Tommy burst out laughing. Katherine cupped her mouth with her hand, her eyes watering, she couldn’t stop. She clutched herchest and fell back in the chair and dabbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “So what happened?” Tommy asked her finally.“What did he do with them?”
It took her a while to steady herself. She sniffed and sipped her wine. “He was furious! Didn’t believe the vet at first. Asked him, ‘You sure about that?’ and the bloke offered to get both camels all excited just to prove it, though there’d be a hefty surcharge. Billy sent him packing. I don’t know if he ever caught up with the trader in the end. The camels, I think he sold them. Knowing Billy he probably even made a profit, claimed they were thoroughbreds or something. The men joked about it for months afterward. I didn’t dare. As you can imagine, Billy did not see the funny side, but it still tickles me to this day.”
“Two males,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “Didn’t he notice?”
“You can’t exactly see it on a camel. None of us thought to even check. This trader must have known, surely, but poor Billyjust took him at his word.”
They drifted into silence, lingering laughter at the tale. She sipped her wine and looked at him fondly. “I’m so glad youcame, Tommy.”
“I’m not staying.”
“I know. But just having you here . . . Billy felt your absence, I’m sure he did, not that he ever told me how he felt aboutanything. He was a man of silence, mostly. Maybe you all are. But he missed you. There’s no doubt about that.”
“Aye, well.”
“It’s unfair, what happened to you both. You were so young.”
“You weren’t much older.”
She shook her head. “No. And that wasn’t fair either.”
“I’ll get off in the morning, I was thinking. It ain’t good for me, being here. Head down to Glendale, then into town, seeif I can pick up a coach.”
“I can arrange one for you? A private carriage?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Shall I come with you then? To the house?”
“What for?”
“Billy always struggled. Took him years before he went back. Probably you could count up all his visits on the fingers ofjust one hand.”
“Yours or mine?” Tommy joked, weakly, but Katherine didn’t laugh. He was ducking the question, doing his best to avoid hergaze.
“I mean it. Let me come with you. I’ve my own goodbyes to say down there.”
He thought for a moment then shook his head. “I think I’d best do this alone.”
That night he lay awake in one of the guest bedrooms, tracing tendrils of flowers on a section of wallpaper lit by a shaft of moonlight. Dog-tired from the journey but he couldn’t sleep. He knew that wallpaper, this bedroom. The furniture was different—one big bed now, not two—but from the moment Katherine had stopped in the hallway, wished him good night outside the door, he had known.
This was the same room he and Billy had slept in, the night their parents were killed.
Chapter 44
Tommy McBride
Around the workers’ compound, past the derelict watchman’s hut, following the bridle path through sparse woodland and overlush grazing fields in the west, until he turned uphill onto a southern slope where the terrain was more barren, riddled withrock and scree, stubbled with spinifex and towering termite mounds, cathedrals of another world, and in the distance glimpsedthe slender blue gum forest that had once marked the boundary between Broken Ridge station and his family’s little cattlerun.
Tommy could have ridden blindfolded, he’d done the journey so often in his dreams.
He dismounted in the trees and walked the horse through, the brush thicker than he remembered it, overgrown. On the otherside he stood gazing over the sloping plains, ablaze in the morning sunshine, the land scrubby and perished, not a blade ofdecent feed. He took off the hat Katherine had given him—one of Billy’s, she had said—and forlornly wafted the flies withhis hand. The place was a wasteland. And to think it had once been his whole world.
He settled the hat back on his head; good
