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there a sadder, more disappointed noise.
    They brought him into town like that. From the pub verandah men saw the Lambs barrelling down the hill like mad bastards, and they heard them singing and shouting like they were ready for rape and revenge, and the sight of them rioting on the open tray of that Chev suddenly put people in the street.
    Lester Lamb swung into the darkened dirt yard of the Church of Christ and got ready to beat down the door. He had to get inside and turn on the lights, throw the windows open, find the minister, tell the people. Oriel Lamb, infant astride her hip, was singing and wildeyed. The horn was blowing and the headlamps tore the darkness.
    Out on the tray, as the graveldust caught them up and blotted out the world, the girls laughed like they were famous.
    Quick cradled Fish’s head in his lap. He felt the blood moving in his brother’s body. Fish’s eyes were open, unblinking.
    We got him back! Quick heard his father bellow to the drinkers across the road. Back from the dead. Fish Lamb is back! Praise the Lord!
    But Quick held his brother’s head in his hands and knew it wasn’t quite right. Because not all of Fish Lamb had come back.

III

    Back in Time
    B ACK in time there was a big empty house. It was owned by a very respectable woman who had cheated several people in order to get it. The local Anglican priest was the only visitor she ever had, for she was lonely and a widow, though very rich. The priest secretly thought she was a nasty piece of work, but he also believed that there was good in every heart and it only needed to be nurtured. She had such an enormous house—six bedrooms and a library, with grounds full of fruit trees and fragrant shrubs—and in an inspired moment he put a proposition to her. She was lonely and bored, he said, why didn’t she open her house? To native women, perhaps. She could be the Daisy Bates of the city.
    Somehow it took her fancy, the Daisy Bates bit, though she’d never met one of these natives. Missionary purpose came upon her like the flu. Girls were procured and the house filled. She aimed to make ladies of them so they could set a standard for the rest of their sorry race. She showed them how to make their beds and wash, how to dress and how to walk. She read aloud from the novels of Sir Walter Scott and she locked the house up at night. The mission girls climbed into bed with one another at night and cried. They had been taken from their families and were not happy. They crawled from windows but were tracked down and returned to the house. The widow showed them how to serve at table and wear hats in church. One evening she went into the library to find a girl dead on the floor from drinking ant poison. Before she evicted the rest of them, she made each of them come into the library and take a close look at the twisted death snarl of the poisoned girl. When she got the last one out the door and into the night, she gathered up all the linen and burnt it under the fruit trees in the backyard. Then she sent a neighbour to fetch a constable.
    She was at the piano one evening a few weeks after, mulling over the possibilities for diversion, when her heart stopped. She cried out in surprise, in outrage and her nose hit middle C hard enough to darken the room with sound. Her nose was a strong and bony one, and there was middle C in that library until rigor mortis set in. The room soaked her up and the summer heat worked on her body until its surface was as hard and dry as the crust of a pavlova.
    That’s how the vicar found her when he came visiting to tick her off about the girls. The smell knocked him over like a shot from a .303 and he ran out with a nosebleed that lasted seven days and seven nights. He didn’t die, but he lost his faith in humankindness and became a Baptist first and a banker second.
    The house was boarded up, and it held its breath.
    In 1923, after a racehorse called Eurythmic was put grandly out to pasture, a publican from the