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‘Mum, you feel softer,’ was the only way he could say it.

She’d given him a wan smile that tried to glow out of her pale, once-pretty face that was now hollowed into a ghostly version of itself. ‘I’ll explain soon, son,’ she’d said, ruffling his hair, which had turned its traditional darker shade now that summer had passed.

It sounded ominous. Explain what? That you’re dying? That I’m going to be left alone? That my father is lost? That your heartbreak or your nerves at such a thought is killing you? Is that what you meant?

‘What about Dad?’ he’d asked, knowing instinctively that she wanted to talk about him.

‘I’m hoping they’ll have heard some news. It’s been long enough.’ She began to frown, as though counting in her mind. ‘He needs to be home soon,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘Before . . .’

‘Before what, Mum?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just home – where we want him.’

Tom had nodded. He wanted his father home too. They were opposites; where Tom was quiet, thoughtful, precise, his father was a loud, often raggedly drunk but ever-cheerful person of height and stringy muscle that roped around his limbs. His face had been etched by the sun’s artistry over years of exposure, its pencil drawing deep lines as if it were a blade into the leathery skin. Vern, when home, was usually smiling or whistling some tuneless melody. And often he’d burst into song and grab Moira to twirl her around the hut. The sand of the red earth they lived upon, no matter how hard they swept, was always present and sounded gritty beneath their dance steps. Tom would clap a rhythm to his father’s cheerful singing, longing for the moment when his mother would reach out and draw him into their private moment to pirouette as a trio. His father never reached for him, but that’s how men were, his mother would assure Tom. He’d hug his parents around their hips, revelling in the notion of love that existed in their simple lives.

His mother was no doubt longing for the bluster and laughter of Vern to echo out across the lonely landscape once again. But there was still no sign of the men on horseback and the beasts they were driving down from Queensland.

He’d offered to help with extra chores but this morning she had told him to go and play, looking paler than ever . . . and sweaty.

Horses sweat, he remembered his mother correcting him. People perspire. She liked to educate him, insisting on teaching him over and above his school hours.

So here he sat, in the venerable coolabah, squinting through his father’s binoculars so he could focus on the township of Farina and look for the telltale plume of steam and the screech in the far distance.

But that’s when it struck him how still everything had suddenly become. Up on the hill there was usually some sort of breeze, just enough to lift a few of the hairs that flopped across his hairline over his forehead. But the air wasn’t stirring.

The sudden cacophony that pierced the silence of the prairie was not from the train that had hauled itself north out of Adelaide twenty-four hours earlier, but from the birds nesting in the gums by the creek. Cockatoos rose alongside galahs, who moved quicker than the heavier crows, who were also lifting off in instant and collective alarm. There was a great excited discordance as the birds cried their agitation.

‘What the . . .’ Tom murmured, watching the birds explode into the air like a dark cloud.

And then he heard it. A groan, like an ancient giant awakening. It continued, growing angrier. The rumbling came from deep in the earth and shook him. He felt the power of that shaking through every muscle and cavity of his body until he could swear his teeth chattered. It was an earth shock, he realised, something he’d only heard about, and he crouched for fear of toppling, marvelling at the powerful vibration as though the cave-dwelling giant deep in the earth’s core was shaking the foundations of the land on which they walked . . . angry at being disturbed.

And then, as abruptly as it began, it stopped. The birds silenced once again and an eerie hush laid itself back down like a picnic blanket after being flipped.

He would later learn it had lasted thirty-five seconds, which was exactly how long it had taken his mother to realise that what she’d feared most was happening. While the land had shuddered, Moira Catchlove’s baby had chosen to start her journey into the world. But Baby Amy had made her decision far too early.

Tom could hear his mother’s screaming from the homestead, all the way to the waterhole. The steam train was forgotten. So was the earth shock. Clutching his father’s precious binoculars, Tom began to run, praying to whichever angels might hear him that they were not sending darkness his way.

He harnessed up Bonny and somehow half carried, half walked his mother outside and into the wagon, where he urged Moira to lie down, wrapping her in a blanket.

‘Mum, you have to tell me. What’s happening?’

She shook her head as if denying it, but the words finally spilled out. ‘You’re going to have a brother or sister before the day’s end, Tom.’

He opened his mouth with a thrill of delight. At last. Someone to talk to, to play with, to teach about the desert life. ‘It looks painful.’

‘It is,’ she gasped, and to him it looked agonising. ‘I’m going to need help.’

‘Why are we frightened?’ he asked, thinking aloud, wishing he hadn’t. He wanted to be very strong for her.

‘Because your brother or sister is arriving too early,’ she ground out. ‘And that puts them in danger . . . especially out here. Now, stop talking and get me to town.’

With a grim expression, he began the bumpy journey of eighteen miles to the town of Farina, propping blocks of wood behind him so he could reach the reins and control the pony properly. His mother would yell out from time to time in what seemed to be torture and then it would subside. At first he’d thought it was the rutted dirt path they were following that was upsetting her, but why was she quiet at other times on the same uneven surface? No, this was the baby. Why was his tiny brother or sister – such a helpless thing – so dangerous? There was no point in asking; a glance backwards showed only a tense grimace in her expression, while her hands clasped her belly.

Tom gritted his teeth and encouraged Bonny to move faster if she could without wearing herself out. Fortunately, it was a mild day. April was the month that he and his mother always craved because it began the slide into autumn; the summer’s heat could reach one hundred and twenty degrees. He was reminded that newborns were often laid under the shadowy cool of their mother’s bed. Where had he heard that? His thoughts were like skittles, ranging off in different directions with no attachment. He was trying not to let his gaze land on the desolation of the wilderness. This was not sand like the Sahara Desert, which his mother had described to him, where the golden dunes were soft and hot, ‘looking silken from a distance,’ she had explained. No, their desert was a relentlessly nuggety and unforgiving gibber plain.

He felt a fresh wave of panic warble through him: what if he couldn’t get her there in time? What if she dies?

This was too daunting to contemplate. Tom forced his thoughts away from what scared him most towards ordered, rational memory that could deliver up a fact and distract him from the threat at hand. The earth folded in and faulted on itself more than five hundred and forty million years ago, Tom had read in an encyclopaedia up at the main house, called Witchelina, which ran the station and he let that fact resonate now and take over. He deliberately occupied his mind with this sort of mundane detail for a few more miles, even managing to eclipse his mother’s intermittent yells by thinking about the morning’s earth shock, which was related to the plate tectonics he’d learned about. He reminded himself to try and record five hundred and forty million as a number.