Aldo remembers, through the late-night haze of his seventieth birthday party in a back room of the Brisbane Workers’ Club, with the glow of port on his lips and Mary on his lap, the week in 1999 when he twice injured his hand. His eyes blur with time and distance. His well-wishers allow him, as they have learned to do in recent years, a moment to himself. He drifts amid the tunes from Rich’s guitar and the plumes of Mary’s cigar and his fingers move over the dimples and ridges of disturbed tissue on his right palm, the papery skin, he imagines, rasping like a freshly-laundered scarf.

Where Mary sits now is where, during those early, lonely Brisbane years, Patience would curl herself in the evenings while he listened to op-shop tapes in his Carrington Street bedsit. Aldo drew in ink and watercolour the women of whom he had dreamed in his adolescence: brutish, thick ladies, German waitresses, Amazons, firewomen. The nervous wriggling of Patience and judicious pulls on his new brass hash pipe kept him awake into the early hours, when he’d block his ears to the late-night traffic and imagine he was back with his dad in Uralla in the little weatherboard shack next to the creek. A ‘dead-end town’, his dad had called it. ‘You wanna get outta here and do somethin’ with yerself.’ But instead of the closed shopfronts and the silent main road Aldo recalled platypus surfacing in the creek, dry forests of craggy-barked Angophoras, granite gorges overhung with she-oaks and flowering heath. He blocked out his squalid room above the Vietnamese greengrocer, forgetting for long moments that he was, like a dog in a field of bindies, trapped in this overgrown suburb of a city.