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‘Many thanks.’

‘Stay warm,’ Henry said as the stranger departed, angling across to the far side.

Fleur turned back, watching the man as he navigated first a bus, and then horses and carts on the wide Port Road, waiting as a tram rumbled by. And then he was lost to the shadows of the lowering light.

She wished again she had the freedom to come and go as she pleased. ‘I’ll see you inside, Dad,’ she said, stepping close and squeezing her father’s arm. As she did so, she smelled a faint, stale odour coming off him. It was hard to pinpoint but the most accurate way she could describe it was mousey. She made a mental note to check if he was using new chemicals in the mortuary.

She also made the hard decision that she could no longer count on her father’s support – it was time for her to make a break from Appleby’s and forge her own path. It felt like something broke inside herself to realise that this was the only way she might achieve her vision to bring women into the funeral business, but she couldn’t let her father see the welling tears.

She had lost him anyway. Irma was winning. It was time to harden her resolve and face her foe.

10

As he stepped off the bus at the terminus, Tom thought about finding a connection but decided it was better to walk until he found a local hotel. The conductor had suggested the Alberton Hotel, mentioning it would probably take Tom about fifteen minutes to get there on his long legs.

Tom began the walk, looking around to spot the pub that he hoped would offer him a room for a couple of nights, but he became lost in his thoughts, striding through the dark, and realised too late that he’d been walking longer than fifteen minutes. He saw a couple standing in a shadowed doorway; the older man looked disgruntled, and the woman, who pulled a shawl protectively, almost fiercely, across her chest, looked equally unhappy. She turned away before Tom could get a good look at her face and the action looked deliberate. He didn’t want to interrupt what appeared to be an awkward conversation, but he was lost and cold.

The interaction was short but there was something about the pair that struck him as familiar. He wanted to look back but made a dash across the wide road as a bus began moving towards him. By the time he’d dodged a horse and cart and a tram had gone by, he saw the woman had left. The older man remained in the doorway, but there was no streetlight to make out his features or even the shopfront from the opposite side of the street.

Tom let the thought go and hunched deeper into his coat, glad of its heaviness, protecting him from the shear of the wind now at his back. He followed the man’s instructions, retracing his steps, until he spotted the glimmer of the hotel’s lights, surprised he had missed it.

A room was available and he didn’t even bother to pause for a beer, heading straight upstairs where he flopped onto his bed, fully clothed, asleep within moments.

When he woke he felt it had been a restorative and mercifully dreamless sleep. It was still dark, but his father’s fob watch told him it wasn’t long until sunrise. He yawned but got out of bed immediately so he didn’t drift back to sleep and he stretched to wake fully, realising he would be first into the bathroom with luck. He wasted no further time.

Tom took care to look neat even in his working clothes, combing damp hair into a slick parting. He quickly ate a bowl of porridge before pulling on a cap and heading out, once again retracing his footsteps to the terminus, where he knew he could catch an electric tram down to Black Diamond Corner. The conductor said he’d recognise it by the major intersection and the ‘silent cop’ at its centre. Tom finally worked out that this referred to the concrete pillar in the middle of the intersection, the second iteration of the traffic signal because the first, which had been introduced to keep traffic flowing to the left, had been knocked over. The famous corner was hard to miss; he’d never seen so much traffic in such a small space honking and easing its way around itself. Bicycle riders jostled against horse and carts, while cars seemed to feel they had superiority until a bus thundered close. It was a stream of metal and grinding gears.

Tom positioned himself at the crossroads, on one of the corners outside a sweep of shops with everything from a newsagency, a books and stationery outlet through to a general store. Further around the corner was a big shop called Ezywalkin, clearly a boots and shoes shop, and he imagined how his mother might wince at the cannibalisation of the spelling.

Men in work clothes began arriving and by a few minutes past seven, there was a small crowd of shuffling blokes in shabby attire, each with a hungry look. Tom no longer wanted to be viewed as one of these impoverished men. He made a snap decision, not at all sure it was the right one, but determined to follow his instincts, he wended his way to the port, scanning its skyline for the woolstores he’d heard so much about.

Tom reminded himself that South Australia’s entire clip passed through the Port Adelaide woolstores, its warehousing responsible for storing, loading and routing the state’s wool trade through to the busy looms of Britain and Europe. He knew to look for the towering structures erected by those enormous graziers, the powerful Elder, Stirling & Co. There was surely a job for him in that warehouse, where wool needed to be unpacked for the buyers to value, and where it was sorted and baled for transport overseas. Few men as young as he would have his knowledge to class the wool before export.

Although the size of the woolstores made him blink upon arrival – it was a giant, no other word for it – Tom’s instincts were rewarded quickly. His credentials as a wool classer got him tested and he impressed the bloke, who offered him a job immediately, saying he’d be back in a flash.

As he waited at the door for the man to return, he craned his neck to take in the towering three storeys of bluestone.

A man nearby, smoking a newly lit cigarette, winked. ‘Fresh in?’

Tom nodded. ‘Farina. Tom Catchlove.’ He extended a hand.

‘From Witchelina?’ the man asked, looking impressed. ‘Yes, I know it. You’re certainly far from home. I’m one of the stock agents from Wesfarmers – Charlie Hunter.’

They shook hands.

‘Well, I’m actually from Paradise Station on the Witchelina property,’ Tom explained. ‘I’m a wool classer.’

‘You’re so young.’

‘Never done anything else.’

‘Why did you leave? Good money for a young bloke like you.’

Time to lie. He gave a shrug. ‘Just want to see more of the world, experience the Big Smoke for a bit.’

Hunter was looking at him slightly perplexed, so Tom added some drama to his story. ‘My father passed away. I just needed a change of scenery.’

The man nodded. ‘Fair enough.’