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We never recovered the entire pack of cards. There were forty-two when at last we cleaned and counted them. The search in the mud made Stella distraught. At last she rose up and wrung out the hem of her dress. The sense in each of us assembled – Mary, Kurnti and I – was of a woman blasted hollow by what she could not understand.

When my father returned, his torso bandaged, I realised that I resented him. Mary flinched at his presence. Stella withdrew. Unmanned by his accident, Nicholas snarled at us all, and demonstrated his capacity for careless brutality. Once he spilled his fiery pipe on Mary's bare arm, burning a scarlet hole the size of a two-shilling piece. As she brushed away the hot tobacco, she refused to cry.

Warily, we watched him and moved out of his way. A menacing possibility had entered our lives. We feared him, waiting as one waits for the arrival of a cyclone, cringing, cautious, to see what destruction it will leave, to see what it is that converts a home to a ruin.

This time it was Mary, not Stella, they took away.

The day unveils itself in partial scenes and stages, as if a memory-camera is fixed, and cannot swing around to envision the entire room or every one of the players. From this angle Mary stands in her hydrangea-blue dress, stained purple and lurid with Nicholas's blood; the knife is close by; she looks utterly guilty. It is early afternoon and the air is flame-tinted and warm, streaming with motes, heavy now with the gravity of death descending, of crime, of consequences, of what will soon break open. Mary begins to cry. She is in shock and both sure and unsure of what has occurred. Her body quakes. Perdita steps forward to comfort her. The two girls hold hands and cry together. If we were to zoom in we would see that their faces look the same: with the expression of distress they have indeed become sisters. In the background are stacks of books, lined all around the walls, and newspaper cuttings of war stories, photographs and maps. This is a complicated scene; there is almost too much to take in.

When the two policemen from Broome arrive, summoned by Mr Trevor, they will discover what appears to them a madman's shack. What kind of bloke would have this many books in the bush? What idiot would pin war images where a little girl was sleeping? In the pink light of twilight they will
examine the body of Nicholas Keene, left where he fell, his back and neck pierced crudely and roughly by a knife.

They will comment on how much blood has seeped away, how blotchy the skin is, how death comes with such ugliness. They will notice the shrapnel scars on his back and the trousers unbuttoned, slid to his ankles. They will take notes, real notes, like the blokes in the city, pleased to have a genuine murder to deal with, something crimson and scandalous they can tell their mates about later on.

In the air is a criminal stench of blood. They breathe it in. They fill themselves. As night falls and the sense of drama begins to shift, the policemen will question the little white girl, who says virtually nothing, and seems to have trouble forming words in her mouth. Then they question the older black girl, who has confessed, anyway, and the surprisingly self-composed wife, who talks clearly and succinctly about what has occurred. It is clear that the black girl, Mary, has been raped. Bruises are already appearing on her thighs and at her neck. Mrs Trevor confirms that she's heard rumours about Nicholas Keene and native girls: she hadn't believed it at first and had once sent away a bloody good cook, her best cook ever, because she thought she was lying about Nicholas Keene, who had not long arrived, and had a baby and wife, who seemed educated and well-spoken and was rather handsome, in fact. Didn't seem the sort, not at all, she added.

The policemen roll the body onto an oily canvas sheet, tie each end with a rope, and lift it between them, sharing the weight, onto the back of their ute. They wipe their hands on their trousers before shaking hands with Mr Trevor, who nods, and looks serious, but is also grimly enjoying this event and its tellable possibilities. He touches the brim of his hat as he says goodbye.

Light from a kerosene lamp streams out of the open door of the shack: everyone present notices how unevenly it wavers,
noting that the fuel is low, and they will soon be left in darkness. Large moths are nevertheless hitting against the wire of the door, drinking in what light there is. The girl Mary is with the policemen: she is quiet and compliant. She sits between them in the front seat for the long ride into the darkness. The little white girl watches as they drive away. In the rear-view mirror they can see her child-shape waving, as if she has just had a visitor, and not a murder, to deal with.

Mary does not look back. Mary looks into the night, tunnelled by headlights that catch at animal eyes, ruby glints, vague darting things, and the trunks of trees that appear to swerve, again and again, into deadly near-collision.

Time looped back and replayed. Mary was driven away into the darkness and Perdita vigorously waved, as if waving still meant something. She saw the twin chutes of the headlights fork out into the night, swing left, illuminate a boab, and then recentre. Behind her, inside, Perdita could hear Mr and Mrs Trevor talking to Stella, telling her to gather some things, to come and stay for the night. Billy was with them, clutching at his mother's arm to stop his own rising up and flapping, to still his large, inexpressible shock. When Perdita re-entered the shack she saw her mother stepping around the glossy black stain that had been her father's life. She felt a numbing tingle in her body and a clogging in her mouth.

Stella glanced at her daughter and said simply: ‘Let's go.'

There was no discussion of what had occurred in that room; no words would explain or commemorate between them, or allow either to say what swelled horribly within their hearts. Stella put her index finger to her mouth in a gesture of stern silencing, ‘Shh!' She took Perdita's hand and almost dragged her away.

That night Billy visited Perdita as she lay, unable to sleep, on the thin prickly mattress placed on the veranda of the Trevors' house. Mrs Trevor had tucked her in clean sheets, given her a cup of warm powdered milk, even kissed her gently on the cheek as her own mother had never done. But then she was left alone with the night sounds: scratches, creaks, the breathy sob of the wind. A three-quarter moon was rising in the sky. Everything was softening, achieving a cloak of weak light. The trees were pale; the clouds above carried a pearly, irregular fringe. For the first time Perdita thought about the existence of ghosts and became afraid. He might be there now, distending into phantasmic, airy shapes, long-fingered, eyeless, yawning and strange, his back and neck gaping open where the knife had been. He might be floating between the book-stacks, wreathing around her bed, passing restlessly in and out of the room where last night he was alive and sleeping.

When Billy crept to her bed, Perdita let him in. He made whimpering sounds. He might also have been afraid. They lay together clutching, and it was then that Perdita knew that Billy had seen everything, and would know for always, for ever and ever, know in the pools of his unblinking, watery grey eyes what role each had played and what had occurred. Perdita liked the firm feel of Billy's body, so warm and solid and unghostly against hers. When she tried to speak to him – even though he could not hear – she found herself stuttering. Something fretful and uncommon pestered her tongue, some mischief was there, some remnant of the day. Perdita did not panic; she assumed it would pass.

Billy rose and went to piss from the edge of the veranda. He was unselfconscious, leaning his hips forward, tilting his belly, and Perdita saw the arc of his water shine in the moonlight. But when he returned to the bed Perdita reached down to feel his body and discovered he had his hands crossed over his
private parts. She lifted them away and rested her own hand there, to comfort him, to show that she understood. From inside the house, very faintly, Perdita heard her mother's voice:

Perdita remembered the speech. It was Macbeth, with bulging vision, seeing slain Banquo's ghost. Yet Stella did not sound afraid or alarmed, or as if she had actually seen Nicholas's ghost; she sounded simply as if she was reciting to calm herself to sleep, to hear in measured language what was otherwise fearsome, night-shrieking and dire.

Billy lifted his face as if he too had heard the speech. Perhaps he too was thinking about ghosts, ‘
prisoners of the wind
'. In the semi-darkness Billy appeared even stranger than usual: his eyes were saucers, his hair copper wire, his features stylised by the fluid moonlight they both seemed to float in.

Vera Trevor could not persuade her Aboriginal domestic help to clean up the blood in the Keenes' shack. Downright refused, she said. No way, no way. No amount of threat or persuasion changed their minds. Debil-debil there, they told her. But she couldn't imagine what devils they were referring to, now that Nicholas's body was gone, taken away for a coroner's report, and Mary locked up. She and Stella had to do the job themselves. They took buckets and mops and ammonia cleaning powder, and on their knees scrubbed away at the mess of death. With their brushes they formed arm's-length pink-coloured swirls of foam, then mopped up, and squeezed, and found beneath them
a wooden floor that had not quite forgotten the crime. When Vera realised that the outline of the bloodstain was ineradicable, she contributed a rag mat to cover what remained. It was a vivid mat, multicoloured and rather jolly. Stella was grateful. It was nice, she said. It brightened the place up.

The morning was sunny, renewed. It was possible to believe that what had happened was a terrible dream, and that Mary was there, and Nicholas, and the order of things was restored. Yet Perdita found that some trace of the violence remained like congestion in her mouth. When she asked for her breakfast it was already apparent. Something mangled her speech, syllables jammed in her mouth, she could not begin simple words because the consonants would stick. Stella was that morning like a sleepwalker; unresponsive and quiet. She looked up at her daughter, but did not pass comment or express surprise.

Mrs Trevor leaned across the table and commanded Perdita to open her mouth: she peered in like a dentist, but found no infection or blockage.

‘Poor mite,' she said, non-committally, giving Perdita's right cheek a little pat with her hand.

But then she went back to eating her toast, offering no further mollycoddle, so that even Perdita did not realise how entrenched the alteration might be. They ate their breakfast in heavy silence. Their gazes did not meet. They were each alone.

Later, in the afternoon, Stella and Mrs Trevor went to clean the shack. Stella had woken fully by then and seemed sensible and practical in the context of death, just as she had the night before, when the policemen questioned her. Billy and Perdita stayed behind, playing cards on the veranda.

Perdita wondered where Mary was, whether she was in gaol. She imagined her in a windowless room, sitting alone. She imagined Mary's head bent, like a saint, and her dark face prayerful. And she imagined a religious light, a beam of iridescence, flowing from the star of an overhead lamp. She could not bear to think of the Broome gaol, a dour ugly building, hard and forbidding, or of the prisoners she had seen linked by heavy chains, sweating in the sunshine, their faces creased and exhausted and verging on desperation. Perdita needed to convince herself that Mary was somewhere unworldly and safe.

It was after the cleaning that Stella really noticed that Perdita's speech had changed. She told her daughter to pull herself together, to stop being stupid. Perdita sensed at this moment an overwhelming loneliness: Mary gone, her mother angry, no one to talk to. No one to talk to in this incredible, newly warped voice, this juddery, hunchbacked, troublesome voice. What had lodged inside her? What had stuck in her mouth like muck, like vile disturbance? Already resignation was beginning to claim her.