Cassie was oaty porridge: pale, reassuring, wholesome. Ash thrilled to her satisfying breasts, her orderly teeth. Her eyes, widely spaced, gave her the remote look of someone listening to distant music. She wore empire-waisted velvet dresses, with sleeves gathered at the wrist, which had belonged to her mother. Cassie was taller than her mother, and the jewel-colored dresses barely skimmed her knees. Evoking a vanished age, they intensified her faraway air. Her reading glasses had large frames that made her look like a girl playing at being a grandmother; when she took them off, there were a few seconds when she seemed dopey and pitiless. All her effects were like that, uncalculated, incidental, and her artlessness was part of her power. Sometimes she turned up in jeans topped with a vintage blouse, pin-tucked and demure, in a lilac-y sort of blue. Tiny fabric loops fastened two nacre buttons at the back. At the sight of Cassie’s shoulder blades, faintly shining through the blouse, Ash wanted nothing more than to undo those buttons.
There were fragile, potent, slightly witchy things on Cassie’s windowsill: a bird’s skull, lavender sea urchin cases, a view of the Prater painted on glass. There was also a photo of her parents: solid, dark strangers. They proved what Ash had known all along: Cassie was a changeling, magical. That was the kind of foolishness she called up in Ash. He would have been embarrassed for any friend who indulged in it.
Cassie had the Sydney imperviousness to cold. Her velvet dresses—emerald, sapphire, topaz—were unlined. When an icy gale blew from the west, she slipped a weightless coat over her dress, or a lambs’ wool cardigan. She seemed to own neither scarf nor gloves. Her concession to winter was socks inside her boots. Previously, Ash had thought of Australians—if he thought of them at all—as no-nonsense, practical people: Canadians with tans. Now he realized that he had overlooked what history had required of them: they were visionaries, adept at denial. Australians had seen pastures where there was red dust, geraniums where there were trees as old as time, no one where there were five hundred nations—they dealt with winter as a tank deals with a blade of grass.
In bed, arching beneath Ash, Cassie bit the side of his palm. There was salt in her, he decided. That made him think of his mother: her salty Scottish eyes. His mother had e-mailed Ash on the day he left: “Australians are hardworking and very successful. They are suspicious of their success and resent it. They are winners who prefer to see themselves as victims. Their national hero, Ned Kelly, was a violent criminal—they take this as proof of their egalitarianism. They worship money, of course. Anyway, enjoy yourself.”
Cassie always wore two rings, a garnet and a square-cut emerald in old-fashioned claw settings, which had belonged to her grandmother. Her friend Pippa had told her, casually, “You’ll be murdered for those one day.” People often remarked that Pippa and Cassie were like sisters. That was quite true in the sense that each girl kept track of, rejected, and coveted whatever belonged to the other.
In the winter break, not long after Ash met Cassie, a colleague invited him to his family’s sheep station in western New South Wales. “It’s the real Australia out there,” said Lachlan, as if Sydney were a collective hallucination. The real Australia was called Yukkendrearie, or so Lachlan said—it wasn’t so very different from the name on the map. Ash and Lachlan crossed mountains blue with menace. A distant viaduct had the look of all out-of-place objects, sinister and forlorn. Then the mountains were behind them, and there were the carpet rucks of threadbare hills. All this was disappointingly familiar: sheep, hills making waves.
Ash asked, “Will we see real Australians?” It was a joke, but not wholly. He was keen to encounter the outlandish, to be enlarged or overwhelmed.
“Bound to. Strong, silent types. Famous for self-reliance and endurance. Hardworking and practical. Stoic.”
“So the real Australian is a Victorian Englishman?”
“All archetypes are fossils.”
Ash didn’t say, Shame to have a borrowed one, though.
Lachlan sent a text message whenever they stopped to stretch their legs. His partner of eleven years had recently left him and wasn’t returning his calls. Zipping up his jeans beside an empty highway, Ash saw a row of canaries in a windbreak. But it was only an arrangement of light.
In the afternoon, the scenery drained away. What was left was flatness and sky. There was no end to either, and a peculiar light. All that space might have been restful but scraped Ash’s nerves instead. Like reality TV, it was both harrowing and dull. How did Sydneysiders trim their children’s fingernails or buy stuff from the Apple store or sign up for Fun Runs with this enormity breathing down their necks? Ash wondered what word might apply to what they were moving through: certainly not “landscape.” It was a presence that spoke of absence; it brought to mind the desolation left by a plundering army—which wasn’t, after all, very far from the mark. Half a cow lay near a fence, its head twisted away from the ivory basket of its ribs. It was only a stray splinter from the coffin of pastoral romance—that had perished here long ago. Ash had pictured himself striding up a hill in a borrowed Akubra hat. What lay around was less disconcerting than the magnitude of his mistake.
“See that signpost?” said Lachlan as they flashed past. “Bony Track. Half a dozen Aborigines were tied up and shot there in the 1830s. Plenty of those colorful local names all over the country. We’ve a Butcher’s Creek ourselves. Stone dry.”
“What happened there?”
“My forebears were much too canny to keep a record.”
In a far paddock, a broken feather was stuck into the ground: some weirdo had neglected to cut down a tree. The Subaru rushed at the dead, discarded distance. A hawk appeared, strung up in the white air.
Lachlan said, “Not much farther now, couple of hundred k. We’ll be there in time for tea.”
He said, “Dinner, I mean.”
He said, “Since Dad died, Mum likes to have tea on the table as soon as it gets dark.”
“It’s dark at five,” said Ash.
“Yes.”
An e-mail had not been sent or had not been read or had failed to arrive. The fragrance of dead lamb enveloped them as they drew up before the sprawling timber house. But food was irrelevant—on getting out of the car, Ash discovered that he was ill. A light-eyed dog stood a little way off and barked at him. The wind came and slapped everyone. Ash spent the three days of his visit in bed.
Plastic ring binders filled a fireless fireplace in his room. A massive wardrobe, sturdy and somewhat scarred, loomed against one wall. Ash looked inside, hoping for something useful, like extra blankets, but found only a wire coat hanger and an emery board. He spread his coat over his bed and climbed in. Pressed-metal walls tightened around his dreams.
His door opened. It was hinged in such a way that from his bed Ash couldn’t see who was standing there. After a while, a child with a dirty face edged around. The farm was run by Lachlan’s sister, Bob. Presumably the child belonged to her. A hard brown arm connected the door to the child. The arm was paler on the inside, like the limbs of the yellow-eyed creature he had seen on arrival. Ash concluded that it was Bob’s child who had barked at him—it made perfect sense.
A second door gave on to a side veranda shared with Lachlan’s room. The wind shouted at the English elms, and Lachlan shouted at his phone: “You can have the Eames recliner.” “No, I never said Glen could come and get it.” “Well, what I mean is, we’ll say it’s yours.” “That’s right, it’ll stay in our lounge room. But now you’ll be the one who sits in it.” “Well, if I say Glen can have it, will you come back?” “What do you mean that’s bloody typical?” “No, you can leave the Thermomix out of it.” “No, Glen can’t have it either.” “That’s right, one or the other.” “What do you mean, typically binary?”
Sometimes Ash woke to hear Lachlan’s keyboard. Lachlan had a major research grant and was writing two books at once. Meanwhile, Ash shivered unproductively. He wore a cashmere sweater, a Christmas present from his mother, over his pajamas. He struggled into his coat