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On the return journey Nicholas and Mr Trevor sat in the cabin, and Mary and Perdita sat in the tray of the truck, sharing their space with boxes and crates of stores the men had bought. Before they left town they had been on a shopping trip to Streeter and Male, the general store, and had bought canned milk, cereals, biscuits, corn. At Fongs they had bought a sack of rice, and Perdita had wanted to linger there, where the exotic resided. Then at the bakery they had purchased a few loaves of still-warm bread. This was an unusual treat for Perdita; her mother never baked bread and she had rarely tasted it fresh.

The truck broke down ten miles short of its destination. Mr Trevor and Nicholas stood with their heads under the bonnet, fiddling with the fan belt. They tapped on the radiator with a spanner, and talked in technical whispers. Adjustments were made, the engine attended to. It click, click, clicked, as by degrees it slowly cooled. Mary and Perdita sat in the dirt eating bread and honey, tipped directly from a brand-new jar, spread with their fingers. Flies swarmed all around, buzzing, insistent, but they simply ignored them and ate like they were starving. Perdita would have stuffed herself if she could. She would have taken it all in, every substance and sweetness. She would have filled herself so that there were no spaces left that her mother-memory could inhabit. At some point Mary leaned towards Perdita and with her little finger wiped a trail of honey from the side of her mouth, then licked her own finger clean, winked and smiled.

‘Sisters, eh?' Mary said.

Perdita felt – what was it? – claimed, rescued. She smiled with her own mouth full of sticky bread and felt her small, unnoticed life reconfiguring around her.

By the time the vehicle was back on the road, its old engine cranked by an iron handle into a cantankerous rumble, darkness was falling. Birds were roosting in the twilight, restless, then settling; Perdita could see their bleary shapes on the blood-woods and high in the gums. A flock of galahs rose flapping, then noisily descended. Mr Trevor kindly drove his passengers right to their door. In the bluish evening Perdita saw the outline of their shack loom up, then heard Horatio hurl towards them, frantic with welcoming joy. He rushed at her so energetically, his dog-life effusive and exploding, that he knocked her flat.

What return was it, that night, with no mother, with Mary?

I have thought of it, over the years, not as a substitution – since one person can never, after all, replace another – but as the portentous sign of things made dangerously misaligned. Mary was not a mother, but a sister; there was still Stella's absence, and my inexpressible, almost inadmissible, missing-her. I wondered every day about where exactly she was, what treatment she was receiving. I imagined a handsome doctor in a white gown, giving her an injection in the upper arm as she gazed, distracted, into the middle distance. Her hair was brushed back in even furrows; she wore a simple nightgown of faded pink. It was a generic, dull image, from who-knows-where, but somehow I found it reassuring.

Despite the fact that I was unconvinced of her love (since she had never been a mother who might embrace, or kiss, or reach inadvertently to caress), there was the stringent complicity of our isolation and the far-fetched world of notions
we had daily shared. Perhaps I attached to her snow dream so passionately because it was something personal, some token of a truly inner life she would rarely reveal.

My father groped in the darkness as Mary and I stood at the door. Horatio was still jumping up, not yet ready to be calm, his fast panting exaggerated in the still of the night. Mary reached again for my hand, as if this time it was she who needed the comfort of touch. We heard something fall with a heavy thud – knocked-over books, no doubt – then a scratching and a fumbling. At length the bloom of a kerosene lamp uprose in the darkness, and with it came my father's face, swelling into view, burnished and brass-coloured above the flame he was controlling with his thumb and index finger. The lenses of his spectacles once again took away his eyes, leaving behind twin discs of light. I saw him there, half present, blurred in groggy distance, as if at the end of a tunnel. I pushed Horatio down, gave him a quick smack on the nose to quiet him, and then led Mary, trembling, into our illuminated home.

It looked so small, now, after the room in the Continental Hotel, almost suffocating, and with a heavy odour of dust. A spray of cockroaches fanned open and scuttled into corners. But there was book-scent, and things known, and our shadows in the lamplight, the dog waiting to be fed, the unpacking of the day's purchases. Mary was passive, doing exactly what she was told. I remember that my father gave her a place to sleep beside me, on the floor. He unrolled a canvas swag, and without a word took the kerosene lamp with him and went into the bedroom. The pool of light that he dragged behind him was closed off, contained, becoming a thin bright seam pressed beneath the bedroom door.

Mary was silent; she lay herself down. Even then I felt that something was wrong. Outside a wind started up, a slack moaning wind.

In the world beyond, 1940 was aflame with nations in crisis. The Nazis had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; the blitzkrieg had caused the British retreat at Dunkirk; Luftwaffe and Messerschmitt were dive-bombing the Homeland. Perdita heard all this, all this new military language, riveted with metallic names and foreign locations, from her increasingly remote and war-obsessed father. Although he received newspapers two weeks late from Perth, and then only when Mr Trevor made a trip to town, Nicholas was following the war with an almost scholarly attention. Manoeuvres, tactics, victories, defeats: these excited and frustrated him, made him feel both involved and dreadfully excluded.

He found himself dreaming again of 1918, and yearning for the thunder of tanks advancing and the sheer terror that made grown men, men like himself, shit and puke and call out to God or their mothers in excited extremity. In a repeated dream he leaped over trenches with the stride of a long-jumper, seeing beneath him strewn bodies and grisly death. He carried his rifle, bayonet fixed, up high above his shoulders, keeping it poised horizontally as he had been taught to do, but he never seemed to land on the other side of the trench. He was stuck there, like a corpse in a ridiculous pose. Stuck there in thunderous dreamland, in exploding mid-air.

Perdita remembers the day, in July, when her father announced that the Germans one month ago had entered Paris. His eyes glittered maniacally; she almost felt afraid of him. How could the distant war invade in this way? Nicholas told his daughter that it was only a matter of time before Australia would be attacked, and that he would be summoned, in a leadership role, to defend the hapless Australians from the evil Hun and their allies. There would be unimaginable suffering, he said, and hideous mutilations. There would be air raids and bombings. The sky itself would burn. As he sipped his tea, gleefully misanthropic, Perdita and Mary exchanged frightened glances. He was like a shadow they lived under. He had become darkened and impersonal.

It would remain wholly separate, Perdita's time with Mary. There was something implacable, sure, about what they shared. Mary was by turns girlish and adult, but she looked after Perdita, daily attending her, offering companionship, knowledge and canny advice. She taught her poker (how to shuffle, to deal, how finally, to cheat), desert songs (learned from her mother from whom she'd been taken), and the lives of the saints (the strange details of which she had read about in the orphanage). She taught Perdita, and Billy too, how to locate
pitjuri
, bush tobacco, and to chew it until the sides of their cheeks began to tingle and salivate, so that they experienced its sour, stimulating effects. She showed them the chevron sand-lines of lizards, identifying the species, and taught them how to track back, hunting stealthily, to a log hole or a burrow. The ripples of departed snakes, the scroll shapes and mounds and pathways of bush tucker – all that had been inscribed there before them, in a hidden language never noticed, became suddenly visible.

‘Whitefellas can't see nothin' around them; whitefellas all buggered up in the head,' Mary declared, touching her temple.
‘'Cept you two, of course,' she added with a broad grin.

Under her intelligent guidance the scrub, which had seemed so empty, took on fullness and detail. Every bird had a true name, every mark in the wind-scalloped dirt betokened liveliness and activity. Even the glass-clear sky was a fabric of signs. There were seasons that a whitefella never noticed, marked by tiny efflorescences and the swelling and fading of bush fruit. Mary also knew about the stock on the station – which of the cattle were calving, which horses were slow or ill-tempered, which she wanted the opportunity to ride.

Billy and Perdita were both charmed by Mary. She was cleverer – and funnier – than anyone they had ever met.

They were hanging out washing together, each under a scratchy straw hat, when Perdita asked Mary to tell her story. Billy was nearby, lying in the dirt with Horatio, tickling the dog's belly as he parted his quivering legs. It helped her speak, perhaps, the fact that Billy was deaf, that he smiled up at her as she spoke, with little knowledge of her words. Mary was Walmajarri, she said, from near Fitzroy Crossing. Her people were desert people. Her mother was Dootharra and her father was a white stockman, a
kartiya
, no name, buggered off, somewheres, long time, nobody knows, somewheres, longaway. Her people had gone to a feeding station to get flour and tobacco, then someone from the Government, seeing her pale skin, seized her from her mother and took her to Balgo Mission. She cried and cried. She said that her mother spoke to her in the wind, and that she was crying too, full of whispery breath, overflowing and spreading out, coming like wind-spirit across the land to find and to claim her. But it was no good, they never saw each other again. Mary was six years old when she was taken away. Mission fellas noticed that she was unusually smart, so later, two years later, she was sent down south, to an orphanage in the city called Sister Clare's. To learn to be a
whitefella, she said, to learn all them whitefella ways.

‘Thank you, Sister, yes, Sister. A cup of tea, Sister. Please, Sister.'

There was a comic mischief, a shrewd pleasure, to Mary's skilled mimicry. She shifted accents and registers; her tales held echoes and ironies. Perdita had never heard anyone speak so openly before, or, for that matter, in so many different voices. When Mary recently returned to the north, to the convent in Broome, she heard from blackfellas passing through that her mother had died. Dootharra had rolled into a campfire one night and was too tired, or too sad, maybe, to roll out again. Her skin was burned, she was lost, she was a dark, dark shade. Mary found a rock and struck at her head until it bled, to show in the Walmajarri way her grieving for her mother, to feel it truly and painfully. The nuns had seen her, and scolded her. They said her behaviour was unChristian. She had looked down at the blood-drops on the earth and wanted her own death.

‘I wanted,' said Mary, ‘to send my voice into the wind, to fly to her, to go away, to go long, longaway.'

Mary slumped to the ground, as if unbuckled, and began to cry. There, beneath the flapping shirts and dresses, the thin cotton garments made warm and lit by the sunshine, lemon-coloured, slight and wispy as ghosts, she fell down and wept. Billy was shocked by this sadness, come so suddenly, that he did not understand. He began to flap his hands, swatting at the air, then to moan, and then in sympathy also to weep. Horatio turned on to his belly, paws outstretched, and looked imploringly unhappy, as dogs sometimes do. And though she was the youngest and smallest, Perdita reached her arms around Mary and Billy and gathered them in; and their little group, like another family, inclined lovingly together, couched in the comfort of hot bodies in a clumsy child's embrace.

At night, after Nicholas took the kerosene lamp into the bedroom, to read in peace, or to study the war, or to write his colossal ‘Keene Hypothesis', Mary and Perdita often lay close together and talked in the darkness. Mary was intrigued by the city of stacked books – which she would eventually start to read herself – but remarked that the library did not seem to include a Bible, nor her favourite, most scary book.

‘Good stories. Proper stories,' Mary said with emphasis.

When she had first arrived in the city she was given a bundle of belongings: two gingham dresses, two pairs of underpants, one woollen sweater and green leather sandals. In a brown paper bag there was, in addition, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, a gold cross on a chain, and a thick blue-covered book,
The Lives of the Saints
. Inside the cover was a name, ‘Annie McCaughie'. She had died, Sister Benedict said, of measles or diphtheria; she was With Our Lord, Resting in Peace, and her parents had generously donated her possessions to the Aboriginal orphanage.

From Annie McCaughie's book, Mary learned about the ghastly profession of sainthood. Saints were devoted to God, with extravagant piety, but then equally fated, most of them, to die deaths of hyperbolic and nonsensical suffering. The women, in particular, were predestined in this way, their holiness determined, it seemed, by the measure of their earthly torments. Mary told Perdita the outlines of the stories. St Agatha, having refused the attentions of a Roman prefect in Sicily, was tortured by being hung upside down and having her breasts twisted from her body. She is represented holding her severed breasts before her, lumpish and bloody, on a golden tray, evidence of her virginal courage. St Apollonia, deaconess of Alexandria, who defended her faith against marauding anti-Christians, had all her teeth knocked out in a brutal attack and was pictured displaying her dislodged, dental motifs resting
in her lap. (She was, Mary added, the patron saint of dentists and the saint to whom one prays in times of toothache.) St Lucy, who suffered the gouging out of her eyes, was depicted holding them on a plate, or in a purse, or dangling gruesomely from a stalk like two ripe cherries.

Perdita listened in horror to the stories Mary retold. She had never imagined – even in the theatrical surplus of a Shakespearean tragedy, glutted with sensation – that women could be treated in this way, torn apart and made holy by tremendous injustice and error.

‘I know more saints,' Mary had whispered, her voice deep and warm under the cover of darkness, and Perdita was both curious and afraid to learn more of what humans might do to each other. Annie McCaughie's book, Mary said, had also been hers: it had a page of tissue paper at the front, covering a depiction of St Stephen, the protomartyr, being stoned to death, and a cover embossed in the centre with a circle of gold doves. Inside there were many coloured illustrations, all on the same thick glossy paper, all behind a thin layer of tissue paper, which made each viewing seem a singular disclosure. Perhaps for Mary there was some solace in thinking that suffering might have a spiritual purpose. Or perhaps nothing, in the end, matched the atrocity of a distant mother rolled into a fire, so lost in grief, and so irremediably heartbroken, that she did not care to remove her burning self from the unholy flames.

There were forms of knowledge of the land and the body, carried into adulthood, that Perdita learned especially, and only, from her sister, Mary. Often they would simply walk – Mary said sitting inside for too long was like a kind of sleep – and in their wandering, sometimes with Billy Trevor trailing behind, humming to himself in his own quiet world, some
times with Horatio trotting and sniffing this way and that way ahead, they traded stories and stored up secrets. The twitchy and particular life of animals was of interest to Mary, and she was always aware of the barest movement, of dry grass bending, a rustly stir, the traces and suggestions of other live presences. Her totem was the honey ant: she knew where they nested. With her digging stick she would extract them, and present Billy and Perdita with squirming black-and-amber handfuls. They would suck the backs off the honey ants – popping their sweet abdomens in the cavities of their mouths – while she watched them, pleased. Mary never ate the honey ant herself; it was her creature, hers.