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the town’s fringes. It consisted of a stone house built by his father, a stable, a chook pen, and a paddock for a few sheep and goats. The tin roof of the house gleamed in the midday sun. A glimpse of dirt road lay like a fuse through the elms.
    Around him in the trees near and far, in the bracken that littered the bush floor, animals and insects whispered and thrilled, atwitter at his return after all these years. After a while, he lay down and dozed on the ground. He thought of what Edward Fitch had said: They all say how they’d love to string you up. Kill ya all over again . He checked his revolver and tested its weight in his palm, prepared for anything. Shapes stirred on the outskirts of his memory, yawning and stretching, casting about for him. It was not a comforting thought.

    Quinn watched over his father’s property for most of the following day, but saw no one arrive or leave. The apparent abandonment disturbed him. Had everyone fled the influenza? He gnawed at a thumbnail. He rolled and smoked cigarettes. From habit, he checked the linings of his coat and trousers for lice. Reading your clothes , they had called it in France, as if they might ennoble the practice by imagining themselves scholars seeking meaning in tattered manuscripts.
    A crow on a nearby branch harked and shrugged its neck feathers before turning its gleaming gaze on him. Again the bird cried out in its language. Was it a greeting? A warning? They watched each other for some minutes, two creatures of God’s earth, before the crow shuddered as if displeased and launched itself into the air. It landed on the next gum tree and set about preening itself jerkily while keeping a beady eye out for food or danger. He wondered if it could see the ocean from its vantage point, other countries, the desert? The future, the past? This was the bird that Noah dispatched from his Ark to check if the waters of the great Flood had receded from the lowlands: surely it knew everything.
    Every now and again, Quinn’s stomach and chest were racked by burning, and he was forced to stop whatever he was doing and double over until it passed. His eyes watered and unstrung hammocks of saliva hung from his lips. The gas. The bloody gas was what did it. It was in him like a disease. There was no doubt it would infect him forever.
    Holding up a shaving mirror to his face, he practised speaking from the right corner of his mouth, the undamaged side, making a flattened circle of his lips as they had instructed him at the hospital all those months ago. My name is Quinn Walker. Ring a ring a rosie. Fee fi fo fum …
    Sometimes he wept, just wept, would wake from drowsing with a damp face and a leaf or twig pressed into his cheek.
    Towards the end of the day, smoke began to unfurl from the chimney of his parents’ house. Twenty minutes later, borne on a rising wind, Quinn detected its scent. He saw no other sign of life until a lamp was lit inside the house and set the kitchen window aglow. Although unable to hear any of it, he knew dogs were barking down there in the twilight, screen doors were slamming shut, and mothers were calling in their children from the streets and orchards. Soon the house was swallowed by the creeping darkness.
    He scooped out a hole in the ground, made a modest fire and sat hunched with his hands clasped around his knees, a blanket over his shoulders, shaking. A fire was a greedy luxury. Back there, during the war, there was rarely a chance to light a fire, even in the coldest months when snow dusted them.
    He cooked the rabbit Edward Fitch had given him. The lean creature, skinned and rammed through on a stick from mouth to arsehole, dripped its juices into the fire. After devouring it with his bare hands, cracking open each sinewy piece and placing it morsel by morsel into his mouth, he balled his trench coat into a pillow and lay down to watch the flames. The coat smelled of foreign places, of mud and, faintly, of chlorine.