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old farmers when you closed the deals. Their respect was grudging, but it was real, and some of them would tell me what a rare and fine woman you were, a battler. It made me proud to listen to the things they’d say, to tell me something I vaguely knew. What with it just being me and you and no man to hold us together.
    As I grew up we talked more and more. Sitting by the fire after another long day in the fields or the cowsheds. We were close. Not like the gossips said, as if we were some odd kind of married couple. No, we knew who we were, what we meant to each other, what we were aiming to achieve. We knew well our purpose in life. I look at you now and it seems so long ago that I heard your voice, strong and clear and full of intent. I see you standing tall on the edge of a field of wheat. I see you looking up to the night sky, watching out for the weather, reading the stars. And here you are now, playing with the clasp of your handbag and you seem so far away, so absent.
    Mother. How can I tell you what I need to say? The doctor told me it might disturb you too much, that the news will upset you. Even though you are forgetting so much, the doctor said that if I tell you it will come back to your mind and then disappear, only to return. And that the nurses will see you crying, sobbing. Yet when they come to give you comfort you will have forgotten what it was that troubled you so. But you and I are all we have. All we’ve ever had. I have no one else to tell that will understand, that will comprehend the details. It is to you I have told everything. You were always the one. The one and only.
    My earliest, clearest, memory is standing in the paddock above the creek. The sky was so big, so blue all around us. The huge gum trees, hundreds of feet tall. We were just a small boy and his mother, two specks in an immense world. You won’t remember that day. It wasn’t so special to you. I looked up at you, you were saying something, the sun was behind you and I could barely make out the details of your face. But you were beautiful and you were mine and in the immensity of the world I felt safe and held. I squeezed your hand as hard as I could and you looked down at me and the sun caught the flash of your smile and I could feel the soft skin of your palm.
    Once, years later, when the crop failed and you looked so worn and worried, you said to me, as we stood together in the barn, that we’d be fine, that the two of us together would be strong and we’d pull through. We hugged, I was only ten or eleven, but I knew I was the man in the growing and that our life was our life. And the flattened crops could be cleared and the soil tilled and seeds replanted. So how can I not tell you now, when we have told each other everything all these years long?
    â€˜Mother, are you warm?’
    She smiles, hearing but not listening.
    She is still looking past me, over my shoulder. I turn around. What is it she is seeing?
    â€˜Mother, I found Trailer’s old leash the other day. You know the one with the metal studs. It made me think of how he used to chase those big goannas away from the chookhouse, barking like crazy. Those dinosaurs scared the life out of me, with their shoulders like bulls and teeth that would rot your arm if the bite got into your blood. But he’d square up to them any day. You used to say we were the three musketeers. Me, you and that dog without an ear. Do you remember him, Mum?’
    In one of those rare moments of lucidity her eyes light up and she sees me as her son. Maybe she even remembers the old dog, but she doesn’t say so. Just smiles a little.
    â€˜The barn,’ she says. ‘the old coppper kettle in the barn.’
    She stares at me. Into my face, as if for the very first time. Then she is lost again. Her eyes are distant, as if they are tired and have given up, as if they recognise nothing of this day, of this place.
    â€˜My mammy said he called by today, after his