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and wisdom, and didn’t deign to reply.
    â€˜So who are these people we’re going to see?’ Jenny asked.
    â€˜Good guys. The best.’
    â€˜What do they play?’
    Billy seemed to be thinking long and hard about his reply. ‘I guess you’d have to call it country music,’ he said. He laughed and Jenny laughed with him. She was beginning to understand. If the country itself was created by song, then how could there be anything other than country music?
    They drove on and on into the red vastness, wrecked cars by the roadside, kangaroos and emus bouncing in the middle distance, disused mines and shacks on the horizon. Jenny lost track of the time but when Billy eventually stopped the Land Cruiser after three hours or so, she was glad of the break. They appeared to be absolutely nowhere, a scrubby bit of outback no different from the last hundred miles of terrain they’d passed through, but Billy, she assumed, saw it differently.
    He got out of the Land Cruiser and headed for the nearest high place, a mound of red sand that was not really very high at all, but he climbed it, stood on top and scanned the territory, exalting, as if reclaiming it for himself. She let him stand alone there for a long time before she went to join him.
    â€˜It’s a big, big place,’ she said.
    â€˜Even bigger when you’re lost,’ Billy added.
    She looked at him and smiled to acknowledge his dry wit, but he didn’t smile back. He wasn’t being witty.
    â€˜Yeah, OK, all right,’ he said defensively. ‘I’m lost, OK, I’m lost.’
    â€˜What, do you mean youdon’t know the songlines for this area?’
    â€˜That’s one way of stating the problem,’ he said, sounding peevish and urban now, not at all the attuned man of the desert she’d set out with.
    â€˜Don’t you have a map in the truck?’ she asked.
    â€˜If I had a map I wouldn’t be lost.’
    He slunk away, brooding and simmering in silence. Jenny looked around. The lack of landmarks was startling. There was nothing at all to navigate by. She caught up with Billy.
    â€˜Well,’ she said positively, ‘not so very long ago we passed a mining camp. We could drive back and ask them for directions.’
    â€˜It was at least fifty miles back,’ Billy said bleakly. ‘I don’t have enough petrol to get us there.’
    â€˜Oh dear,’ said Jenny.
    â€˜I had other things on my mind, all right?’ Billy said, defending himself from accusations Jenny had no need to voice.
    â€˜We could light a fire,’ Jenny suggested. ‘A distress signal.’
    â€˜No matches,’ Billy said, and before she could suggest anything else he added, ‘It gets worse. I don’t have any food and I only brought half a pint of water.’
    She looked at him as though he were a subhuman idiot.
    â€˜Is it my fault if I was brought up in a suburb of Melbourne?’ he whined. ‘I just read about the songlines in a book, like everyone else.’
    It was late afternoon. At least the sun was past its hottest point. They stood in silence not daring to look at eachother, having absolutely nothing to say. Jenny thought of the various forms of murderous revenge she could take on him and feared that the land might do the job for her all too soon.
    â€˜There is one possibility,’ he said weakly at last. ‘As it happens I always carry a portable generator with me, just in case. It’s petrol driven. I could siphon the last of the petrol out of the Land Cruiser and then we’d have a little power.’
    â€˜And then?’
    â€˜And then you could play your guitar.’
    â€˜I’m not in the mood for a jam session.’
    â€˜I’d do it myself but a cello isn’t the same.’
    â€˜What are you on about?’
    â€˜You’d play the guitar very, very loud. The noise would carry for miles. Somebody would hear it and come