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That night he was alone for the first time, without his team or his parents. His father was a doctor and his mother was a nurse and they had wanted to go with him, but that night they were both working and Griffin had said, insisted, that he didn’t need them there.
    His father had just bought him a car. A red Datsun. It was hard luck he couldn’t find his way back. His new car, he soon realised, had a temperament that wasn’t cooperative. He began to smell something and looked through the window at smoke pummelling from the engine. He stopped the car by the side of the dirt road and got out to inspect the bonnet warily. He didn’t know what to do – wait or go find some help. He didn’t have the slightest idea of where he was. It was dark. The streets led nowhere.
    Griffin walked for a while, looking for a house or someone he could ask. He saw a light in a park. There was an Aboriginal family grouped together, food cooking over a fire, and he was hungry. They saw him standing there. Marie, fifteen, was the one prodding the fish with a stick. The fire was a colour he had only seen in zinc. He walked forward. That image marked his life. Marie, a dust-coloured girl, fed him fish in a park.
    When he took the piece of fish from her she glowed with the fire as she smiled. He saw the dark corners of her eyes, and he smiled, too. The fish tasted taut and sinewy, with a layer of sweet oil, the juices dripping down his chin.
    Brought back to life by these first few bites, he saw Marie’s sister. She lay out in the grass, neck elongated, under an ironbark tree, humming to herself. When she moved to look at him, he turned away.
    Marie’s cousins and brothers came with him to the car. Nocturnal like all youths, they were wired for the late hours, and rowdy, stirring the empty streets. This was their territory, Griffin understood; they didn’t need a sign or paperwork.
    ‘That can’t be your car!’ they said, rushing to it excitedly, stroking the smooth red top. They laughed and joked with him as if he was one of them. These muscly dark boys pushed the car down the street to the service station. There was no room left to touch an inch of the car, so he walked beside them, feeling foolish at first. On the way he told them something about himself: he wanted to play cricket for Australia.
    ‘They’re not going to pick you,’ Marie’s brother, the age of an uncle said. ‘No black’s ever going to get on the team.’
    Griffin’s dad would have disagreed with him. He told Griffin he would make it. He’d been bowling Griffin out the back since he was a toddler. At the service station, Griffin called his father to pick him up.
    When he came back out the fellas shook his hand and said, ‘Come over here anytime. You know where we are.’
    One of them stood forward for the group and said, ‘You like our sister, eh?’
    Griffin felt his face turn plum.
    ‘If you hurt a sister of ours, there’ll be trouble.’ They exchanged wild smiles.
    When Griffin got back to Brisbane and told his family of his encounter; they did not like it.
    ‘They are not your sort,’ his father said firmly.
    In conversation with his parents, Griffin agreed with their interests, looking down into his tea. He told them only what they wanted to hear. But the minute his car was fixed he was down the highway again.
    He soon lost count of the times he stood by Marie’s door, and she came out, always smiling, looking like the first time he’d seen her. Marie’s family made sure there was no chance he was related, and they weren’t breaking rules of kinship. It was a two-year courtship, in which time they were never left alone together, even chaperoned to the cinema by Marie’s Aunty. They were married in a church in Mudgeeraba.
    Griffin’s parents had a section of the house for them, and they moved in. On their wedding night, they drove quickly down the coast when they heard the news that one of Marie’s brothers had died by electrocution. This