‘I can’t drive anymore.’

          ‘I have to sleep.’

          ‘Sleep here, then.’

          He shut his eyes. She marvelled at his ability to sleep like that, one elbow hanging out in the sun. He’d driven so far this trip that his right arm was browner than his left. This way, at least, he’d even things up a little. His face relaxed and the sharp lines that had begun to fold themselves around his mouth eased, became faint shadows in the bright sun.

          After a minute or so, when his breathing had become regular, she got out, closed the door quietly and walked back down the burning blacktop. She felt invincible under the shade of her hat brim. She wandered over to examine the jagged streaks of tyre marks in the tarmac, some hers, others older. She walked past the yellow warning sign with its flying kangaroo, back towards the basking lizard, surprised by how far she had travelled in what had seemed like a split second. The road lay thinly on the red earth, no more than a slick of tar across the old gravel. There was no other sign of human life besides a distant wind pump, broken and motionless. She looked further up the road, wondered how far they were now from the body of the kangaroo and what had become of it.

          The lizard raised its head, displaying at her nudging sandal. Its tongue was blue, and she drew her foot back, worried about poison. Everything was poisonous here, or dangerous in some way. Their Australian friends were quick to warn them of the spiders, the snakes, the heat. Even the sun was deadly, burning through the thinning ozone. She should go back and cover his arm.

          She turned to look back at the car, to see if his arm was in the sun, and caught her breath when she could see only the empty road. She thought for a moment he had driven off and left her there, a tiny speck under the sky, alone with the curvature of the earth. She stood motionless, poised as though she were barely anchored to the world, as though it could suddenly lose its gravitational attraction and she could fly off if she made any unwary movement. Then she realised there was a bend and dip in the road, imperceptible, but enough to hide the car. They were reaching the edge of the great flat hinterland and were beginning to enter the rolling valleys of the coast, where the road followed the dictates of the land and the rivers, rather than the ruler-drawn lines of the map. Soon they would have left these wide horizons and would be in the closer confines of the valleys, and then the city, and then back to the cramped streets and glimpsed skies of England. This journey, which had come to seem endless, would have a conclusion after all.

          The heat blasted up from the blacktop and down from the sun, beating against the felt of her hat. She could feel it through the soles of her sandals and in the shifting uneasiness of the melting tarmac. The lizard arched and hissed again, its tongue and everything about it improbable. Everything in Australia seemed to her to be backwards, inverted, some sort of cosmic joke, designed after a few beers. God made Australia last, she used to joke, when He should have been resting. Her Australian friends didn’t find it funny.