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At night they returned together to the shack. Mr Trevor had been there already and refilled and lit the kerosene lamps. As they walked towards it under the three-quarter moon, Perdita saw from the outside how very small their world was, how frugally they lived. Two rectangular windows shone like animal eyes in the darkness; the shape of the building was crouching, cowered. She felt a rising apprehension at the thought of re-entering the room where her father had bled to death and saw him again, his life ebbing, looking weary and surprised. She wondered if dying people always looked surprised, if death was like that, flabbergasting, and delivered from behind.

Where Nicholas had fallen there was now the oval rag mat, which Perdita had seen before, in the Trevors' house. It was a
cheery, a glorious lie, a text of other men's shirts and cast-offs, floral and scrappy fragments, of something that was once worn by Sal and Daff. Perdita stepped onto the mat with a little shudder. There was a smell too, just perceptible, of eucalyptus smoke. She discovered later that the people from the creek had smoked the house. They had dragged smouldering leaves around the room, to clear the contaminating violence of slaughterous thoughts, to release from captivity the unquiet spirit. They had let Nicholas drift away; they had let him be air.

When I try to recall those first weeks after my father's death, my memory falters. Burdened as I was by the loss of my fluent speech, other events lessened in importance, or were unremarked. Stella took to wearing her Spanish shawl – this is a reliable image because others, I recall, remarked upon it, taking the extravagance as a sign of genuine mourning. I did not attend the funeral. Children did not then, it seems, so there is no tidy memory of my father encased, flower-covered, eulogised and sealed away, framed in his coffin by the beams of a high church ceiling, like an image in a movie. There was only the body in the canvas and its rough removal, the policemen veering into the night with Mary sitting between them; then darkness, and a plume of dust, settling in the far reaches of the thinning lamplight.

The days were all the same, dull and empty and governed by grief for my father, for Mary, for all that had changed. Stella and I fell into repetitious reading and sewing. Nicholas's newspapers continued to arrive, and we also became rather obsessed with the war, following it with an interest neither of us had expressed, or had been able to express, when it was hitherto, so definitely, Nicholas's pastime.

Stella retained the newspaper cuttings on the wall and added a few of her own. She particularly liked the map, which from
the beginning had been filled in to mark the German expansion and which had not been destroyed in her Christmas-time rage. Event time was war-time. We wanted a reliable history, a large scale detachment.

My father had been killed when the siege of Leningrad began, in September 1941, just before I turned eleven years old. This was during Stalin's scorched earth policy; and it was when Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars. I knew of Odessa, Kharkov, Sevastapol, Rostov. I had been nowhere, seen nothing, never attended school, yet I held in my head a war-time globe, the ‘
thick rotundity of the world
' composed of cities aflame, armies massing, territories fought over and lost and turned into graveyards. The map on the wall, corpulent Europe, became covered with Stella's tiny drawings of swastikas. At a distance they looked like spiders, swarming across the paper. From my mother I had already received an engrossing and gaudy education; the world at war magnified my national cartoons and my mechanical geography, and gave me a confident, absurd contemporaneity. I was not squeamish or afraid; no details bruised my heart to make me feel anything more profoundly than I had felt the loss of Mary.

The issue of my speech rankled Stella. She seemed to believe that the stutter was an affectation that I had developed to annoy her, or to dramatise my father's death in the very chamber of my mouth. But in truth I simply found it uncontrollable, and was often in tears with the struggle against my own failure, screwing my mouth into contortions so that I might recover what I had always taken for granted.

Other people also responded with distance. Mrs Trevor certainly seemed to like me less, thinking I was brain-fevered in some way by the shock of the blood and the knife, and even Billy, who had lip-read, to some extent, my communications in the past, now seemed frustrated by the jerky motions of my
meaning. My friends who had inhabited the creek-bed, and who had always welcomed my visits, had disappeared. Willie said they had gone north for ceremonies, for dances, for the ‘sorry-time' of mourning someone in their own community, someone important. There would be rituals for weeks, dancing, grieving. But I believed that they also missed Mary, and had decided to leave.

I longed for Billy's companionship, but he seemed to withdraw. I saw him staring at the sky, as if to read meaning there, or lying with his face on the dirt, compelled by the wriggling life of some tiny creature. In his own anguish, and missing Mary, he became more pathetic and more than usually disassociated. I watched him drag sticks behind him, leaving trails in the sand, and I wanted nothing more than to walk by his side, to hold his restless hands, to still his blubbery lips and dry his eyes each time he broke into sobbing. Mrs Trevor, under a large hat, watched over Billy. She willed us apart with her troubled gaze. I imagined she might embrace me, or cure my speaking, but she was distant and suspicious, more critical of Stella, and removed from whatever affection she had once held for me.

I watched Horatio nuzzle at Billy as he lay on the ground, trying to rouse him. Even this upset me: another shift in affections. The dog was mine, not his. I called Horatio to my side and hugged him and slapped his cheeks, to show my possession.

As I talked less, Stella began to talk more, to fill up the shack in which she now felt abandoned. Every now and then she harangued at nothing precisely, complaining about her life and her daughter, addressing God, or William Shakespeare, but mostly she filled the silence with monologic ramblings of a kind of theatrical earnestness and stalwart misery. Her misfortunes were many, she said, but when the war was over they would travel to England, they would live with her sister
Margaret, they would start anew. She would make a garden, she said, and fill it with clematis and annual bulbs with fat, scented blossoms, and she would sit in a wicker rocking chair in the soft English light, listening to the wireless.

I was filled with wild loneliness, guilt and grief. I thought I would die for all that remained unexpressed. There was a murder of Jews at Kiev on 29 September, as the Germans began their advance on Moscow. We read about it in November. In history books it says that 33,771 people were killed, men, women and children. I remember knowing only that there was a dreadful massacre at this place, and that with indecent, childish misunderstanding, I attached emotionally to the name
Kiev
, thinking that perhaps it was special enough to contain my vast private woe, my sense that some things, after all, were irremediable.

When at last she cast off her Spanish shawl, Stella enlisted Mr Trevor to teach her to drive. Nicholas's Jeep had stood still for weeks, a monument to his sudden disappearance and the rude persistence of objects over people, but one day Stella noticed it and summoned her neighbour. The battery had become flat, the starter motor had seized, the whole machine was about to become sculptural and dead, but Mr Trevor bent into its belly and tinkered and repaired. When Stella sat behind the wheel and pumped the accelerator, so that the engine churned and rattled into life, Horatio leaped up, exulting, thinking Nicholas had returned. Perdita saw him sprint from behind the shack to welcome her father home. He circled the car several times, sniffing the earth, looking confused, his vigorous tail gradually stilling. Perdita had seen Horatio search for Mary – turning in sad circles where she once slept, lying beneath the tank stand where she liked to sit and read – but realised now that he also missed Nicholas. There was no howling or
fuss; like Perdita, the dog moved in a quiet befuddled sorrow. Perdita left the shack and ran to clasp her dog. They sat in the dirt and watched Stella staring ahead behind the wheel, listening to Mr Trevor's explanation of the pedals of the car, sitting resolutely where Nicholas had once sat.

The first time they drove to Broome to collect stores, Perdita was excited. She loved going into the town and believed too that she would discover what had happened to Mary. Stella at first drove slowly, testing each corrugation of the road, each gravel and sand trap, but when they arrived both she and Perdita felt a sense of release. They booked for one night at the Continental Hotel and Perdita found it reassuringly unchanged.

Perdita shared a room with her mother, much like the one she had earlier stayed in, and saw that it possessed the same shadowy coolness and aura of calm. The twin beds were high and neat, and draped by conical white mosquito nets. The walls were pale green. There were no war images to look at. Sunshine filtered in stripes through the cyclone-proof shutters. There was an electric light, and even a fan. Perdita would have liked to stay there for ever.

When she was an adult she learned that Stella did not pay the bill, but that the hotel manager, knowing her tragedy, did not insist. Everyone, she discovered, knew of the murdered husband and the crazy wife and the little girl who had seen something that made her words seize and stick. In small towns there exist these discreet forms of solidarity. Nicholas Keene was not well liked, ‘buggered in the head', they said, ‘a gutless wonder', but his wife, well, she was a pitiful Englishwoman, without a bloody clue, his daughter a lonesome and isolated stray.

Feeling suddenly unburdened, Perdita flung herself on the bed, and absorbed its luxury (the smell of soap powder, once
again, the creaseless cover, the listless encompassing of an over-soft mattress); she remembered her father at the bar, slumping over his whisky, and the palm tree mirror with the liquor bottles lined prismatically before it, and the beautiful woman from the bar, crowned by a high dome of hair, who had given her a packet of salted peanuts. She remembered Sis, from Beagle Bay, who worked out the back in the kitchen, and who had treated her with wise, ineffable tenderness. She remembered the image of her large black hands plunging into a sink of dishes, a voice tone, a compassion.

Early in the evening Stella and Perdita went for dinner to the beer garden. They were served barramundi and chips, with a single ring of canned pineapple, startlingly yellow and balanced, in lieu of salad, at the edge of the plate. Perdita was surprised to see how much food existed in the world. She watched the hotel patrons scoff their meals of fish or steak, and down in huge thirsty gulps their frothy beers. At one point she saw Sis emerging from behind a painted lattice frame. Impulsively, without any hint of hesitation or stutter, she called out her name. Sis turned with a small tray, looked around her, puzzled, then saw Perdita and waved. Perdita waved back. It was like receiving an answer to a necessary question. Sis stood for a moment with her tray, just to look at them. She was smaller than Perdita had remembered and was wearing a tent-like dress patterned with orange hibiscus blossoms. Perdita waved again, across the diners, grateful to be so confirmed.

She was not sure, even later in bed, trying to filter her feelings before sleep, why the exchange of waves had so moved and impressed her. Perhaps, since everyone was disappearing, this sudden reappearance, definite, intense, swathed in large blossoms declarative of festivity, recovered in its sweet sign the possibility of a child she might have been, a child cheerful, unstuttering, a child who has a clean room and a plate of food
and knows nothing of death, and nothing of
Kiev
, and who waves – just like that – in spontaneous joy.

In the room that night, under white electric light, Perdita watched Stella slowly undress. It was the first time she had seen her mother's body exposed. Stella was preoccupied and stood naked for a moment, dangling her bra, then flung it sideways onto the bed as she rummaged in her overnight bag for a nightdress. She had a long shapely back and enormous buttocks. The tops of her thighs were dough-like and dimpled. If Perdita had been able to offer a word of love – just as she had called out Sis's name – she would have done so right then. But her fat tongue bulged and her heart pounded: she was afraid she would stutter. She saw the nightdress recovered and lifted above the head. Then the garment coming down, a soft cream sheath, sealing her mother away.

In the morning, in the dazed half-sleep and half-light of just-awakening, Stella whispered in a thick voice across the room to her daughter.

‘I had my snow dream again last night.'

There was a pause; Perdita waited and heard a slow yawn.

‘It's been years, I think, since I've had my snow dream.'

Stella was lying inside the cone of the mosquito net. She was masked by white folds, which trembled with the sea breeze that flowed in through the open window. Perdita, barely awake, thought her voice sounded untypically vague and gentle, as if fluttering downwards, as if in slow motion, as if carrying into waking, perhaps, some of the soft qualities of snow.

Perdita had developed a rash from lying under the oleander bush in the front yard of the hotel. She held her crimson forearms to her mother and wanted sympathy.