‘It’s a bit difficult sitting down here,’ he said. ‘If you want to get rid of me, you’re the one who’ll have to go.’

‘Oh Lee, I don’t want to get rid of you. I don’t want to get rid of anyone. We all have to get on, living in this place the way we are, for God knows how long.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This place, Hell. It seems like Hell sometimes. Now for instance.’

I don’t know why I was talking the way I was. It was all happening too unexpectedly. It was a conversation I wasn’t ready for. I guess I like to be in control of things, and Lee had forced this on me at a time and a place that he’d chosen. I wished Corrie were there, so I could go and talk to her about it. Lee was so intense he scared me, but at the same time I felt something strong when he was around – I just didn’t know what it was. I was always very conscious when I was near him. My skin felt hotter, I’d be watching him out of the corner of my eye, directing my comments at him, noticing his reactions, listening more for his words than for anyone else’s. If he expressed an opinion I’d think about it more carefully, give it more weight than I would, say, Kevin’s or Chris’s. I used to think about him a lot in my sleeping bag at nights, and because I’d be thinking about him as I drifted into sleep I tended to dream about him. It got so that – this sounds stupid but it’s true – I associated him with my sleeping bag. When I looked at one I’d think of the other. That doesn’t necessarily mean I wanted him in my sleeping bag, but they had started to go together in my mind. I nearly smiled as I sat there, thinking about that, and wondering how he’d look if he could suddenly read my thoughts.

‘Do you still think about Steve a lot?’ he asked.

‘No, not Steve. Oh I mean I think about him in the same way I think about a lot of people, wondering if they’re all right and hoping they are, but I don’t think about him in the way you mean.’

‘Well if I haven’t offended you and you’re not with Steve any more, then where does that leave me?’ he asked, getting exasperated. ‘Do you just dislike me as a person?’

‘No,’ I said, horrified at that idea but getting a bit annoyed too, at the way he was trying to bully me into a relationship. Guys do that all the time. They want definite answers – as long as they’re the right answers – and they think if they keep at you long enough they’ll get them.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘sorry I can’t give you a list of my feelings about you, in point form and alphabetical order. But I just can’t. I’m all confused. That day in the haystack was no accident. It meant something. I’m still trying to figure out what.’

‘You say you don’t dislike me,’ he said slowly, like he was trying to figure it out. He was looking away from me and he was very nervous, but he was obviously leading up to an important question. ‘So that does mean you like me?’

‘Yes Lee, I like you very much. But right now you’re driving me crazy.’ It was funny how often I’d thought of us having this conversation, but now that we were having it I didn’t know if I was saying what I wanted to say.

‘I’ve noticed you looking at Homer kind of ... special since we’ve been up here. Have you got a thing for him?’

‘It’d be my business if I did.’

‘Cos I don’t think he’s right for you.’

‘Oh Lee, you’re so annoying today! Maybe you shouldn’t have tried walking on that leg. I honestly think it’s weakened your brain. Let’s blame it on that, or the weather or something, because you don’t own me and you don’t have any right to decide who’s right or wrong for me, and don’t you forget it.’ I stormed off in a hot passion to the other side of the clearing where Fi and Homer had been making a yard for the chooks. The chooks were in it, looking shocked, maybe because they’d heard me chucking my tantrum; more likely because they were wondering what the hell they were doing there.

Oh. ‘What the hell.’ I just made a joke.

I watched the chooks for a while, then cut across the clearing again to where the creek wandered back into thick bush and lost itself in a dark tunnel of undergrowth. I’d been thinking for a few days I might try to explore down there a bit, impossible and impassable though it seemed. This might be the time to do it. I could work off some anger and get my mind onto something else. Besides, it looked cool in there. I took my boots and socks off, stuffed the socks in the boots, and tied the boots round my neck. Then I bent over and tried to pretend I was a wombat, a water wombat. I’m the right shape for that, and it was the only way to get under all the vegetation. I was using the creek as a path, but there was a definite sensation of going along a tunnel. The greenery arched so low that it scraped my back even when I was almost kissing the water. It was cool – I doubt if the sun had penetrated the creepers for years – and I hoped I wouldn’t meet too many snakes.

The creek was narrower through here than it was in our clearing, about a metre and a half wide and as much as sixty centimetres deep. The bottom was all stones, but smooth and old ones, not too many with cutting edges, and anyway my feet were getting tough these days. There were quite a few dark still pools that looked very deep, so I avoided them. The creek just chattered on, minding its own business, not disturbed by my creeping progress. It had been flowing here for a long time.

I followed it for about a hundred metres, through many twists and turns. The beginning of the journey had been sweet, like most new journeys I suppose, and there was the hope that the ending might be sweet also, but the middle part was getting tedious. My back was aching and I’d been scratched quite sharply on the arms. I was starting to feel hot again. But the canopy of undergrowth seemed to be getting higher, and lighter – here and there glints of sunlight bounced off the water, and the secret coolness of the tunnel was giving way to the more ordinary dry heat that we’d had back in the clearing. I straightened up a little. There was a place well ahead where the creek seemed to widen for ten metres before it turned to the right and disappeared into undergrowth again. It spread out into a wider channel, because the banks were no longer vertical there. They angled gently back, and I could see black soil, red rocks, and patches of moss, in a little shadowy space not much bigger than our sitting room at home. I kept wading towards it, still bent-backed. There were little blue wildflowers scattered along the bank. As I got closer I could see a mass of pink wildflowers deeper in the bush, back from the creek. I looked again and realised that they were roses. My heart suddenly beat wildly. Roses! Here, in the middle of Hell! Impossible!

I splashed along the last few metres to the point where the banks began to open out, and sploshed out of the creek onto the mossy rock. Peering into the wild of the vegetation I struggled to distinguish between the shadows and the solid. The only certainty was the rosebush, its flowers catching enough sunlight through the brambles to glow like pieces of soft jewellery. But gradually I started to make sense of what I was seeing. Across there was a long horizontal of rotting black wood, here a pole serving as an upright, that dark space a doorway. I was looking at the overgrown shell of a hut.

I went forward slowly, on tiptoe. It was a quiet place and I had some sort of reverential feeling, like I did in my Stratton grandmother’s drawing room, with its heavy old furniture and curtains always closed. The two places couldn’t have been more different, the derelict bush hut and the solemn old sandstone house, but they both seemed a long way removed from living, from life. My grandmother wouldn’t have liked being compared to a murderer, but she and the man who lived here had both withdrawn from the world, had created islands for themselves. It was as though they’d gone beyond the grave, even while they were still on Earth.