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more thing - well, perhaps just one: the roof could raise and tilt like a white wing. We stood, Jack, the owner, myself, and admired the clear perfect slit of ultramarine sky. My heart, I confess, was once again filled with envy.
    The noise of an approaching helicopter did not annoy me. After all, I sleep with fire trucks and police sirens going past my house each night.
    What are the helicopters up to? Jack asked.
    Someone off the Gap.
    He frowned. Oh dear. Does it happen often?
    All the time, once or twice a week.
    As we looked up the helicopter entered the parallelogram of sky framed by the lifted roof and the rammed-earth walls. And there it stayed, like a black invader inside a human cell.
    Oh dear, said Jack.
    He turned to me, passing his large hand across the stubble of his jaw. Why don't you call Sheridan?
    While I dialled the first of Sheridan's many numbers, Jack stood with arms folded across his chest, staring at his ruined sky.

CHAPTER FOUR
    THE TWO HOUSES ON Pittwater had stood side by side for many years, although to call Jack's old place a 'house' is to stretch the truth a little. It had once been a house, and it certainly had a good solid sandstone fireplace, but by the time Jack paid his $2,000 and took possession, the structure had collapsed into a heap amongst the wild lantana. Jack had propped up the walls on two sides and put a corrugated-iron roof on top. He had constructed a deck, and here, in a place commanding spectacular views of the estuary and the escarpment, he had erected a Japanese soaking tub and this he then connected to a little stove which served not only to heat the bathwater but to provide a campfire for his deft and tasty meals.
    Somewhere very near by, in the middle of the floor, there was a toilet, as disconcerting to some guests as the household habit of naked bathing in the hot tub beneath the frosty stars.
    Through this extraordinary campsite, burgling possums and thieving kookaburras came and went, the kookaburras by day, the possums by night, and when August came and the westerly began to blow, Jack's carefully drawn plans would be lifted straight off his drawing desk and carried, soaring like sea eagles, out above the scrub.
    Snuggling right next door, behind Jack's blind back wall, was a more conventional structure, a rectangular wide-verandahed house with a big sandstone chimney at its heart. Alison and I had once owned this house, together with Sheridan and Clara. This old place had not been perfect. It lost light too early in the afternoon and it was very cold in winter, but it had this splendid wide verandah on which great thick wistaria vines had twisted themselves.
    It was to this site that I returned with Jack late that afternoon, walking up the steep path through the white-barked gum trees. As I walked I could feel the pressure of the tape recorder in my pocket, but there was an even greater pressure in my heart because both these houses had been violently destroyed.
    In January 1994, when we were in our fourth year in New York City, fire swept down that hill, leaping with explosive force across the steep fire trail along which Alison and I had so often walked at the end of our day's work, a trail on which she had suggested I change my character 'Hermione' to 'Lucinda', a trail which led, not through this dreadful hell of burning birds and trees, but to a high rocky bluff where you could sit beside huge cinnamon-barked angophoras, their trunks as smooth as human skin, and look down to that cerulean blue water and above it the ultramarine sky and when I wrote, in those years, about being in love, then these trees and this water were part of the language together with, thwack, the tight tumescent smack of a spinnaker filling with wind on the water far below.
    It was here that our first son had been conceived while the jacaranda petals lay upon the lawns like so many carelessly discarded jewels.
    It was here that the fire roared like a train, incinerating our house, Jack's