Chapter Seven

He left in February 1992, four months short of eighteen, with three hundred and forty dollars and a duffel bag, on the overnight coach out of Glen Innes.

There was no fight. That is what everybody got wrong later, including him — in the seminar version there was always a tearful confrontation with a father who told him he'd never amount to anything. The seminar version was better. The seminar version had jeopardy.

What actually happened was that he told them at dinner on a Tuesday, and Gail cried into a tea towel, and Neville said "right," and then, after about a minute:

"You'll want the good bag. Not that one."

And his father went and got the good bag.

That was the last kindness of the pre-history.

Through the coach window, in the dark, the sign at the bottom of the driveway went past, and he looked back at it, and he thought:

I'm going to buy that place one day and put a gate on it that costs more than the house.