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When he first arrived, Nicholas had spent a few hours each day with Willie, learning the tribal language of the region. Since Willie was a stockman, paid in tobacco and flour, and certainly not paid more by Mr Trevor to indulge this lazy-bugger whitefella, here for no reason and asking too many smart-aleck questions, Nicholas had to follow him at his work, and even to assist from time to time. As Willie roped steer and branded, made fence posts and erected them, chopped wood, carried water, fixed the bore and the windmill, dragged sacks of provisions and heaped them in the shed, as he broke horses, nailed nails, fashioned furniture from wood, Nicholas gradually collected a sparse vocabulary and a smattering of concepts; gradually too he began to admire the black man's hard labour, and his dignified care in the explanation of his own words. There were times Nicholas felt that Willie was holding back, not telling him everything, or even deliberately misinforming him on some crucial matter or other, but this was the characteristic treachery of the native he had been told to expect. In other terms, however, Willie was indispensable; Nicholas needed help for all that his book-learning had monumentally excluded.

By the time Perdita was about six, Nicholas had acquired enough knowledge to add to letters and reports to the Chief Protector of Aborigines the publication of the first of his meagre output of academic articles. He privately realised now that he would never become a famous intellectual, such as he had seen pointed out, crossing the lawns at Cambridge, moving in long gowns with magisterial self-importance, burnished by citational prestige and university gossip. Nor would his contribution to Aboriginal ethnography be anything other than a crude transliteration of stories, and the more useful, perhaps more respectable, delineation of language systems and kin groups, much of which, in the end, he garnered from Mr Trevor. Like his wife, Nicholas had developed a passivity in relation to his
own life. He lost track of time; he lost purpose and ambition; the barest professional pretext enabled him to stay in a country in which he had unconscionably, disastrously, lost himself. He saw that
Perdita
, the lost one, was the member of his family who most seemed unlost.

Now and then Nicholas received letters from his ageing father – asking him, begging him, to return home with his family, offering inducements, the managership, once again, of the largest store – but these consolidated his sense of estrangement and disaffection. He despised his father for having given him so much, for his unending solicitude and irritating hopefulness. ‘My son', the letters always began. He had, moreover, no compunction in asking his father for money (which always arrived, monthly, with more filial begging), but felt that while he remained abroad he was free from the haberdashery destiny Mr Keene senior would foist on him. To his father he sent letters composed entirely of fictions, suggesting he was on the edge of a scholarly breakthrough, that his work would have a universally relevant importance, discovering, as it must, the base infancy of man. His paper would become known as ‘The Keene Hypothesis'.

When war was declared in 1939, Nicholas was excited until he discovered he had been denied a commission; his fiction then was that he worked in British Army Intelligence, engaged on some kind of clandestine mission. But he would return to England, he decided, as soon as the war was over.

Locals in Broome thought Nicholas Keene a fraud and a bloody no-hoper; no one seemed to know what the hell he was doin'. Wastin' time, prob'ly. Muckin' round. Voices laconically gossiped on pub verandas: why that pommy bloke hung about, anyhows, in that buggered little shack, with his mad-crazy missus and his gone-feral kiddie, was anyone's guess.

Something happened, something broke, in Perdita's eleventh year, in 1940. Stella, normally garrulous, stopped talking altogether, and fell again into her own deep cavernous emptiness, all compulsive interrogation but with no answers to ‘big questions'. She yawned all the time, and would not make eye contact. She stopped washing and eating, she picked undetectable specks from her dirty clothes. She said there was a huge, deafening uproar sounding in her ears, like crowds jostling for their carriage in St Pancras Station, and the clang of metal there, and the resounding platform, and heavy iron machinery slowing down or speeding up, and the hissing emissions of steam from corroded lead pipes. People were shouting, she said, and whistles were blowing. Too many people were shouting. Nicholas also shouted at Stella, but it seemed to make no difference. He found her recalcitrant unhappiness an affront, a disgrace.

Perdita could not really imagine ‘St Pancras Station'. It may have been like the inside of the engine of Mr Trevor's truck, only much, much bigger. Some kind of rattling contraption, hot and agitated. In England, she knew, there existed colossal chambers of stone and metal, buildings in which a hundred people might stand together at one time. In such a place it made sense that everyone would be shouting; there would be
crowded anxieties, dropped parcels and small lost children; there would be tormenting intrusions and no easy exits. Whatever her mother experienced must be truly dreadful. Perdita looked at her turning a teacup, again and again, by its comma-shaped handle. She felt a sudden wave of love and concern, a feeling rare enough, but for which she was grateful. What linked them persisted in the emotional residues of what had been taught, the tales they mentally engaged with, the flights of fancy.

Nicholas decided that Stella needed more time away, in the hospital, in Broome. She had ‘lost something', he said, and Perdita wondered what
thing
it was. Certainly, Stella was possessed of an unnerving silence. Words, thought Perdita. Perhaps it was words she had lost. When they packed to leave, all Stella wanted with her was her biscuit tin of loose buttons. She clasped it to her chest as if it were a book, or a baby.

Although by then Nicholas had his own Jeep, the trip into town was in Mr Trevor's half-worn-out truck. Nicholas and Stella sat with Mr Trevor in the tight little cabin, and Perdita sat with their luggage in the tray, in the dust and sun, jolted at every turn. Through a rectangle of grimy glass she could see the backs of their heads, bobbing like dolls, like strangers, as if inorganic and unattached, and she wondered how long her mother's absence might be, and if, after this illness, she would recover at all. Mrs Trevor, leaning her flushed face forward, talking in serious adult tones, had told Perdita that her mother just needed another rest; just for a little while, she said, where nurses could look after her. But Perdita knew there was hideous desolation there somewhere. This was not simple tiredness but some bigger, unmentionable fatigue-with-life, something that opened the mind up to a railway station and invading crowds.

The visions on that journey were those that will return all
her life. It is not that anything Perdita saw was unfamiliar; it is that they were trailed out, spool-like and consecutive, for future memory, that they were marked by the poignancy and rarity of the occasion – taking her mother away, for who knew how long – and the sense, some intuited, anxious and desperate sense, of the injustice of her disposal, and of its necessity.

From the tray of the old truck, bruised with the wallop of too rough a journey, Perdita watched the shuddering world pass by – boab trees here and there, their bellies distended, their stick limbs dead stiff, scratching at the sky, the sculptural forms of anthills, also quasi-human, flashes of morning light broken by scraggly trees and granite outcrops, random uprisings of startled birds, fleeting shapes that might have been wallaby, a lone bullock, far away, hurtling crazily through the open scrub; all this travelling landscape, all this mobile world, seemed somehow impressed with the solemnity and purpose of their journey. Behind them, a cloud of orange dust mushroomed and spun with the turbulence Perdita understood as catastrophe.

In town Nicholas and Perdita stayed at the Continental Hotel. Perdita loved the long verandas and the wide-open shutters and the inside beer garden, shaded by multicoloured umbrellas. A small Malay man in a sarong and headscarf led them to their adjacent rooms. He bobbed and bowed as he opened the doors. They had beds with clean linen; they had running water and electric lights. Perdita slumped onto her bed, feeling as if she had been battered. There were bruises on her buttocks and knees from the journey, and she felt a sting in the corner of her eye that she knew was the beginning of an infection. Instructed to stay in her room while her mother was taken to the hospital, Perdita simply lay, relieved to have the world at last stop still, worried that she had not said goodbye to her mother. She dozed a little, on the cool soap-
smelling sheets:
Lifebuoy
. A breeze infused by ocean salt threaded through the shutters.

When Perdita awoke she was hungry and went exploring. In a small wooden shed out the back she located a kitchen, and a kind woman bent towards her, touched her cheek ceremoniously, and offered her a breakfast of toast and fried eggs.

The woman – Sis, her name was – ministered sustenance and gentleness to whomever wandered lost into her modest kitchen. Sis was from Beagle Bay Mission and had family all over, she said, all over the place, ebrywheres, ebrywheres roun here. She had married a Japanese pearl diver; they had six children, she announced proudly, now all grown up strong. Perdita replied, sounding earnest, that she was an only child, but that there was Billy, her friend, who was maybe like a brother, even if he was a Trevor, and simple, and could not hear or speak at all. She watched the woman's body move sideways, drying dishes, stacking them.

Then Sis turned to her and said suddenly, ‘Your dad, I seen him roun. But your mum. Is she still alive?'

Perdita was shocked that this stranger might have imagined her mother dead. Or might know something.

‘Hospital,' she said blankly. ‘Mum's sick. In the head.'

This did not describe the noisy railway station, or the competing silence, or the mysterious depleting languor to which her mother was now subject. But Sis looked calmly at her and nodded.

‘Ah, yeah,' she said, her tone sympathetic, as if she knew, in any case, what a railway station might feel like, and what might visit an unfortunate woman like a fist-blow in the dark. Perdita held up her dirty plate, smeared with egg yolk and frilly scraps. Sis took it with both hands and plunged it in brown soapy water.

‘Thanks, missus,' Perdita said, genuinely grateful.

‘No worries.'

Sis turned back to her and sweetly smiled.

When Nicholas returned from the hospital he seemed cheerier somehow. He moved like a man without shrapnel lodged in his back, a man young, unencumbered. In the bar of the Continental Hotel he made weak attempts at jokes, and the locals, knowing already about the mad wife and the reason for his town visit, humoured and indulged him. Perdita sat perched unsteadily on a bar stool, sipping a glass of lemonade. She had rarely seen her father in new company; he seemed inept, but trying hard. As it grew darker she watched him become inebriated; she watched how he leaned on the bar, resting his body there, how his features sagged and transformed, how he gulped as if greedy. At one stage he knocked over a glass of whisky and immediately ordered another, downing it super-swift. He had forgotten she was there. Perdita counted the bottles above the bar, listened to the laughter of drunk men, saw her own reflection, squeamish, in a long wavy mirror etched on the surface with toppling palms. Such a pale small face, such a tentative oval.

Some time later a buxom barmaid, a beautiful woman with slanted eyes and a marcelled hairdo, took Perdita by the hand and led her along the passageway to her room. She left her with a smacking kiss and a packet of salted peanuts.

‘Sleep, luv,' she instructed, as she closed the door behind her.

Perdita thought she would visit Sis, but decided she was too tired, much too tired. Her sore eye was gumming over and had begun slowly to throb. She lay in her clothes and sandals on her luxurious bed, very still, very alone, thinking for some reason, though it was sultry and dank, of her mother's dream of snow. One day, she decided, she would see snow for herself. She would go to England, or Russia, far, far away. Russia. Yes, Russia. She
would go to distant Russia and see the snow. But in the meantime, her mother's dream had become her own private treasure; she fell asleep imagining a soft drift, an endless vertical sadness, a delicate slow sinking, a whiteness, a whiteness.

Nicholas and Perdita were both woken by the call of butcher birds in a nearby tamarind tree, and by a clanking metallic sound that turned out to be a group of Aboriginal men in iron chains, linked painfully by their ankles. They had been released from gaol to make bitumen roads. From the small window of her hotel room Perdita saw them, men joined in this way, humiliated, caught, and wondered what they had done to be so cruelly constrained. They wore ragged trousers and grimy singlets; their faces shone in the sunshine. A prison guard was sitting at a distance under the blue shade of the mango tree, pinching a cigarette into shape, licking it, turning it, slowly striking a match. He inhaled deeply, watching all the while. When Perdita and her father left the hotel, she realised that she recognised one of the chained men. It was Kurnti, who sometimes worked in the stockyard at the Trevors' station. Perdita called his name and waved, and he straightaway waved back, his face offering up a truly innocent smile.

‘Deeta!' he called out. ‘Yah, Deeta!'

Nicholas turned to look, but did not say anything. He simply seized his daughter's wrist and dragged her away.

Perdita carried through the day the image of a black man waving. The smell of hot tar. The clunk of heavy chains. The sound of her own name called out to her, as if it was Aboriginal.

That day Nicholas took her to a convent. It was a large wooden building, lined with shutters. Black and white faces in wimples
peered at them curiously as they walked together up the gravel driveway, lined with purple bougainvillaea. In the front room, where they were told to wait in silence, there was a large crucifix on the wall, which Perdita stared at, fascinated. Christ had a face of famished hollows and softly closed eyes, and a look of calm, self-satisfied repose. Perdita remembered Stella's stories, explicit and unbelievable. She wondered suddenly if Nicholas planned to leave her here, with these stiff, wimpled women in triangular dresses who worshipped this wretched, assassinated king. She experienced a moment of panic; why was she never told anything? Why did adults, always and anyhow, get to make all the decisions?

Perdita was about to ask when a nun called Sister Immaculata led a young woman into the room: Mary. She had bronze-coloured skin and deep black eyes. She stood a little apart, as if in a different world from the convent sisters. Mary was sixteen years old, tall for her age, and had about her an air of maturity and self-possession. Perdita shyly smiled. The smile was more confidently returned. Nicholas explained that Mary had been raised in a Catholic orphanage down south, and that she would be coming to live with them, to cook and to clean, and to help with lessons, while her mother was away. Mary could read, he added. Sister Immaculata performed a little bow and Perdita wondered if her father was someone important. Then the sister lurched forward, all of a sudden, and took Perdita's face in her hands.

‘Dear, oh dear,' she said, staring into her infected eye.

She ordered the child to stay put as she fetched some ointment. Perdita felt the long explorative fingers of the nun, arthritic and witchy, holding open her eye as she applied translucent cream from a tiny metal tube. The nun's thumbs rested beneath her right eye, then her left. Perdita was afraid. She understood the healing intention, but still she felt afraid. Both
eyes were streaming uncontrollably with tears. At some point in the procedure Mary took her hand and stayed close, instantly affectionate, in an implicit companionship. It was a fond, easy handclasp. Perdita felt the lacing of their fingers. This was the moment, the very moment, that Perdita began to love Mary.