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deep, dark space. The shelves are crammed with cans. He kicks a metal bin. ‘Flour,’ he says. ‘You must always keep the lid on everything. Ants. Or worse. Now,’ he says, lacing his fingers together and bending them back till his knuckles pop, ‘finish your tea and I’ll show you to your new,’ he smiles, ‘home. Home from home.’
    ‘Aren’t we staying here?’
    ‘Thought you’d prefer some privacy. I’ll take your bags round.’ Larry picks up Cassie’s rucksack and goes out, the flyscreen bouncing shut behind him.
    Graham goes to take a closer look at the picture – not a photo, a painting, a small square of painted wood, richly coloured like an icon. Cassie peers over his shoulder. It isnot any sort of icon but a painting of a woman and two blonde-haired children, photo-sharp, surrounded by a heavenly glow. ‘Wonder if that’s Mara?’
    ‘Or maybe she did it?’
    The door bangs making them both jump. ‘Ready?’ Larry holds the door open and sweeps his hand in an exaggeratedly polite gesture. They follow him down the steps. Outside, Graham stops to grind his fag out in the dirt and Cassie catches sight of something – some kind of lizard, big as a Jack Russell, gleaming violet-blue, poised as if frozen beneath the steps.
    ‘Look, Gray.’
    Larry turns. ‘Oh, that’s just our old goanna,’ he says. ‘He lives under the veranda. Won’t hurt you. Meant to bring good fortune, I believe.’
    She stoops to look closer at the glistening folds of scaly skin, the closed trap of its jaw, the exact cold circles of its eyes.
    ‘Isn’t he amazing?’ she says, but Larry and Graham have disappeared round the side of the house. She follows them round the back, which is really the front of the house, though it looks like it’s never used. She can’t see any garden. The steps up to that door are wonky, a rusty old swing-seat on the veranda. They go through a patch of bushes and scrubby trees to a long, corrugated-tin shed.
    ‘Shearers’ shed – as was,’ Larry says. ‘Quite a crowd, the shearers, itinerants. Once a year they’d descend.’
    ‘But no more?’ Cassie asks.
Obvious
.
    ‘What is there to shear?’ Larry laughs. ‘Your own private residence. And conveniences.’ He points out the dunny. On one wall of the outside of the shed is a tin sink. ‘Your bathroom,’ he says, without apparent irony. ‘There is usually water but don’t drink it. That well is shallow – saline. Warm too – suitable for washing. Drink only the kitchen water.’
    ‘No
proper
bathroom?’ Cassie looks dubiously at somethinghanging from a hook above the sink that might once have been a flannel, and a lump of dusty hair-encrusted soap.
    ‘We don’t extend to modern conveniences, I’m afraid, but you’ll soon get used to it.’ Larry opens a door on to a dim corridor with six further doors. ‘You can take your pick,’ he says, ‘except this one –’ he indicates a door, ‘that’s Fred’s when he stays. But I prepared this one. Only one with a double bed.’
    He opens the first door on to a room in which their rucksacks squat like old friends beside a sagging iron-framed bed. The curtains, drawn against the windows, are patterned with the ghosts of unicorns. On the wide, splintery floorboards, like a tan and white butterfly, a whole cowskin. On the box by the bed, a jug and two plastic beakers, and a thick white candle, fresh but warped by the heat, melted on to a jam-jar lid.
    ‘What do you think?’ Larry says.
    ‘I love it,’ Cassie says, breathing in the dry biscuity smell.
    Graham flops down on the bed, grating the rusty springs, causing a patter of rust.
    ‘Rather basic, I’m afraid,’ Larry says.
    ‘No, it’s lovely.’ The look of the bed – it makes Cassie’s legs tremble with tiredness.
    ‘You must keep the door shut – and the window,’ Larry says. ‘Against flies, mosquitoes, spiders, snakes.’
    Cassie catches Graham’s expression and goes to the window to hide her smile. She