SMALL PORTIONS OF AUSTRALIA

It didn’t work.

Ray wasn’t completely surprised. Well, at first he was, but then he remembered that this wasn’t Australia in 2030, and he wasn’t using the maps he’d bought from the soldier. This was an imaginary San Francisco, with imaginary maps and whoever imagined them – Caddy or someone else – probably hadn’t imagined maps as a way to travel from one place to another (other than in the traditional sense, of course). It would have been great if Ray could have imagined that the map tunneling thing happened anywhere Ray was, that the trick was embodied in Ray and not in the maps he had, but it wasn’t his imaginum. Anyway, he thought, maybe it was for the best. These guys had a quest, right? They had a lot of issues to work out around their quest, about their relationship and the nature of responsibility to a dead parent, and growing up and assuming your own identity and all that stuff. If he just brought the whole quest to an end with his magic maps, how would their characters develop? Caddy would kill him.

He apologized to Simon and Sarah. Simon hated him anyway and had wanted him to fail, so that all worked out well for Simon. Sarah he felt kind of sorry for. The sooner she got out of this whole square standing thing the better. To try and make himself feel better he bought her the other two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy and took the two kids out for lunch at a pretty nice joint called Chow, next to the bookshop.

‘I’m sorry I wasted half a day for you, guys,’ he said, as they were going their separate ways.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Simon said. He’d been proved right and could afford to be magnanimous.

‘If you’re ever in Australia,’ Ray began, but Simon interrupted.

‘In the future, you mean?’

‘Well, you’re hardly going to be there in the past, are you?’

Simon looked a bit less magnanimous.

‘Anyway, if you ever plan to see some small portions of Australia, look me up, hey? I’ll only be a kid, I guess … maybe you can buy me a beer, say in 2012?’

‘I could buy it then,’ Sarah said.

‘That’d be nice. OK, well, good luck,’ and Ray shook both their hands and headed off.

About four seconds later Simon yelled back over his shoulder, ‘We set fire to a Christmas tree’.

‘I knew it,’ thought Ray.

At the top of Dolores Park he found the place he’d stepped in and stepped back out. He thought about visiting another imaginum, but he was tired – the dorm bed he’d slept in had been covered in plastic under the sheet, and the crackling had kept him awake half the night. Instead, he poked his head around the dividers to see what ponytail guy was up to. He was tapping a pen on a clipboard – did these guys go home ever, Ray wondered, or were they here all the time, day and night? Well, he wasn’t going to sit around and find out. He walked out onto the carpet and back into Craigieburn.