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said. ‘Here.’ She held out her fist and dropped a thin silver chain into Walker’s palm.
    ‘Maybe it will bring you luck,’ she said. ‘Keep you safe.’ Walker remembered a comic strip he had read as a kid: ‘Kelly’s Eye’. As long as Kelly wore
this jewel around his neck he was indestructible. Each week ended with him walking out of an incredible explosion or twenty-car smash-up, naked except for the stone around his neck and a tattered
pair of shorts which were also indestructible.
    ‘Let me put it on for you.’
    Walker bent his head and felt her arms reach around his neck, fiddling with the clasp. Her mouth was near his. This was the moment when they could have kissed but it passed.
    ‘Do you like it?’
    ‘Yes. Sorry, I never know what to say when I’m given a present.’
    She smiled – ‘Let’s get going’ – and they began making their way back up the low cliff to her car.
    ‘There’s something else as well,’ she said when she had unlocked the car door. She reached over to the passenger seat and handed Walker an envelope. In it was the photo that
had been taken at the party. Or part of it anyway: it had been cut in two and the half he held showed Rachel, almost in profile, holding the wine glass in both hands as if she were praying.
    ‘To remind me you exist?’ Walker said.
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘What about the other half?’
    ‘I keep that. To remind me that you do,’ she said. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
    ‘No. It’s five minutes from here, that’s all.’
    They were both eager to be on their own now, wanting the leaving to be over with, knowing that everything between them would have to wait.
    ‘Is there anything else I can do?’ Rachel said finally, standing by the open door of the car.
    ‘No. I’ll call you.’
    ‘Be careful, won’t you?’
    Walker said yes, yes he would. He watched her drive off and waited for the tail lights to disappear from sight before heading home himself.

CHAPTER TWO
    It was a three-day drive to Durban and Walker set off the next day. He crossed the Bay Bridge and headed up the coast. He had just passed Malory’s house when a white mist
rolled in from the sea, enveloping the road. He slowed to a crawl, winding down the window and feeling the air clinging damp to his skin. The mist thinned and he looked out at a zinc sky, pale sea
rolling calmly on to white sand, grey-white gulls dotting the beach. When the mist closed in again, all he could see was the lighthouse glow of cars heading towards him.
    He turned inland ten miles later and the mist cleared, the landscape becoming gradually flatter. That night he slept for a few hours in the car before pressing on, stopping only for food and
gas. At first he listened to music continuously, but soon the radio began to irritate him and he drove in silence.
    By now the landscape was flat and featureless, almost an abstraction, existing only as distance. A hundred years ago there had been no road, only emptiness; now there was a four-lane freeway but
the road altered nothing, not the sky yawning over it or the land stretching away to the horizon. It occurred to him that horizontal was derived from horizon. Where words came from, where they were
going: horizon. If walking was a form of thinking, then driving was a form of meditation or self-hypnosis which, instead of concentrating the mind, encouraged it to float. The residue of
concentration required to keep the car on the road lent these drifting thoughts a sense of urgentless purpose.
    Often, glancing in the driving mirror, he expected to see Rachel’s face looking back at him.
    He spent the second night in a motel and arrived in Durban late the following afternoon. The rental agency was on the edge of town. It felt strange, walking in after so long bent up in the car.
There were no other customers and the man he spoke to had no objection to finding out about the car rented three months ago by Malory. He rifled through a filing cabinet, squinting