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dry ridgy track that led towards the centre of town.
    â€˜
In her hair were country ribbons
,
    Tied in bows of pink and white;
    In her hair were country ribbons
    In her eyes a gentle light.
’
    But he stopped singing long before he reached the corner of Hindley Street; and as he approached his lodging-house he dismounted from his bicycle and walked the rest of the way. The truth was that he had grown far fonder of Charlotte than he had actually meant to. There was something so unusual and provocative about her; something that stirred him in the night, when he was curled up under his blanket and trying to sleep. Charlotte Lindsay was special, and Eyre was afraid that what he had said to Lathrop was painfully true: he loved her. In fact, he loved her so much that he almost wished that he didn’t.
    His landlady’s husband, Dogger McConnell, was sitting in his red-painted rocking-chair on the porch, smoking his pipe. Dogger had once been a dingo-hunter, out beyond Broken Hill, and he reckoned that in his life he had killed thousands of them. ‘Bloody thousands.’ His face was ascreased as a creek-bed, and his conversation was unremittingly laconic. He could tell tales of the outback that, in his own words, would ‘shrivel your nuts’, but he rarely did. He preferred instead to smoke his pipe in satisfied silence on the porch and watch the comings and goings along Hindley Street, and take a prurient interest in the activities of his wife’s eleven lodgers, who were all male, and all clerks, and all desperate for female company, always.
    â€˜Back early, Mr Walker,’ he remarked
    â€˜Yes. The young lady’s father was home. Rather unexpectedly, I’m afraid; and not in the best of sorts.’
    â€˜Hm, I’ve heard tell of that Lathrop Lindsay. Old Douglas Moffitt used to do odd-jobs for him, painting and suchlike. Not an easy man, from what Douglas used to say.’
    â€˜No, certainly not,’ said Eyre. He wheeled his bicycle into the cool dusty shadows under the verandah. He only left it there so that the leather saddle wouldn’t get too hot in the afternoon sun, not because he was frightened that anyone might steal it. Apart from the severe punishments which met any kind of pilfering, hardly anybody in Adelaide apart from Eyre knew how to ride a bicycle, and even when they had seen him do it, many of the blackfellows still believed that it was impossible, or at the very least, magic. The children called him Not-Fall-Over.
    Eyre came back out and sat on the steps.
    â€˜You’re glum, chum,’ said Dogger. He puffed his pipe and frayed fragments of smoke blew across the sunny street.
    â€˜Well,’ said Eyre, ‘you’d be glum if you were in love.’
    â€˜With her?’ Dogger cackled, gesturing behind him with his thumb. ‘You’ve got to be bloody joking.’
    â€˜I don’t know why you’re so hard on her,’ said Eyre. ‘She’s a fine woman. She’s always good to me, anyway.’
    Dogger took his well-gnawed pipestem out of his mouth and leaned toward Eyre with a wink. ‘She’s good to me too, chum. Always has been and always will be. But asfor love. Well, no, love’s in your head. You can’t love any more, when you grow older, you don’t have the brain for it. And the things I’ve seen, out at Broken Hill. Different values, you see, out beyond the black stump. And, to tell you the truth, you don’t have the steam for it. Do you know what I mean? And she’s had eleven children, Mrs McConnell. Eleven; nine still living, seven normal, two potty. Left her as capacious as the Gulf of St Vincent, without being indelicate.’
    â€˜Indelicate?’ said Eyre, mildly amazed.
    They sat together on the verandah for a while in silence. The sun began to nibble at the branches of the gum trees on the other side of the street and the dusty lanes and gardens began to glow with the amber