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cheek-bone, a tumescence now evident. ‘Mate, what do you think.’ It wasn’t a question.
    ‘Came back today, did she?’
    Sombre nods.
    ‘And you’d like to patch things up, get title to the place?’
    ‘Well, yes.’ More nods.
    I leaned forward. We were closer than we’d ever been. ‘Stanley,’ I said. ‘Consider this possibility. Morris signs the Prince over to you. The next day, Liz leaves. She wants a divorce. She’s got twenty years of sweat equity in this business. You’ll have to sell it and give her half.’
    Stan’s eyes went large, went thin. He shook his head, smiling, not the cheeriest of sights.
    ‘Forget that,’ he said. ‘She’d be the one walking out. She’d get bugger all.’
    I tasted my beer. Not bad for the Prince, where it usually failed any test, no doubt tainted by something living in the pipes.
    ‘Bugger all,’ said Stan, eyes willing me to agree. ‘That’s right, not so? She’s the guilty party. Believe me, I’d get the evidence.’
    ‘Stan,’ I said, ‘where have you been? That stuff went out twenty years ago. It wouldn’t matter if you got pictures of Liz with Rickos and his Crazy Cuban Castanet Caballeros, all eight of them, naked except for sombreros.’
    ‘Half,’ he said. ‘You sure?’
    Eric Tanner tapped me on the shoulder while continuing to talk to the members.
    ‘Never mind bloody doctors,’ he said. ‘What do they know? Bloody drugs. Probably bloody lollies. Gazebo effect. You heard of that, Wilbur? Scientific term. Ask the dentist, he’ll tell ya. I say, ya time’s ya time.’
    He turned to me. ‘Listen, Jack, we goin to see the Blue Boys cop a hidin this Satdee? In the circus tent.’
    ‘Put your life on it,’ I said. ‘On second thoughts, put something of value on it.’

Sarah Longmore’s studio was in Kensington, on the rough edge, near the Dynon railyards in a cracked and potholed dead-end street with unpaved verges, weeds battling to survive.
    Just before a six-metre corrugated iron wall, I turned into a small cinder yard. A yellow Ford ute, better days seen, had its blistered nose to a building – partly brick, partly cinderblock, partly rusted tin. I parked the Lark next to the ute, switched off the wipers, sat listening to the engine note. The machine had been in the oily and expensive hands of Kevin Trapaga, Studebaker fanatic, and it was making the lovely stroked-cat sound, the V-8 cat. This would last for only a short time, so it was important to savour every moment. Then I could go back to driving Linda’s Alfa.
    With reluctance, I switched off and got out. The day was cold, wet, clamorous. I could hear trains, what sounded like steel being dumped from a height, the regular banging of a stamper of some kind, and, from inside the building, the screeching sound of metal-grinding. A steel-framed sliding door was the only entrance. I put a hand to it and pushed hard. It slid easily, taking me by surprise.
    The inside was one huge, dim space, easily ten metres high at the peak. Unlit fluorescent lights hung in two rows from wooden beams, the floor was a patchwork of surfaces – oil-stained concrete, uneven bricks, cracked pavers, a rectangle of wood, bleached and blotched, probably covering an inspection pit.
    Objects stood around, welded metal forms, human-like but bigger, one-and-a-half human size perhaps. In the gloomy corner to my right were what could be witches around a suggestion of a pot. The thing nearest the cauldron was carrying something. A piglet? A child?
    Close to them were what I first took to be two boxers, angular stainless steel figures close together, the impression of a left being thrown at an averted head. But as I walked, I saw that one figure appeared to be bound and the other had a projection from his hand. He could be cutting the throat of the bound figure.
    I looked left and saw a pack of dogs, six or more, attacking something, mounting each other in their lust to get at it. But then I noticed the thighs, the