Heath took the toothbrush and cleaned it before putting it back. They washed their faces in warm water from the kettle. Bedtime was early because sitting around the fire had fast become the most banal pastime of all. Muted silver light seeped in the open doorway dimly lighting the van’s interior. Sarah wasn’t hungry or cold as she settled on the bed. Panic, fretfulness, concern, those things had to take some time out too. She lay on her stomach, her socked feet rested on her pillow. Her head was at the foot of the bed. She pulled one blanket over her and took in her view – down the van, from cupboard height, looking towards the door, a wedge of the ghostly grey exterior visible through the doorway. Heath was sitting up against the bedhead, a blanket over his knees.

‘I’ll tell you my relationship disasters,’ he said, ‘and you deconstruct them for me, and tell me what went wrong – from a woman’s perspective.’

Heath’s love life consisted of a string of amusing stories and predictable sexual encounters. Calling them relationships was pushing it. He’d sampled across the board, or maybe it just seemed that way because he gave each girl a distinctive name. The ‘Party Girl’ may or may not have been bookish in her spare time, and so not that unlike the ‘Librarian-looking chick with glasses’. Going by what Sarah heard, he’d never been in love.

He asked her, ‘Who was your first serious relationship with?’

‘Are we staying on this topic for any specific reason?’

‘You never introduce topics. I’ve told you more than you’ve told me. Now you know about all the women I’ve dated. I don’t even know if you’ve got any brothers or sisters.’

‘None.’

‘You’ve only mentioned your father, is your mum alive?’

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘Same age as me.’

‘You’re so full of shit,’ she laughed. ‘Yes, she’s alive,’ Sarah said.

‘How long have you been married?’

‘Ten years. I got married when I was twenty-five.’

The maths laid out for him, Heath said, ‘Okay.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Who was your first serious relationship with?’ he said, returning to his original question.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Yes, you can, you just don’t want to tell me.’

‘You’re right, I don’t want to tell you.’

‘Why not?’ She could hear the unperturbed mildness in his voice. ‘I’m an understanding guy.’

‘What makes you think it’s something that needs understanding?’

‘Because you won’t tell me. All right then, tell me more about endurance riding. I know you’ll talk about that. How often do you compete?’

‘A few times a year.’

‘When did you get into that?’

‘In my early twenties. I had one other endurance horse before Tansy. She was getting old so I retired her.’

‘How much is a good endurance horse like Tansy worth?’

‘Depends.’

‘How much did you pay for her?’

After some consideration Sarah said, ‘I didn’t pay for her.’

‘She was given to you?’

‘No. I took her.’

‘Is this about to get incriminating? I’ll lower the cone of silence.’ He made a humming sound while he mimicked the action of a dome closing down over them.

‘I was looking for a new horse, I was at one of the best endurance horse studs in Australia.’ Sarah’s nose couldn’t help but wrinkle as she thought of the place. She could see the gates, the sweeping driveway, a limousine parked alongside a line of horse floats. ‘I could only afford to pick from the horses in the first stables. All the top horses, million-dollar horses, were down the back. So I snuck down, out of curiosity, to look at them.’

She could feel Heath’s gaze on her face. The tension was already in her voice. She was aware of her own body, growing more rigid on the bed.

‘I was sneaking photos on my phone, to show everyone how amazing the place was – like a five-star resort, but for horses . . . Until I went the long way around to get back to the front stables, trying to stick to all the quiet places where nobody was. I heard this sound, not even whinnying, not even like a horse.’

Heath sighed. ‘I don’t know if I want to hear this.’ He said it in that tone people use when they are resigned to finding out anyway.

‘She was screaming,’ Sarah said. She touched her lips a moment and breathed to clear the nausea that came with the memory. ‘Like a child screaming.’

‘Yeah, I’m not gonna like this.’

‘She was inside a disused stable. They were using a cattle prod on her. Training her, they tried to tell me later, but it certainly wasn’t that. They were deliberately hurting her, laughing. I won’t tell you exactly. I don’t want to. I don’t tell people because . . . Tansy is beautiful, that’s what she is; she’s not what was happening in that shed. She was barely a filly, just a foal really. I think she’d been a disappointment to the stud because of her dark coat. Greys are best for the sport. Her mother was a grey. They would have been hoping for Tansy to be a grey. But she was black. Black horses tend to overheat over the long distances. The big buyers wouldn’t have wanted her. It was the owner’s son who was hurting her. I’ve since heard what a twisted bastard he is. I don’t think her dropped price was the reason behind it though, he just likes to hurt things.’ Sarah clenched her teeth. ‘I managed to get some photos. I emailed them to myself, and went to the main office. I told them there was a fire – it made them come quicker. I also didn’t want to give the stud time to hide her. I went back to the shed with a crowd and then I wouldn’t leave, not without her.’

Sarah fell silent, thinking back to the day, the blue sky, the sounds and smells, the breeze, the owner storming down a narrow lane in his white suit and black shirt, his leathery tan and shiny bald head, and Sarah’s voice clear in her own ears, raised and threatening, demanding, unafraid, in what was probably a dangerous situation. Sheiks, in their flowing white robes, had watched on from afar.

‘It really felt to me like I had to rescue her,’ Sarah said. ‘Like you wouldn’t leave an abducted child, you wouldn’t walk away from that.’ She frowned at Heath as she said it. ‘Finding someone, something, being hurt like that, and then saying, Oh, don’t worry I’ll send help later. I couldn’t walk away. They said I was crazy because I wouldn’t leave. They were crazy, to try and brush aside that kind of cruelty. They didn’t call the cops on me though; they knew they were in the shit.’

‘You did the right thing not leaving.’

‘I knew it wouldn’t be as critical to everyone else, not even the RSPCA; they see it every day. They would have cared, but gotten to her eventually. And then her removal would have been bogged down in red tape. Plus it was the owner’s son; they weren’t going to admit to anything or sack him. I heard her screaming. I heard her fear. You can’t walk away from that sort of thing.’

‘I know what you mean. I’ve heard that scream. My dog, the bloodhound, he once got trapped headfirst down a wombat hole – I’d searched for hours. He was screaming like that, muffled though, underground. Not an animal sound, beyond that. I’ll never forget it. I would have done anything to save him too – I did, I dug him out with my bare hands. Like you, I couldn’t walk away. I didn’t even go for a shovel, had to save him right then.’

‘Was the wombat down the hole?’

Heath nodded.

‘That’s always terrible. But you got him out?’

Heath opened his hands and rubbed his palms together. ‘I tore my hands apart doing it. Not as many scars as Jasper ended up with.’ He smiled. ‘The wombat survived too. He was already a gnarly looking bastard.’

A stretch of silence passed before Sarah said, ‘I couldn’t leave her.’

‘I understand.’

‘I agreed not to go public if the stud let me have her right then. But I made sure word got around anyway. The right people saw the photos. The stud deserved the backlash they got, they really did.’

Sarah took a shaky breath.

‘What was she like, when you got her home? Was she okay?’

‘She was more settled than you’d imagine. Really brave. But she couldn’t be stabled. She hated stables, still does, hates walls and doors, concrete floors. It took ages until she would walk into a shed at all. I know she still remembers.’

A large moth fluttered into the van. The wing beats purred as it did a circuit of the darkened van. It left as effortlessly as it had entered, vibrating its way back out the door.

‘Can I touch you?’ Heath said.

Sarah sat up and turned around on the bed to face him. She’d pulled her knees in to her chest and wrapped her arms around her lower legs.

‘Why would you say that?’

‘I meant a hug, a touch. It felt like you needed it.’

‘Well I don’t.’

Mist had blocked the stars and turned the full moon into a fuzzy grey disc. Sarah squatted behind the shed and looked up into the eerie miasma. Heath was around the corner from her, peeing too. Foggy silence amplified the sounds of urinating. Heath began singing as a way to mask the sound. His free hand on the shed, he tapped the beat with his fingers.

She straightened and pulled up her thermal leggings. She could hear him zip up.

‘I’ll tell you why I hate fog,’ he said, his song over. ‘It reminds me that everyone breathes the same air. It feels like this patch of air around us is stagnant and we’re breathing it in over and over. Don’t you think?’

Sarah grunted in half agreement. She shone the torch and they walked together into the shed.

‘It brings home the truth,’ he said. ‘It’s this . . .’ he gestured to the fog, ‘. . . closed-in conditions – right the way around the globe, the same air, trapped by the atmosphere. I take in what someone else has exhaled. Cities make my lungs tight. I don’t mind it so much here, it’s not a populated place and I’m with you, I don’t mind sharing your air, plus I know it’s come across the ranges and must be reasonably clean. Even at the beach sometimes I’ll get a face full of air and think – where has that been? It’s a bit claggy, you know? I’d feel more comfortable knowing it had come across a timbered valley. That’s why I love the bush, because when it’s a clear day you can smell how clean the air is. You can taste it. It’s so good you want to drink it in.’

They stepped up into the van.

‘I’d be really struggling if I was trapped in this kind of fog in a city block with hundreds breathing in and out all around me.’ He shuddered.

Sarah sat down to take off her boots and Heath collapsed face first onto the bed, boots on. He’d limped heavily and she could tell he was tired of his ailment. It wasn’t the creek that had him trapped; it was his leg and the mist.

‘You’re a loner,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s why you’re single. You’re not a people person. I mean, God, you don’t even like breathing in the same air as other people. It’s you who keeps your distance. You don’t want people to get close to you. That’s why no one has.’

She put her boots aside and pulled his off for him. Sarah put his shoes square and neat together, the way he liked. Heath got under the blankets. She switched off the torch. The mattress took up the end of the van, stretching wall to wall. The only way onto the bed was from the bottom. In the dark, on all fours, Sarah crawled to the top and felt her way in under the covers. Heath reached out and pulled her into him. Sarah let him hold her. The clinch had an almost sibling feel to it. He didn’t touch her, other than his arm tight around her waist and his chest against her back, his face tucked into her neck.

‘I don’t mind being close to you,’ he said.