She got up and looked out at the backyard. It was still quite early, the sky a pale blue, sun slanting in low shafts along the dry grass, making haloes around the bushes. A big black bird swooped low out of a tree and posed for a moment on the top of the wire archway, then with a laborious flapping took off back up into the tree.

The dog was standing there, watching the window. She had not seen it at first because of the way it was not moving. It was as if it had been standing there, watching the window, all night. Its shadow stretched away, neat and crisp, from each of its paws. When it saw her at the window, it started to wave its tail backwards and forwards.

She had had to feed it the night before, of course. But just this once, she had told herself as she stood out in the dark backyard, giving it a tin of Pal she had found in the cupboard. Definitely just this once.

But from the way it was looking at her through the window with its head cocked on one side and its tail going backwards and forwards, it looked as if it might not understand about just this once.

She turned away from the window without acknowledging the dog. As far as she was concerned, the dog was as irrelevant to her as the tilting white plastic Garden Setting. Quickly she pulled on some clothes. Instead of leaving by the back door, she went through the house, finding herself tiptoeing past the Master Bedroom, and opened the somewhat majestic panelled front door. From the way it creaked and squeaked it was obvious that no one had used it for a long time.

She pulled it closed behind her as quietly as she could, but as she went down the front steps, the dog appeared around the side of the house. There was no fuss. It was as if they had been meeting like this at the foot of the steps for years.

She turned out of the gate. It was nothing to do with her if the dog was trotting along behind. It was none of her business, and she was not going to give it a glance.

She began to stride out, shoulders back, chest pushing forward through the air, her eyes on the silvery paddocks up beyond the last roofs of the town, where long stripes of pale early sunlight and soft mauve shadow folded themselves around the slopes.

A few doors further up the street, a very large woman was sweeping her front path with a tufty little dog beside her. Harley was carefully not looking at her, but she heard the sweeping stop. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the fat woman leaning on the broom, watching. She was not even pretending not to watch, and the tufty dog was watching too.

She put a pleasant sort of expression on her mouth, and readied herself for a quick bluff Morning! as she hurried past. But before she had time for that carefully-judged Morning! - not so cool as to be rude, but not so warm as to have to stop — the woman leaned the broom up against the fence and spoke.

Having a bit of a look-round? Your first morning?

It was impossible not to look, impossible not to slow down. Harley smiled in a way that felt sickly.

Hmm, she said. Yes.

The young woman was tremendously large and so fair she had no eyebrows, her big pale bland face like something beautifully washed. She had pressed herself up against her wire gate, to talk to Harley, and cushions of cloth-covered flesh bulged between the strands. Behind her on the lawn were various-sized balls, a wading pool, a tricycle with a wheel missing, a red plastic cape, a small pink gum-boot.

She was smiling and waiting. It seemed that she had really meant it as a question and was waiting for an answer. She did not seem to be playing by the city rules: How are you good thanks and you and then you went on. This woman actually seemed to be expecting a conversation.

The dog had stopped too, and was sniffing the nose of the tufty little dog.

Can’t get up there, you know, the woman said. If it was a walk you were after.

Harley felt her face lengthening, her upper lip growing haughty. She reminded herself that this was the bush and they did things differently here, but she did not like being given answers to questions she had not asked.

Hmmm, she said again.

The young woman was still smiling calmly. She was not in any kind of hurry. She was just waiting for the next part of the conversation.

You want a walk, the woman said, you’d be better off going along Jupiter Street.

She smiled warmly and nodded several times. As far as she was concerned, it was self-evident where Jupiter Street was.

Jupiter Street, she said again. That’s your best bet.

Still she did not point.

Lorraine’s got her place done out nicely, she went on after a short wait. You’d be comfortable enough there.

Harley felt herself shrivelling up, curling away from this thing — this relationship — with this stranger. In the city there was a kind of politeness in pretending you were equally unknown to each other.

She felt her face stiffening.

Yes, she said, in a quelling end-of-conversation way.

But this rosy beaming woman might never have heard of end-of-conversation, or the tone of voice that told a person they had gone on long enough.

Yes, she went on serenely. Beverley’s just had the twins, of course. Plus they’ve got the toddler, that’s Kylie, and there’s Brad, he’s seven.

She smiled and nodded encouragingly at Harley.

You need your mother, times like that, don’t you?

Her big solid body was like something inanimate, only the head nodding and smiling away on top of the solid pile of neck.

Harley heard herself producing words.

Yes, well thanks so very much.

It did not sound as if she was actually grateful for anything.

The face of the fat woman registered something. It was not a frown and it was not offence. It was like the look on the face of an actor registering that his partner had forgotten his lines.

There was a short pungent silence.

Round down along past there, the woman said, and finally pointed. Jupiter Street.

The bulk of her began to get itself turned around, like a liner, to point up the path towards her house.

Can’t miss it, she said over her shoulder.

Harley felt her lips draw back across her teeth. It could not really be called a smile, but she was trying.

Thanks, she called after her. Thanks very much indeed.

She strode out, taking deep deliberate breaths. Forty-five minutes to an hour, the doctor had said. Every day if possible. At home in the city it was a matter of round and round the park, or through the congested streets trying not to step in the dog poo. An hour could seem a long time. Here, she could see that forty-five minutes to an hour was a much more elastic kind of thing.

It was obviously going to be another hot day. The flies had not found her so far, but where the sun slanted in across the ground the paddocks were already humming and ticking with insects. Lizards rustled under the dusty bushes beside the road and small solid-looking birds like fat china ornaments hopped in and out of the yellow flowers.

Ahead of her, long stripes of sunlight split by trees lay along the paddocks. A single long-dead pale gumtree stood in its necklace of ringbarking, casting a long intricate shadow out in front of it. Along the crests of the ridges there was a lacy effect where the pale sky showed through the canopies of the gumtrees. The bush on the ridges was not green so much as a dark and dusty khaki that went to black where the hills folded secretively into little creases. A bald shaved stripe where powerlines ran was the only straight line in a landscape that was all soft swellings and bulgings.

A group of cows was gathered around licking a rough brown block of salt. One looked up with a long straw of grass hanging from its mouth, staring at her like a yokel.

The dog trotted alongside her as if she belonged to it, as if it was being taken for a walk. It slowed when she slowed, broke into a run when she strode out quickly, looked where she looked. It was like a mirror trotting along beside her. But it was not because of the dog that she was walking. It was for herself, for her dicky ticker.

She took deep breaths, swinging her arms, striding out along the road. She could feel her heart pumping away in her chest. It sounded strong.

But it had sounded strong before, and then it had suddenly stopped. You could not really trust a heart.

Dicky ticker. She had lain on the narrow hospital bed watching the doctor’s young full-lipped mouth saying it: dicky ticker. He said it a lot, as if he enjoyed it, as if he was quoting, with amusement, some earlier, quaint, generation of doctors. She was confused from having nearly died, but she had wished he would stop saying it.

The nurses had talked about infarction.

None of them ever said heart attack. It had taken her a while to realise that was what had happened to her.

The gigantic pain had spread from her chest into her shoulder and down her arm and up into her jaw. The tremendous gripe of it had squeezed her almost to death.

She had barely been able to breathe, feeling the knots pulled tight around her heart. If she moved or thought the wrong kind of thought they would tighten further, and strangle her. She lay, not even blinking, watching the light and shadow on the white ceiling of the emergency room.

The doctor had all his long words about arterio-this, that and the other, and she listened and nodded. He had been kind, with his joky way of talking. But there on the white bed, under the cotton hospital blanket that kept you from being cold without exactly being warm, she had seen that all the arterio business was only an excuse. The truth was that her heart had finally decided to punish her. It had taken all these years, had let her go on with her dangerous streak, had watched to see if she could mend her ways, if Philip’s death would make a difference. But she had not mended her ways: instead she had shrivelled inside, and clenched tight, growing wizened and stunted from so much unhappy history.

It seemed only right that her heart was finally turning on her.

Nurses came and went, tiny and far away beside the bed. Doctors held her wrist, leaned in at her. Friends came and made mouth-shapes at her, pressed her limp hand. They had all talked about her second chance. She could turn over a new leaf. It was not too late.

They had all agreed how important it was to unwind. They made it sound easy, a simple choice you could make, wind or unwind. They made it sound no more difficult than choosing to sit down or stand up.

I want you to clench your right hand. Tight, tight, tighter, the soothing voice on the tape coaxed. Now relax. She had lain on the bed, clenching her fist, tight, tight, tighter. Then relaxed.

She was prepared to go through the motions, but she did not really believe in second chances. It was too late.

Somehow, it had always been too late. Even as a child she had known about being wound, like the swings she had played on with her sister. She would twist them up on their chains, forcing the seat around and around so it was coiled tight and ugly against itself. That was wound. It made you scream with the danger of it, the power screwed up in the chain, waiting to strike.

And in the end it got you.

It was not that she did it on purpose. It was more that she did not try very hard to avoid it.

It gave a sharp involuntary yelp, then quickly turned and licked her hand as if to forgive her. She snatched her hand away from the warm wet tongue and strode on, ignoring it.

A thick gumtree screwed its way up out of the ground, silvers and pinks roped like sinews along the length of the trunk. You could see that when the seed had sent up its shoot, something had blocked it, a stone perhaps, and made it come out twisted like a piece of string. Once twisted, it stayed that way, no matter how long it lived. The sapling would have been born twisted, and here was the mature tree, thick with years, still twisted. When it fell over, dead, the fibres of the dead wood would still show where, all its long life, it had been wound.

The dog was running on ahead of her, nosing at bushes and rocks, glancing back at her, panting, but when she caught its eye she looked away.

She tugged off her jumper and tied its sleeves around her waist. Moderate to vigorous exercise, the rosy-lipped doctor had said. More than a stroll.

She strode out hard, feeling the cuffs of the jumper wagging at her waist at each step. There was a certain cruel pleasure in forcing herself hard towards the crest of the hill. There was something of righteous punishment in it. The sun was in her eyes and she kept her head down. The muscles in the backs of her legs were starting to ache. She lengthened her stride to feel them stretch at each step with a small shooting pain. Take that, she thought. And that. And that.

They had told her that your heart had to be made to work.

The breath was coming hard now, her lungs burning, each breath like an angry little grunt. That. And that. And that.

If you made it work so hard it broke, that would serve you right.

The road corkscrewed around the corner and her arms skewed away strongly to get her up the last steep pinch. At the top she stood panting, feeling the heart thudding strenuously in her chest.

She stood listening to her chest pull the air in and expel it again. In, out. In, out. If she was having another heart attack, it would be hours, far too long, before anyone found her on this back road. It would be a long way to Livingstone Base Hospital, too, lying along the back seat of someone’s car.

Too long, too far, too late.

If you were privileged with a second chance, you were obliged to be pleased, and be properly grateful, doing the walks and the unwinding. But after that no one could hold you responsible. You were not to blame if you did not get a third chance.

The dog did not seem to realise she could be having another heart attack. It came up and stood in front of her, panting up cheerfully as if nothing was the matter. Then it jerked its head around to snap at a fly and collapsed suddenly on its haunches, scratching convulsively behind its ear. Hair and dust flew out, each speck lit up radiantly by the sun.

Fleas, she thought. Nothing to do with me.

It looked as though she was not having another heart attack, after all.

Just over the brow of the hill was a fork in the road and a flaking wooden sign. One fork pointed downhill towards CASCADE RIVULET, the other uphill, to HANGING ROCK. Someone had tied a stone on the end of a bit of string and hung it from the sign. She laughed aloud, suddenly, a noise like a bark.

The dog twisted its head to look up at her in surprise and she stopped laughing. She glanced around, as if someone might have heard her, laughing on an empty road, and looked at the rock again. It was not really all that funny.

Below her, she could see Cascade Rivulet glinting metallically between the trees. The road ahead of her turned a sudden sharp corner down the slope, so steep it had washed away into long corrugations, and then all at once there was the river, and the bridge.

She recognised it straight away from its picture in the paper, a humble little thing, the bend giving it an apologetic look. It was hard to see why the town was split on it.

She walked down to it, feeling stones rolling away from under her shoes down the slope. A white ute was parked at the far end of the bridge but there was no sign of anyone, only a flat paddock in which some cows stood all lined up the same way like ornaments along a mantelpiece.

She stopped in the middle of the bridge and looked down at the river. Sun shone through the transparent amber water and lit up rounded rocks just under the surface, and fans of white sand. Where a band of sun cast a slice of black shadow, the water was dark and secretive.

She wanted to go down there, under the bridge, and saw that the fence at one end had collapsed, the wooden posts leaning crookedly where the bank had been scoured out by flood. She would not have actually forced her way through anyone’s fence. She knew how farmers felt about them, and about city folk who had no respect for them. But someone had been there before her. She could see where the post had been eased further sideways in the soft ground, and a rip down the dirt of the bank, where someone’s heels had slid.

Underneath, the bridge was a quaint, clumsy thing, a clutter of primitive timbers wedged against each other into crude simple joints. Where each horizontal met a vertical, each had had a piece removed so they were locked tightly together.

It was like two people holding hands.

From a distance the old wood looked nothing more interesting than grey, but close up, each timber had its own colour and its own personality. One was pink-grey with fine streaks of red like dried blood in the grain. Another was green-grey with circular blooms of brown-grey lichen, the next was the bleached blue-grey with a kinked grain like an old-fashioned marcel wave.

She stood with her shoes sinking slowly in the damp sand, looking up into the underbelly of the bridge, feeling the muscles twitching in her thighs after the fast walk. It was all coarse and clumsy, but as well as the subtle textures of the grain, the shapes fitted together in a satisfying way, and there was what they called at the Museum an interplay between the light and the shadow that drew the eye back to look again and again.

She got a notebook and pencil out of her pocket and stood drawing squares and long rectangles that interlinked and interlocked, glancing between her page and the pencil.

When she had filled a page she turned over and started again. She spent a long time getting the angles right where one rectangle came in and locked into another. It looked so simple as to be not worth a second glance, but drawing it showed how complicated it really was.

When she had covered the third page she felt she had the shapes right, and started to shade the squares and rectangles with her pencil. Light, dark, light, dark. It was in no way a realistic drawing of the way the bridge looked, but it was what it might look like if you reduced it to its essence: simple squares and rectangles, simple lights and darks, arranged in a way that was not as simple as it seemed.

Suddenly the dog was down there with her, nudging her knee with its nose, and a piece of shading jerked past its border.

Bugger off, she said without looking, and kept going with the shading.

It licked its nose with a long rubbery tongue and panted up at her, but she went on steadfastly taking no notice. At last it pushed with its nose at her knee again.

Bugger off! she said

This time it was loud and angry, and she looked down frowning.

Then she saw that her feet were sinking into the damp sand. Water was seeping up around them and was about to come in over the top of her shoe. She stepped back to where the sand was drier, her shoes making wet sucking noises as they pulled out of the sand.

The dog watched with interest. It cocked its ears at the sucking noise and went on watching the shoe-shaped holes she had left, as if they might make some other kind of interesting noise.

She glanced down at the dog at the same moment that the dog looked up. It closed its mouth and stopped panting, as if it thought she was going to say something. Thank you, dog, for example.

But she did not believe in talking to animals, much less thanking them. She turned away, put the notebook back in her pocket, and climbed up to the roadway.

From up on top, you would never guess how interesting it was underneath. The long squared timbers had been laid side by side in a plain way, and were simply held in place with big brown bolts. When the flood had come, and the bridge had decided to bend rather than break, each timber had swivelled slightly on its bolt. Some parts had been squeezed together, and in others long wedge-shaped cracks had opened up. But each individual beam had not moved very far. Beam by beam they hardly bent at all. To see that, you had to look along the whole bridge.

On the far side of the bridge she could see that another, more substantial road ran along beside the river on the other bank, joined by the bridge to the one she had used, making a big H-shape. She decided to take the other road back to Karakarook. There could be something wearisome about repeating yourself.

She could feel the sun on her back now, starting to get hot and harsh in her eyes. It was hard to leave the bridge, the water, the sense of stillness. The slice of shadow underneath was already smaller, shrinking in beneath, and blacker. In the middle of that crisp line of shade, the shape of her own head provided a knob, like a handle, of extra shadow.

From up here she could see the two shoe-shaped dents she had left in the sand, slowly filling with water but keeping their shape. Beside them were four smaller holes where the dog had stood. She could drop down dead, right now this minute, with another infarction, and long after she herself had been reduced to a smudge of smoke from a big busy chimney, the shape of her shoes would still be here. The shape of her shoes would go on proving she had been there, day and night, in light and in darkness, until the river rose and washed them away as if she had never been.

No one would know, though, except the dog.

Where the shadow met the light on the sand further along, she saw that there were two other holes in the shape of shoes, also filled with water. They were just like hers, but they were not hers.

As she watched, two big bumbling insects dipped quickly into the water in one of the other footprints, as if tasting it, and up again. Twining around each other they dropped into one of her own prints, hovered, and danced together out of sight under the bridge.

She moved her head and watched the shadow on the sand move too. A fly spun into her ear as if with an urgent message, then it was gone, leaving silence behind.

The sky was thickening into a hard blue. A cicada started up, stopped, started again, was joined by another on a different pitch.

She decided to take it slowly on the way back. There was something to be said for having respect for a dicky ticker.