He heard her cooee off to his right. It was an unsettling call, syllables that straddled word and sound; an eerie trace of the real and imaginary vanishings in which Australian folk legend abounded, a mythology whose richness betrayed the fragility of European confidence in this place.

Tom never heard it without thinking of a picture that had hung in his first classroom in Australia: a small girl in a landscape of yellow grass and tall, splotched gums, the pretty wild-flowers that had led her astray still clutched in her pinafore. Light folded her in its cloth of gold, and drew a veil across the distant foliage that blocked her escape. She wept in her shining prison: lost in Australia, a predicament the Indian boy had understood at once.

The plan was to cross the hill from south to north. They had started out on parallel tracks about twenty feet apart but Nelly now sounded further away.

Tom came to a log-ridden gully. Halfway down, he knew he couldn’t get any further. He called to the dog. To Nelly.

He followed his yellow tapes back to the path and found her waiting for him. She said, ‘The gully’s too deep here. We should try further up, where it peters out.’ There were scratches on her hands, and on one side of her face.

‘What’s that smell?’ he asked

‘What smell?’

They sniffed. ‘There. I keep smelling it.’

‘Native mint bush.’

She snapped off a leafy stalk and passed it to him. The clouds parted. ‘The sun,’ they said, together.

Every time they set out again, Tom felt a little surge of hope. After about an hour his spirits sagged.

He checked his watch and saw that all of twenty-eight minutes had passed.

Sometimes he called the dog’s name backwards. To shake things up a little.

‘What sort of knot was it?’

He told her. Added, ‘It won’t work free.’

They were sitting by the side of the track on their jackets, eating apples. Tom said,‘There’s all this folklore to do with knots.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Knots are supposed to contain power that can be used for good or evil. It’s called maleficium. There’s a long history of people attributing magical powers to knots. The Romans believed that a wound would heal more quickly if the dressing was bound with a Hercules knot, which was their name for a reef knot.’

Nelly ate apples core and all. She twirled the stem of this one in her fingers before letting it drop.

‘In Scandinavia the name Knut used to be given to boys whose parents already had as many children as they wanted. People believed that even the word for knot was powerful enough to prevent another pregnancy.’ Tom said,‘You wouldn’t think that’d survive too much reality, would you?’

‘I don’t know, they probably lucked out more often than not. A woman who had as many kids as she wanted would’ve most likely been older. Less fertile.’ Nelly had produced a pencil and was unfolding her map.

Flies sizzled past Tom’s face. Somehow he began talking about Iris. Not the detail; he found himself unable to use the words mother and shit in relation to each other. But that he feared she wouldn’t be able to go on living on her own. ‘My aunt says it’s time she went into a home. And she’s probably right. But of course Ma hates the idea. She starts crying every time the subject comes up.’

He added, ‘It’s not like all nursing homes are terrible. I’ve offered to drive her around, find a place she likes. But she won’t even think about it.’

In this way he established Iris’s irrationality, and his willingness to do everything that might reasonably be expected of him.

Nelly had stopped drawing. She asked, ‘So what does she want to do?’

Tom was about to say, She wants to stay where she is, of course. But knowledge that had remained hidden within him, so that he had been able to ignore its tenancy, chose that moment to emerge into the light.

‘She’d never ask. But she’d like to live with me.’

He waited for Nelly to assure him that it was reasonable for the old to be sent away from their families into the care of strangers.

He waited for her to say what any reasonable person would say; what he himself had said to friends beleaguered by the needs of elderly parents. But that’s crazy. You have your own life to lead.

Nelly said, ‘Is that possible?’

Tom saw his books dispersed, his study transformed into a lair. He saw pillowslips stained with hair dye, and loose Strepsils turning sticky in a drawer. He saw his mother in a big pink chair in the sunroom, her flesh warming, the blurry nimbus of her perm.

‘Not really.’ He got to his feet. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

Migration had entailed so many changes that years went by before Tom remarked a decisive one: in Australia he was no longer the child of the house. The obvious displacement in space had obscured a more subtle dislocation in time. The shift, facilitated by his father’s death, was sealed by the proximity of his young cousin, Shona. She was a large, dull child, lightly spotted with malice; their relations were wary but amicable.

That first Christmas, eating roast turkey at Audrey’s table, Tom saw his uncle pluck the wishbone from the ruins of the bird. Automatically, he put out his hand. No one noticed, because attention was focused on nine-year-old Shona, who screwed her eyes shut, grasped the other end of the greasy bone and pulled. Tom’s gaze shot to his mother, but Iris was saying, ‘Tell, darling, did you make a nice wish?’ The boy pretended to be reaching for the gravy.

Not long afterwards, and in quick succession, he was displaying symptoms of diseases evaded in disease-ridden India. Measles, chicken pox: the classic illnesses of childhood. It was a simple ruse and it failed. His mother had to go out to work. Tom was told to be a big boy; tucked up and left for the day, with TV, a thermos of Heinz soup and a stack of Shona’s old comics for cheer. Outside the window mynahs called into the huge Australian silence.

After he recovered the second time, Tom remained healthy for years. There was no one to look after him; the message had been received. But it was couched in cipher. What remained vivid from that Christmas was the recollection of looking across the centrepiece of plastic fir cones and seeing his mother speaking with her mouth full. The sight of food that was neither inside nor outside the body, food that had broken down into an indistinct, glutinous mass, was disgusting: an Australian rule clever Tom Loxley had absorbed. He would believe it was the reason he flinched from the memory of that meal. The wishbone he had not been offered vanished under a slime of mashed fowl.

Consider the great cunning of the operation. It enabled the boy to transfer his gaffe to his mother. It demonstrated that he knew better than she did; that in the antipodes their roles were reversed. It aroused his pity. Crucially, it shielded him from pain.

But it was not foolproof. Hurt thrust deep festers slowly. Time passed, and Iris grew frail, and what Tom could not bear to grant her was childlike need. A request that he fasten her clothing or cut up her food might provoke a putrid eruption; at best, a spike of rage. It was a disgraceful reaction and he did his best to master it. He eased his mother’s arms into her cardigan and folded a tissue for her sleeve; he wiped her swirled excrement from the floor. With cautious steps, Iris was fi nding her way back to the kingdom of childhood. One of the emotions it aroused in her son was a terrible envy.

A thin stream of self-pity was decanting itself into Tom. They were climbing the hill for a last foray into the bush, Nelly a few steps ahead.

‘It’s nothing like you and Rory,’ he said wordlessly to her back. ‘We don’t talk. It’s not one of those modern relationships.’

His thoughts slid to Karen’s parents. The Cliffords were as groomed and athletic as the couples featured on billboards for superannuation funds. They played tennis three times a week and jogged around an artifi cial lake every morning. Tom had once watched them power walk down a path in twin designer tracksuits with the wind lifting their silver hair. In their dealings with their children, they deployed a brisk, practical brand of affection. One Christmas, Karen and her sisters had been given copies of their parents’ wills, and invited to choose furniture and other keepsakes from the family home. They were also informed that their parents had inspected a range of what they termed low and high care facilities, and entered into agreements with suitable establishments.‘We don’t want you girls bothered with our lifestyle options.’