; and indeed in their tiredness and lethargy, the dazed confusion apparent on their faces as the first strokes of jet lag begins to take effect, there is something bovine and desperate in their countenances. He knows that if he were to fly again, it would be a return to that; he also knows that he will never leave Australia again.

He wonders about Conrad: was it worth it? He has no doubt of it for himself and for his family; the money, an amount incredible and transformative, has already been deposited in his and Jenna’s bank account: the old man’s behaviour has been gentlemanlike throughout; and Paul is not ashamed of the transactional nature of their weekend together. He doesn’t believe that either secular shame or religious sin attaches itself to the work of sex. Rather, he wonders how had Conrad reconciled a long fantasy of an idol called Sean with the reality of an ageing man sitting across from him at dinner, sharing whiskies late at night, having sex together, the lovemaking tentative and careful? Paul had assumed it would be Sean’s rough and genial persona that Conrad sought. Yet, when Sean had placed his hand on Conrad’s crotch in the car, had assumed possession, the old man had recoiled. And before Conrad had turned away from him, Sean had glimpsed the man’s disturbed countenance. Was there a word for a combination of anger and disappointment? That was what he had seen on Conrad’s old face at that moment. So, when he leant in to kiss him the second time on the patio, as tenderly as possible, he had been Paul, not Sean. That will be his abiding memory of that weekend.

He will tell Jenna this. He will also come clean about his use of cocaine and MDMA at the parties, his smoking and snorting; he will not hide this from her, and he knows she will trust him not to return to the chasm of addiction. He will not tell her that he has been to see Andy. Instead, he will say that he had phoned and his brother had answered, slurring his words. ‘Obviously so fucking out of it, Jenna; he was so fucking out of it’. He has already memorised the words he will use. ‘I knew on hearing his voice I was right never to go back and I’m never ever gonna.’ It is not a lie, the evasion; it is a protection, the ojo de venado that Arsenio and his family hung from their wrists, that so fascinated him as boy in Sacramento; and the heavy black-kohled eye in swirls of blue that always hung from the rear-view mirror of Tass’s ute in the workshop in Byron Bay. Paul is convinced: a lie is not a lie when it is offered as protection against evil. This is why he will not tell Jenna about Andy, but he will tell her everything that occurred between himself and Conrad, and explain to her that what will remain precious in the core of his recollections are the moments when the veil between himself, Paul, and the stranger, Sean, was lifted. And that there was a reciprocal kindness—certainly diffident, shy, not fully formed, but nevertheless a sympathy—between himself and the man who had flown him to LA, and so there were rare moments, like the old man’s embarrassed chuckle when he inadvertently farted on awakening that first morning, or the easy silence between them as they lunched at a marina on the last day, when they had been not john and whore but Conrad and Paul. Not throughout, not even for the majority of their time together, but enough to make Paul thankful. When he went to kiss Conrad that second time, to apologise for the bluster and the swagger that had tainted the first kiss, that bravado he had thought the old man was seeking, he had kissed him tenderly, lips just touching lips. It had been Conrad who kissed him back with force.

‘Enjoy your vacation.’

Paul looks up.

The young woman from across the aisle is smiling at him. A customs official, proudly tapping a finger at his straggly, straw-coloured beard, is waving her through. She looks stunning, has deftly applied lipstick, has brushed and released the dense coils of her luxurious hair: the only visible trace of the distress of that long flight on her face is the slightly exaggerated bafflement of her expression.

‘This is home,’ he explains. ‘I’m returning home.’

Her back to him, her arm raised, her long dancing fingers signal a farewell.

That sense of the whole world being bleached, drained of colour and all the illumination too bright—not only from the fluorescent lights of the cavernous arrivals hall but also the morning light pouring through the enormous windows, the refracted shales and shards also seeming unnatural, of an inorganic provenance—continues as Neal leads them through the subterranean maze of the airport car park. He and Jenna had both been there waiting for him when Paul emerged from the baggage claim area, Jenna excitedly calling his name, Neal’s smile on seeing his father so immediate and so strong that Paul was struck by the thought: My god, my son is handsome, and when my son smiles, it is with all of his body. And, of course, Paul had been pleased to see them both; yet he felt no excitement, and he found himself exaggerating the effusiveness of the kisses he gave Jenna and the hug he gave his son, as if in the boldness and the franticness of his actions he could forestall any suspicion and temper his own self-doubt. He is happy to be home, to be with them again, of course he is. He must be. And yet, as Neal expertly hauls his father’s bags onto the tray of the ute and secures the canvas, as Jenna insists that Paul take the front seat next to their son, as the vehicle slowly chugs along the crowded exiting lane until, with a swift release of the clutch and with his foot pressing confidently on the accelerator, Neal is sliding into the southbound lane of the freeway, Brisbane’s city skyline a grey shimmer in the distance, Paul cannot shake the feeling that he is seeing all of the world as though through water; the too-bright lights are almost painful, as if there is at once too little and too much clarity. There had been a moment back there at the airport, the ute idling as they waited for the driver of the car ahead to insert her ticket into the machine’s slot and release the boom gate, when he felt his wife’s hand on his shoulder and, turning to her, it was as if he could not place Jenna’s face. Her nose, her pinched nostrils, the almost translucent blue of her eyes; it all seemed to blur and waver as if it were the beginning of a hallucination, and he was almost repelled by the savage cut of the lines at the ends of both sides of her mouth, the brutal wrinkles and raw red skin on her neck. He wills himself to exude gratitude and ardour. He must not betray his confusion; he must not reveal his disenchantment. He turns back to stare out the window. Disenchantment. A word that contains both anger and disappointment.

Paul reminds himself that surely it is the wretched tiredness from the trans-Pacific flight that is responsible for his fragile emotions. A relief arises from that naming and he settles back in his seat, watches the world arrive and disappear in the continuous smooth motion of the drive. Brisbane, from this distance, seems small, inconsequential, still struggling to declare itself a city. He knows that Aussies like to compare their cities to American cities, and he too has found himself coming to believe that Californian cities and Australian cities had much in common. Well, he knows now that it is not true, that his long time away has made him forget the sharp differences on either side of the ocean. Los Angeles and Sacramento have more vitality to them, they aren’t as antiseptic. Everything here is so damn clean. No life in any of it: the straightness of the asphalt highway, the functional and uninspired lines and shapes of the buildings being constructed across the widening sprawl of the city. No diversity, no individuality in the shape and style of windows, in the roofs and fencing: just like the population, everyone and everything looked the same.

Paul doesn’t realise it, but he is frowning as he looks out the window.

‘You alright, Dad?’

He knows one thing: he must conceal this disappointment—this disenchantment—from Jenna and Neal. A tearing in his heart: not an agony that is physical; rather, the pain arising from disgrace. Has his debauchery—not the days with Conrad, which had been clean, but the drugs and the unbearable sadness and malevolence of his brother’s house—destroyed peace forever?

‘I’m okay, son. It’s just the jet lag.’

He closes his eyes, pretends to have nodded off to sleep.

And it is indeed somewhat restorative, the shutting off of the world, the amelioration of that stabbing artillery of light. He is conscious of the uncomfortable jam of his sunglasses on the base of his nose, between his eyebrows, but he makes no attempt to shift them, to take them off; they afford Paul a discreet vantage from which he occasionally opens his eyes, glimpses through the window at the edge of Brisbane’s metropolitan limits the vista of prefabricated villas and cold, squat identikit apartments and office towers, the outlandish colours and luridly designed billboards of franchises and chain stores and supermarkets, all unchanging as the limits of the city glance the approaching extremities of Surfers Paradise.

So, yes, better to keep his eyes closed, to ignore that baroque commercial world outside, to instead sink into the trance of sombre colours and pulsing emanations that form and re-form, expand and contract, under the heavy lids of his eyes. While lost in those kaleidoscope visions, he hears fragments of conversation between Jenna and Neal. His son’s hushed whisper: ‘Is he asleep?’ And his wife’s soft answer: ‘Poor love, that flight is so exhausting.’ And throughout, the hushed music, falling in and out of Paul’s reveries: the snaking arrogant riff introducing the Stone’s ‘Miss You’, the percussive jubilation of Aretha Franklin’s version of ‘Spanish Harlem’.

The shifting patterns beneath his eyelids form their own musical accompaniment, as if the beat and course of his blood through veins and capillaries is the bash of a snare, the roll of a drumstick, resulting in spills and torrents and waves. The strain in his stomach, the sensation of nausea kept at bay has abated. He dares open his eyes, and, even with the filtering layer of the sunglasses, the world is stunningly and shockingly green, the supine hills and smooth valleys of the coast blazing with the verdant richness of the coming summer. The blanching void has gone, as has the endless suburban rotoscope of estates and car yards and office towers. The world is again full of colour.

His child and his wife are singing along with Aretha Franklin: Neal’s voice just hanging on to the note; Jenna’s voice loud and clear.

Paul removes his sunglasses, blinks and re-enters the world.

Neal turns down the volume.

‘Good morning, Dad. We’re in New South Wales. We’re nearly home.’

And this time, Jenna’s hand on his shoulder doesn’t feel an imposition, there is no discomfort there at all, and Paul can’t conceive how he could even have contemplated being disenchanted. Disenchanted? What a callous, inappropriate word for what he has and what he holds!

The serene ocean dips in and out of view as the car glides along the vacillating road, this vast expanse of green and blue. Are they the only car on the highway this morning? He is returning home to the house he and Jenna have built, and he has a son who is hardworking and kind and roughly handsome and who is aware of the shadows and netherworlds within which his parents both have lived and is at peace with such knowledge and who does not accuse because he has no cruelty in him, and who is faithful to family and to love, that which Paul never knew as a child and a youth. And Jenna’s hand is on his shoulder and he clutches it, suddenly afraid. The day is warm but he is cold, for fortune can destroy as easily and swiftly as it can bless, and he won’t let go of her hand, this woman, so beautiful and now so aged, so courageous and now so gentle, so broken and now so serene. And Paul can hear the lilt, the joyous pluck and striking of the guitar’s strings, and he can hear the voice, placating and slowly rising to rapture, and Neal turns the volume high and Van Morrison’s voice and Van Morrison’s song floods the car and is of union with the grace and sumptuous beauty of the world outside and Paul is crying, a weeping that is joy, for now his wife’s grip is firm, consoling, on his shoulder, and his son is patting his father’s knee and whispering, ‘It’s alright, Dad, all of it is right,’ and it is also a sobbing that is grief for the vicissitudes and unfairness of fate, for the hardness, the fear and the shadows that are his brother’s life, and finding himself in the middle of the song—for the song has now entered Paul—as Van Morrison sings ‘Sweet Thing’, the music and the lyrics evoking ancient and lost worlds, Paul silently calls on gods or God, wishing he had Jenna’s faith, that he could believe, and whispers a prayer for his brother and Cynthia and their coming child: Oh please, Lord, within those moments of darkness please let there be moments of silence and peace and love and grace. And so, Paul is sobbing, for what could not be altered and what could not be returned and I will drink the clear clean water to quench my thirst, and he is crying for all that he has, and the song becomes a prayer and a lament and a jubilation, and it can be all those things at once, for that is the miracle of the song. And from that point on, when people will ask Paul, Do you believe in God? he will answer, No, but the miraculous is possible, and I shall drive my chariot down your streets and cry, because in this moment he does believe himself to be saved, to have been one of the fortunate ones, blessed and provident, and he owes it to this woman whose hand he cannot let go of and he owes it to this son who is faithful. We shall walk and talk in gardens all misty and wet with rain. The music rises to a crescendo, the car is enveloped in the song, but then so is the whole of the world: the earth outside, the unfurling ocean, the impossible antipodean sky, all of it is praising and all of it is singing and even their bodies, Paul’s and Jenna’s and Neal’s, are as much song as they are flesh, as much praise as they are bone and as much gratitude as they are blood. Paul is sobbing. It is a miracle for a man to be blessed in life, it is a miracle to have a home. Paul is home.

•

For a moment it is as if I can hear the Morrison song; but no, it is the swelling rhythm of the ocean tide, the rough thunder as the waves crash upon the shore and the sibilate gasp as they retreat back into the deep. The last four pages of the Machiavelli are blank and it is over these four pages that I have given an ending to Sweet Thing, making my handwriting deliberately small so I can fit the outpouring of words onto the pages. As I write the last three words—Paul is home—I find myself experiencing a contradictory, perplexing emotion. On the one hand, I am certain of the integrity of the ending, for the question of home not only dominates my age and my time in history, but its enquiry and its pursuit has been my own personal work: what is home? In writing, in language, if one is fortunate and finds the right story, then words can refute opacity and offer precision. Paul is home. Yet, it was film that first offered me this idea and it was in film that I first imagined its trajectory. I understand that VHS—a technology that appears more makeshift and erosive over time, diluting colour, shredding the image and weakening light—is not film; but as moving image it shares in the magic of cinema. And it was magical, that first time I put a pornographic tape into the VCR machine, pressed play and immediately was overwhelmed by the youthful and awkward beauty of a young man sitting before a fire. The pugnacious yet unthreatening visage of Paul Carrigan. I swooned. Cinema is an art that can make one swoon. And so, inevitably, I have imagined the ending of Sweet Thing as film. An interior shot. Paul is in the passenger seat next to his son, asleep. We hear Van Morrison’s ‘Sweet Thing’ playing on the stereo. Paul jolts awake and the audience is now sharing his point of view. The liquid ferocious colours of the northern New South Wales coast: the cobalt Pacific and the green of the forests, those trees that shoot as straight as needles up to the sky. In the car, the man starts sobbing, a weeping that is long and seemingly inexhaustible. His wife’s hand is on his shoulder, his son patting his knee, simple gestures of love. And the man is weeping. Jenna is singing along to the song, and so is Neal, the one voice sweet and confident, the other shy, even graceless, but affirming, nevertheless. Paul is weeping and Paul is home. The moving image itself can never be as precise in its intent as can writing. The camera can offer documentary veracity, claim the real, but it can never fix meaning; there can be voiceover, for sure, directing the audience, but that isn’t the moving image; that is a reliance on words and thus writing: cinema, film, the motion of images always leaves interpretation open to chance.

The tide is rushing in and it is streaming out. Film was not to be my vocation. I massage the ache and numbness at the protruding bone of my wrist. These words scrawled on the back pages of a book, these etchings and markings and scratchings in blue ink, are my craft.

I pick a section at random, quickly read it through to make sure that I can decipher the tiny and messy prose. I fall across a word: baroque. I used it to describe what Paul sees as Neal drives out of Brisbane and into the hinterland of Surfers Paradise; he uses it to describe the elaborate and exaggerated commercialism of the architecture of that region. It captures what I experience when I make that drive. However, it is my word, not Paul’s. I circle it and place a minute question mark within its boundaries. I close the book, stash it and the pen deep into my bag.

A man has come onto the beach. I had been so lost in my scribbling that I hadn’t heard the rumble of his van as he parked. He is standing some ten or so metres away, and he is tearing off his T-shirt. His arms are sinewy, a dark tan roughened then smoothed by the coast’s endless sun. He is about thirty, the slight flop of belly on an otherwise svelte form. Dropping his shirt onto the sand, he turns towards me, flicks his chin to the water and asks, ‘How is it out there?’

‘It’s bloody beautiful, mate.’

The man smiles and stretches his arms out wide. ‘This is beautiful country.’ He brings his hands together, rubs them, starts jogging on the spot. ‘Time to brave the cold, cuz.’

I watch him run into the waves, dive into the water, to emerge a few metres further, his strokes so sure and rapid that he seems to be belting the frothing sea.

It is dazzling country, his country. I am sure this is his country. The Yuin have a languorous beauty, a gift granted to all people who know the consolation of life on a temperate coast. His is a hardened, toughened body; the insignia on the chest of his shirt advertises a plumbing business. Yet there is also a delectable softness, evocative of a warm sun and an equivalent sea. His is a striking handsomeness that owes both to his ancestry on this land and that of forebears from lands on the other side of the world. The harsh, angular but potent Glaswegian mien, and the genial and round Yuin face, they have cojoined; I know that it has been a long and exhausting and ugly battle, and yet I can’t help having an heretical thought: it was all worth it to have produced such singular beauty.

I watch the man dive again and swim further into the ocean. He knows this land and he knows this water, and with expert knowledge and keen intuition, he avoids the ever-present treachery of the currents and the rips.

The man is returning to shore. His breath hard, long, he collapses on the sand.

‘How was it?’ I venture.

His laugh is first a gurgle, then a rupture, a buoyant release.

‘Fucking wonderful, mate.’

With a supple and youthful adeptness, he turns onto his back and stretches out his legs so that his feet slide over the edge of the towel onto the sand; and in seconds, a sprinkle of what seems like fine concrete dust has coated his heels and ankles, all the length of his calves. The angle of his left arm, splayed the length of his side, is such that the first thing I notice is the bracelet over his wrist, chunky pebble squares painted in an alternating rhythm of black and yellow and red, the sky and the sun and the land, threaded through a thick black twine. On his forearm is a tattoo, a black-outlined crucifix with a cyan shadow of the cross underneath it, giving the design the impression of a third dimension as well as evoking something medieval, even ancient, as if the tattoo is the ancestral insignia of a lost heroic age. My eyes move to the damp black hairs spread delicately across the man’s dark belly, which rises and falls in a slow and steady movement, as if he has fallen asleep. I turn away from him, conscious of the lechery implied in the intensity of my gaze; a misinterpretation, for I am simply observing and marvelling at the man’s unforced and captivating male beauty.

I look to the sea.

The panorama has altered sharply, as if while I was contemplating the man’s form a Creator God has seen fit to mix Her paints in dark and sombre tinctures and slash Her brush across the sky. An igniting cumulus is descending in haste from the eastern horizon; where it casts its shadow over the ocean the water is night; the speed of the cloud’s rampage is discernible by how fast the shadows fly across the sea’s surface. And yet, with the sun behind us, where the sea is unhindered by the cloud’s shade, the water seems as a sparkling bejewelled lake, the waves breaking the shallows as alternate surges of emerald and sapphire. It is as if the world has been torn in two, a cosmic diptych of light and dark, each dimension—one wild and turbulent, one serene and luminescent—of an equal astonishment.

There is a rustle in the sand.

The young man has sat up, is staring out to the sky and ocean.

‘Storm coming,’ he pronounces; and then adds, ‘Won’t last long.’

And indeed, in a hurried swoop, the temperature drops, and the wind now nips and bites as it rushes over my face, my neck and shoulders. I grab my shirt, shake off the sand and put it on.

‘You a writer?’

For a moment there is vanity: has he recognised me? Then I realise that, as he parked his van and walked down to the cove, he must have seen me scribbling that first draft of the novel’s ending.

His question, as always, gives me pause. That sense of the word—writer—as pertaining to a world and caste that is not mine, how it ruthlessly banishes me from my childhood and adolescence and class, and yet always leaves me outside the gates of the aristocrat’s castle.

The man is slapping one hand against the other to dislodge the sand. They are strong hands, gnarled hands, with the small bruises and tiny scars and raw blisters of work. His are not soft hands.

‘Yes,’ I answer. ‘I’m a writer.’

There are times when that answer can be met with a diffidence or with the defensiveness of contempt, even with the stirring of belligerence, as if the word suggests segregation and arrogance, an elite condescension. But the man is smiling and in that expansive cheer of his grin there is nothing of reserve, nothing of aggression.

‘It’s kind of cool to see someone actually writing by hand. Don’t see that much anymore. My nan used to write. I always remember her hunched over the kitchen table at her place in Bega, scribbling away.’

‘So, she was a writer as well?’

‘Not books, though I reckon she’d have had some deadly stories. She was a great storyteller.’ He shrugs his shoulder. ‘Letters. She was from a large family, eleven brothers and sisters.’ And as he says this, he slowly moves his hands away from one another until his arms are outstretched as if the physical gesture can better communicate the enormity of family than mere words.

He smacks his hands back onto the sand.

‘I think my youngest has her gift; she was a reader from the get-go. That’s the only present she wants at Christmastime or on her birthday. “Can I have a book, Dad?”’

The pride in his voice is resonant, as bold and as clear as the holler of the sea.

There is so much I want to say. That in the crucible of his love and his pride for his daughter he has already accomplished the first labour she will need to be a writer: he has taught her that she need not be ashamed of her story. I think of my own father’s gifts to me. Every Thursday afternoon, payday, he would line up with his fellow workers to collect his little yellow envelope from the paymaster, whose office was above the factory floor—and indeed, I recall my father taking me there once and how as soon as my father pushed open the solid wooden door with the word Paymaster and then the gentleman’s name etched in heavy white letters across the glazed glass, and that door shut behind us, the raucous ceaseless din of the thundering machinery disappeared, and there was only the glory of silence. On the way home, he would stop at a little newsagent on Bridge Road, look at the books scattered across the bargain table and, unable to decipher the English language, he would choose one book or another because of a bright cover or because of the seriousness or humour he interpreted in the inks. And so he bought literature for me, and science fiction, and crime fiction, and novels way too dense and too adult for me; and I read them all, because I did love reading—that does indeed come first, the disappearing into the worlds. Without that hunger for reading, one cannot be a writer. However, I was buoyed by his and my mother’s joy in and gratitude for reading. I want to tell all this to the young father, but the rain starts to fall. The drops are heavy and land with a smack on our heads and shoulders. We each scramble for our towels, I grab my sandals and bag, and we are both running to our cars as the sky growls and the rain descends in a torrent. He is younger, faster, and is at his van first. He turns around, lifts one hand in a thumbs-up salute and I wave my farewell.

His van is already thundering up the narrow dirt road as I start the engine.

He was right: the lashing shower doesn’t last long. By the time I approach town the writhing python fury of the cumulus has crossed the ocean and the coast and is vanishing behind the mountain; only its tail whips the summit, obscuring the apex in a haze of rain and mist. The sun, too, is dropping westwards; liberated from the choking embrace of the clouds, it shimmers with a final ferocious force. The inlet comes into view and it is as if the waters are silver. The gleam has a metallic sharpness and the intensity from the sun annihilates all colour: the sparks that fling off the water are resplendent.

My first stop is the greengrocers. I select a red onion, a handful of green beans, a cucumber and a tomato for a salad. Conscious that I will be leaving at first light tomorrow, my intention is to buy fish fillets from the shop under the north side of the bridge to cook myself the simplest of coastal meals this evening.

Heading back to the car, I quickly check my phone. A bank of messages and missed calls. I throw the vegetables onto the passenger seat and impatiently tap my passcode; the screen bursts into colour and I scroll through my messages. A journalist from The Age wants to know if I can contribute a thousand-word essay on the unfolding global crisis, and there is a missed call from the editor of The Guardian. I press the mail icon and there is a flood of emails. Veronica from the Wheeler Centre wants to know if I can participate in a hastily organised panel. A similar request from Chris at Readings bookshop. I close my mail. There is text from Simon: I miss you, baby. Are you sure you want to drive straight through? Text me xxS

The phone is in my hand. I have the car window wound down and I rest my arm on the frame, look out along the main street. A group of four old men, all bearded, one of them with his grey hair pulled back in a long ponytail, are laughing together outside the tackle shop. There is a young woman, a Jehovah’s Witness, outside the supermarket with copies of The Watchtower. A boy, still in his school uniform, the bottom of his white shirt untucked, is helping a frail elderly woman down the steps outside the butcher shop. A portly old man, in stained red football shorts, so old that the colour has faded to a dull crimson, is whistling as he crosses the street from the caravan park. His belly is enormous, rotund and perfectly spherical; it appears hard as steel. I recognise the man from the beach earlier; he is holding the hand of his young daughter, who is tentatively licking at her ice cream, her eyes squished shut in apparent joy with every lick, followed immediately by a look of concern, as if worried about how long she can make her pleasure last. His son, younger than the daughter, is skipping ahead of them; he is biting chunks from his cone, as if impatient to feed his appetite: spools and splashes of chocolate ice cream stain his chin and are dripping down the front of his oversized Sydney Swans footy singlet. The boy, lost in the pleasure of his treat, is about to step off the footpath when his father calls out in stern warning, ‘Che!’ The boy spins around, startled, then nods and waits. The father takes both his children by the hand and they walk across the road.

I return to my phone. It is a long drive home along the Princes Highway, close to nine hours. Simon is anxious about me making the drive in one day, suggesting that I stop overnight in Cann River or Bairnsdale. I understand his concern, and in truth I too would have similar reservations about him undertaking such a drive, but I stubbornly insist on driving all the way home in a day. I relish the in-betweenness of long drives, those canny hours between departure and arrival, in which the whole of the world suddenly drops away. Of course, I can turn on the radio, the world can flood back in, but there are long stretches of highway where radio waves struggle to penetrate, so that there is only the crackle and spitting of the depleted and vanquished signals. In such moments I am an astronaut in my car, and the drive along the straight empty roads is a flinging into space. I avoid driving in the city, and when I have to, I fill the silence in the vehicle with sound: music, radio, interviews, podcasts. Yet on these open roads—the shooting majesty of the eucalypt forests on either side, or the dense lush tunnel of effervescent temperate forest; the parched endless plains and scrublands, the titan inland seas of red or yellow or gold desert; or skirting the serene infinity of the ocean—I find myself shrugging off my frustrations and disappointments with my nation; it is on these open roads that I rediscover it as country and as land, as vista and as panorama, as earth and sky, and I fall in wild love with it again. The open road, vast, seemingly without end.

I text Simon. I promise to drink lots of coffee and I will make sure I stop every time I yawn. I can’t wait to be with you, I love you, xxC.

I know I can wait till I am back at the house, sit out on the deck and reply to my messages and emails then. There is a knot forming; it is as though with every breath and thus with each churn of blood through my body there is an awakening within my belly. It is not a soreness exactly, and I could not call it pain; it is an aggrievement, an apprehension of something sinister that is oddly alien and yet organic. I know the nub, that locus of unease, grows from within me and belongs to me; yet I am unsettled by the unease of some exterior malign weight bearing down on me. I examine the emails again. My breath is short; there is a cold touch at the back of my neck.

A sharp blast of horn. I look up from the phone, return to the world. There has been no accident. A driver has tooted in greeting to another. A trio of schoolgirls, arms locked together, are sprinting across the road, the last in the line clutching a parcel of fish and chips under her arm. Their laughter is a peal of joy as they run to the park at the edge of the caravan park. I shield my eyes from the luminescent glare of the afternoon sun. The tide is high, and the genteel waves lap at the shore of the gardens.

I write to the editor of The Age: Thank you for the offer but I am not a journalist, I am a poet; I suspect you are confusing the purposes of each of those professions. There are times to speak and there are times to be silent. I am choosing to be silent. My best wishes, Christos Tsiolkas. I send the same reply to The Guardian. In this way, I answer all my emails and then I can delete them. I switch off the phone. The intrusion in my belly has gone.

I sit a moment before starting the car. The faint odour of salt water on my skin, the brine sharp in my nostrils. The strong and not distasteful reek of my sweat. For an instant, I am pulled back into the past and I see with the eyes of a little boy a tall handsome man, his black hair slicked back with Brylcreem, the white cotton of his singlet hugging his wide chest and slender torso, his arm raised, so I stare fascinated at the flutter of moist hair underneath, trace the trail it forms on the underside of his arm, which disappears under the strap of the singlet until it erupts again on the other side to meet the dense thatch of black hairs on his chest. And his pong, Stavros’s scent, for a moment it floods the car and I utter a short prayer, the praise not even in the forms of words; thanking Stavros for the simplicity of ritual introduced into my life so very young, watching him wash the factory off himself and then dress and emerge a man. Why not say a prayer to Stavros? He was once a god to me.

I turn the key and start the car.

It is as if the decision made itself, and I played no part in it. Instead of making a U-turn and heading back across the bridge, I find that I am heading south. At one of the highest points in town, where a ridge forms a gradual elevation alongside the main street, there is an old church, with a humble wooden steeple. An enormous water tank sits in squat dominance next to the church, its metallic girth seemingly mocking the Protestant austerity of its neighbour. As I take the turn off the road around the ridge, I notice a For Sale sign planted into the earth before the water tower. A crudely outlined hand and extended finger at the bottom of the sign is pointing to one of the side streets that lead to the sea off the main highway. I check the rear-view mirror; there is no one behind me. I swerve left and into that side street.

The house is perched halfway up the sheer ascent, the street’s extreme gradient giving it an air of precariousness, as if it might at any moment—buffeted by wind, lashed by storm—be unmoored and set adrift. It is a small, utilitarian cottage; the mustard-coloured weatherboards have been recently repainted, but the paint is already beginning to peel from the assault of the ocean air. The land is of a decent size: smaller than a quarter-acre, which is not unsurprising in a house situated so close to town. I can imagine unlatching the industrial metal gate, the rusted wire threads spooled on diagonals to form a plane of diamond outlines, and then strolling the few hundred metres up the street to town to purchase the morning papers and a coffee. And as I have that thought, my fingers are releasing the latch, swinging open the gate, and I enter the front garden.

The house looks to have lain empty for some time. However, the lawn is being maintained—the grass so short and neat it must have been mown in the last week—and there is a trio of white rosebushes in the bed along the side of the front yard. These are untended, the branches overgrown, brittle and gnarled, and there are outcrops of weeds circling the bases of the plants. The cracked wooden boards creak and groan as I climb the three short steps to the front porch. The imposing front door is painted a deep military green. There is a double-hung window on either side of the door, the grilles and sashes painted white, the heads, casings and aprons painted a similar green to the door. An old armchair, battered by the elements, sits in one corner of the porch. Bird droppings, splotches of white and grey, have soiled its headrest and arms. On the other side of the porch there is an abandoned kennel. A veil of silken cobweb shields the entrance.

I stand on the porch and look out.

Light is volleying and refracting across the surface of the inlet. Pelicans are gliding effortlessly towards the nearest shore, where two fishermen have waded into the still water. Leaning over the railing, I can see the far reach of the south head and the azure and emerald waves that crash against it. Beyond that tumult, the body of the ocean seems at rest, a straight blue mirror reflecting the sky.

The rapid incline of the slope is such that the gardens and house seem protected from the scrutiny of the near neighbours. I peep through the first window. The room is bare, the wooden floorboards scratched and unpolished, scarred and marked by fallen drops of white and yellow paint. My breath forms a cloud on the surface of the dusty window.

I am shocked at the sight that confronts me at the second window: the room in there is blackened, the wainscot boards and plaster of the walls charred by fire and smoke. A fine dust of ash and cinder still covers the floor.

Fire, lethal and terrible and ferocious, bore down on this town. Simon and I watched the footage on television: the townspeople evacuated to the shore as the fires blazed closer to the town, the sky a pulsating red fire until the debris of the exploding forest, consumed by the apocalypse of flame, cast a black shadow along the length of the coast. A reminder of the elemental gods who can make day night.

And a reminder that the elemental gods hold faith with fate. The wind changed and the fire forged another path. The town was saved.

I bring my face closer to the window, indeed so close that I feel the moist heat of my breath caper off the glass and touch my face. This fire was internal, caused by one man or one woman, and therefore not of the elements and not an indictment of a whole population or a whole civilisation. Mere accident. When we cannot abide the terror of accident in our individual lives, we respond with faith. And when we resist the idea of accident in history, we counter with politics. I am so close to the glass that in the resultant mirror formed by the blackened walls and floor I see my reflection approaching, and it is myself that kisses the image of myself: and for a moment we are one.

The seared walls and floor, the singed ceiling, all have vanished. A very old man is lying on a tartan sofa. A book, Sōseki’s Kusamakura, lies open on the man’s chest; the small mound of his belly rises and falls as he sleeps. At one end of the sofa, snuggled within the valley formed between the old man’s legs, a small black-and-white terrier is also sleeping. In the middle of the deep green wall there is a painting of a long-limbed spindly pine resisting a fierce wind sluicing across a small hilltop; the artist has depicted the thin struggling branches so vividly, with a realist’s verisimilitude but also an expressionist’s passion, that they suggest human hands grasping for rescue. To the left of the painting is a mounted A1 poster of a book cover, the bold and stirring colours, the play of light and shadow that is Caravaggio’s magnificent Conversion on the Way to Damascus, where Saul of Tarsus is rendered in the image of a youthful and supple late-medieval soldier, with cuirass and tunic, his long, sinewy arms outstretched in astonishment at his bizarre vision. On the other side of the painting of the straining pine is another framed print, this one Manet’s sublime The House at Rueil. The placid watery colours, the softness of its greens and whites and blues, offer a calm that balances the passionate dramas of the painting and mounted poster.

Another man walks into the room. He too is aged, his near-white hair cropped close to his skull. He is portly and there is a suggestion of a slight shuffle as he steps softly over to the sleeping man. Under his arm there is a folded laptop computer and in the other hand there is a notebook. The terrier awakes, sniffs the air and begins to thump its tail joyfully. The man places his computer and notebook on the coffee table. Pasted across the notebook’s cover is a black- and-white image—a scan or a photocopy—of a group of young men seated on benches, the martial crop of their hair and their identical black uniforms suggesting that they are sailors of some mid-twentieth-century navy. At the centre of the photograph, a boxer, young and sturdy, dressed only in his nylon wrestling shorts, a white towel across his shoulders, is showing a piece of paper to a mate, a ticket stub or some receipt. The boys’ closeness, their unashamed and virile intimacy, suggests great affection. And love. As does the gentle action that the standing man now performs as, with a motion that is in part a caress and in part a shaking of the sleeping man’s shoulder, he whispers softly, ‘Wake up, Simon, I’ve got some dinner on.’

I step back from the mirror and there is the return of the scorched room. And, made more vivid, more alive and more molten by the dark shadows beneath the glass, the reflection of the inlet and the descending twilight.

The next morning, I am up before light, and it is only when I turn off the water in the shower that I hear the first trilling and call of the birds. I brew a coffee, drink it on the deck, watching the faint line of silver, the initial foaming and then seeping and then eruption of the blood reds and fire yellows of dawn. One moment the smooth inlet waters are in shadow and then, with the first glare of the sun, they are blaze. The alto timbres of the bowerbirds and honeyeaters, the soprano shrillness of the lorikeets and magpies, the bass booming of the cockatoos and the unique baritone chuckling of the kookaburras: the whole world in song. I wash my cup, the breakfast plates, leave a note to the owners to thank them for the stay, switch on my phone. The green illumination of a text from Simon: I cannae wait for you to be home x

It is early, not yet seven, when I set off. The sun’s light is mellow grace; all is illuminated but without harshness: this is not the fire of terror and calumny but a soft and tender incandescence. As I accelerate on the open highway, the eucalypt forest thickens on both sides of the road and creates a canopy so dark and imposing that I shiver from the sudden cold. Just as I am about to turn on the car’s heater, there is an approaching white light, the flare of warm sun, and the forest to the left of me drops away and an immense stretch of yellow sand and sapphire sea is visible. The chill is gone.

At one point on the drive I switch on the radio, but at the first intimations of the news from the world I turn it off and return to silence. I drink coffee at every stop and I drive carefully, slowly. I know that I am returning to the city, to clamour and fury, to passion and zeal. But for the moment I am in the splendid in-betweenness. Yet in the midst of this enjoyment, this quiet exalting, there is also impatience. For his touch, for his kiss. I remind myself that it isn’t necessarily to the World I am returning. None of us can live in that capitalised world for it is an abstraction; it isn’t brick or weatherboard, not steel, not cement, it is neither plaster nor stone. It cannot offer succour. One cannot shelter there.

This understanding is calming. I drive in silence. I am not returning to the world. I am simply coming home.