Tom bought a round, and the curator edged closer. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know if what they say about the paintings is true?’

‘What do they say?’

‘Ah well.’ A claw flipped, dismissing private hope. There remained the pleasure of imparting gossip. ‘There’s a whisper that Nelly doesn’t actually get rid of her paintings after they’re photographed. That they’re stashed away, accruing value.’ The voice was malicious and admiring. ‘She’ll make a killing one day.’

Once, after Tom had gone with her to a gallery in a suburb of tall houses and broad-leafed European trees, Nelly said she had some shopping to do and showed him the list inked on her palm: milk, cheese, bread. He drove to the nearest supermarket, where he picked up a few things he needed himself.

At the checkout, Nelly arrived with a carton of milk and a sliced loaf.

‘Is that it?’ he asked.

She had her purse out and he saw that it held only a fi vedollar note and a few coins. Not enough for cheese at the prices charged by the small, expensive store.

Tom walked up to the top of the farm track, where he knew his phone would have coverage. The air over the paddocks was a substance between liquid and paper. It held, on the horizon, the trace of a mountain: a watercolour blotted while wet into almost blankness.

There was a message from his aunt, left that morning, asking him to ring her urgently.

No message from his mother.

He imagined her dead, of course. He had failed to call her the previous day, and now she had died. Plains and cities and snow-headed peaks filed before his eyes: vast India passing with her. The ground of history gave way. Tom Loxley swung in sickening freedom.

He pressed the numbers that would bring about a changed world.

In the farmhouse at the bottom of the track, Jack added an artificial sweetener to his mug. The shading of hair on the sides of his hands gave them the look of a drawing of themselves.

Tom said, ‘I left the gate ajar. And some food in a bowl.’

‘Foxes’ll have that.’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow night. Friday morning at the latest.’

On the wall behind Jack was a frayed piece of tribal cloth in a wooden frame, a beautiful scrap in buff and dull ochres. Baskets woven from grass hung beside it. Yellow and red kangaroo paws crowded a greenish metal beaker on a table. The sleek couch, grey with a thin stripe of lemon, was a replica of the one Tom owned.

He sipped the tea Denise Corrigan had insisted on making, and felt her gaze on him. She was an unremarkable woman, with her father’s remarkable eyes. Tom saw that she was enjoying the effect of the room, its calculated undoing of assumptions created by brown brick veneer. He looked away, to the window framing fields with a filmy backdrop of mountain.

Jack said, ‘Rain’ll ease up later. I’ll go up and have a gander. Take one of the dogs.’

When Tom rose to leave, he was confronted by another anomaly. A set of hanging shelves by the door paraded kittens, boots, thatched cottages, mermaids: each miniature and doubled, a display of china salt and pepper shakers.

‘Mum used to collect them.’

Denise’s voice, utterly even, defied him to betray disdain. He was familiar with that tone.

On the step, he asked, ‘Is your father OK? I mean, to go looking…?’

‘Yeah, he’s good. The pacemaker’s made a difference.’ Denise added, ‘I’ll go with him.’

‘I didn’t mean to trouble…’

‘No trouble. Wednesday’s my afternoon off.’ She nodded at him; smiled. In flat shoes, she was taller than Tom by inches.

She said, ‘You must be worried about your mum.’

‘It’s nothing serious. But I have to get back.’ He clicked open Denise’s umbrella. ‘She’s eighty-two. Arthritis in both knees. When she gets up from a chair, there’s this tearing noise…’

Denise nodded again. She told him she was a physiotherapist at the local health centre. She pulled up the hood of her raincoat. ‘It’s cruel, arthritis.’

He lowered the window and thanked her again.

‘No worries. Drive safely.’

Tom had started up the engine when she leaned forward. ‘They turn up, you know. Dogs. I’ll ask people at work to keep an eye out.’

Children draw rain as a finite thing, a band of broken strokes descending through fine weather. The rain curtain: Tom, driving at a crawl along the breakneck road curling down from the hills, could remember searching for its watery beads all through a monsoon; but the rain never showed itself until it had him surrounded.

Hours later, the rain had eased and the city was a thrust of tombstones at the horizon. Soon the freeway would catch up with fast food, shopping malls, showrooms, car yards flying shrouds of plastic bunting. But for the moment there were pale, fl at paddocks that went on and on. This was landscape that could only just remember colour, as time fades bright experience. There remained the faintest recollection of something called green.

Coming up behind a truck, Tom saw sheep pressed against slats: eyes, dirty fillets of shoulder and breast.

Jack Feeney kept a few beef cattle, large polled grey beasts, in Nelly’s paddock. For the rest he ran sheep.

Light stretching in the sky pulled silver through charcoal, transforming clouds into a softly expensive pelt.

Tom pulled out and overtook the truck as soon as he could.

At home, the first thing he did was step into the shower. With water streaming over his turning body, his mind occupied itself with shit.

‘I knew something was wrong. It was almost nine-thirty and I hadn’t seen her and you know we have a cup of tea at nine. When I knocked, she was still in her nightie. And there was a smell…’ Here his aunt’s voice had faltered. ‘She’d done you-know-what on the floor. And trodden it into the carpet.’

‘But why? How…?’

‘She says she didn’t realise she’d done it. “It must have slipped out.” That’s all I can get out of her. I’ll never be rid of the stains.’

The last thing Tom had done in the country, in accordance with the instructions taped to a wall in Nelly’s kitchen, had been to lift out the pail in the lavatory and bury its contents.

As a boy, sharing a lavatory with his mother, it had been impossible to avoid the stench of her faeces. It was not until he left home and shared living spaces with other people that he realised their shit smelled different-from each other’s, from his-even though they all ate the same food. But his mother rose unaltered from that elemental reek when he buried his waste in a hole by Nelly’s fence.

Did that mean the odour of shit was genetically determined, in part at least? Towelling himself dry, he thought there must be a book about it, one of those fashionable volumes offering packets of whimsical facts, histories of fi sh, biographies of numerals. An Archaeology of Excrement. It’s got to have occurred to the French, thought Tom.

A low, black iron gate swung open into his aunt’s garden, where a red man had been strung up in a tree; outlined in fairy bulbs, he held a sign that blinked Season’s Greetings. November still had a few days to run, but Audrey was always early with her decorations. She prepared for Christmas as for a catastrophe, warning, ‘It’ll be here before you know it,’ weeks ahead of the feast, observing its advance with the grim satisfaction of an Old Testament prophet notified that the first wave of locusts had been sighted.

Tom went down the path that led to Iris’s door, which had once been the side entrance to his aunt’s house. The slippers aligned on her doormat were deep pink with golden chevrons across the toe. He crouched; the fabric was still damp.

He thought about the moment when his mother must have realised what had happened. Iris, whose knees made it impossible to stoop; to pick up a coin or a pill, to scrape her own fi lth from the carpet.

‘She’d been sitting there for an hour.’ Audrey, on the telephone. ‘You’d think she could have told me sooner, instead of just sitting there with it all around her.’