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didn’t touch you or anything, did he?’
    â€˜What!’ She looked at me in revulsion. ‘Is that what you think?’
    â€˜Rob, you can tell me. You can tell me anything.’ I took a step towards her.
    â€˜No he didn’t.’
    I stopped and she looked at me.
    â€˜He didn’t.’
    It was true.
    She got mad again. ‘Jesus, Zac. Is that my problem, huh?’
    â€˜It happens.’
    â€˜Yeah, something might be wrong. It has to be child abuse.’
    â€˜I was guessing, okay. He was weird. You were weird. I was guessing.’
    â€˜You guessed wrong.’
    â€˜Yeah, well if you gave me some little clues I wouldn’t have to guess all the time.’
    Robin stood glaring at me and I stood glaring at her. Finally she looked past me at the fire and she said, ‘Soup’s burning.’
    The can was blackened and burned, the soup bubbling and sizzling down a side. I grabbed a stick and nudged the can back from the flames. I put wood on the fire.
    I said, ‘We should go and see him. We came all this way. We should go and see him about this invoice.’
    â€˜You’re right.’ She nodded. ‘ I’ll go now.’
    â€˜No.’
    She said, ‘Maybe that’s why I came. To sort this out with him. And I should ... do it.’
    â€˜Yeah, but you don’t have to do everything alone. In fact, you can’t. You’re not allowed to under the rules of a relationship. It’s the law.’
    â€˜Zac, the President’s plane isn’t missing. An asteroid isn’t going to crash into the earth. It’s stupid parent stuff.’
    â€˜Sure. Can we talk about it first? And we’ll go and see him and get it sorted.’
    She sighed and looked at me and nodded. ‘Okay.’ She stepped the four steps to me and she put her hand on my shoulder and she kissed me on the cheek. She stepped back again before I could hug her. ‘You know, out on the road, when the radiator had overheated and you were doing James Dean with Liz Taylor?’
    â€˜Yeah. I know it was Giant, not East of Eden. It was a mental typo. No iPhone coverage. I couldn’t google for a memory check.’
    â€˜When you were standing like that with your hands over the rifle and your leg bent over the other. I never realised it before. It’s Jesus on the cross he was doing. You looked like Jesus.’
    â€˜Jesus, huh? I would rather look like James Dean.’
    â€˜That too. Zac doing James Dean doing Jesus. Whoow.’ She took abig gulp of air and fanned her face with her hand. ‘I need a smoke. I need a joint.’
    â€˜Okay. I’ll get it,’ I didn’t want to see her walking away from me anymore. I thought if I went and got the deal and rolled us a smoke, we could keep talking it out.
    I had to search the car even with the interior light in my hand. It was under the front seat. I had an idea about mood music. Like the night I’d put Bo Diddley on to get her to come. Track four. ‘Little Girl’. It was old-time and spare. Guitar and drums. He wants her to go home with him. That’s the song, over and over. I wound up the volume.
    I went to the car boot and found a torch. I could tell she was gone as soon as I stood up.
    I ran back, hoping she might have gone in the house. ‘Rob?’ I went to the empty window frame and called in quietly, ‘Rob? Are you in there?’
    I felt tired. I felt sagging, empty falling down tired. I closed my eyes and listened to the song. It’s a happy up-tempo version. No piano. Bo gets them clapping. It sounded thin this far from the car. The sky was all stars maybe not beyond reach.
    I looked at the ground by the fire and I saw that the rifle was gone.

    ***
    I took the torch and went into the desert in the direction Robin’s father had pointed with his knife. There were snake tracks in the fine sand and flickers of glass that caught in my torch beam. I found her