Kanga Creek Reunion

The Ruddocks arrived first, because Aunty Prue had never been late for anything in her life, including, the family said, her own birth.

Elias saw them from the front verandah of the Kanga Creek Hotel at a quarter past two on Thursday afternoon: a white hire four-wheel drive coming in off the Quilpie road in a long plume of red dust, much too fast for the gravel, with the windows up and the air conditioning so high that when Uncle Trev opened his door the cold came out like a fridge. It was forty-three degrees in the shade, and there was not much shade. The flies found Trev before his second foot touched the ground. He swatted at them with his golf cap, and said a word that a retired school principal's husband should not have known, and Aunty Prue, climbing out the other side in a linen dress that had been white in Brisbane, said, "Trevor," without looking at him, the way she had said it for forty-five years.

Then she looked up at the pub, and saw Elias, and her face did something it did not often do, which was soften.

"Rosie's kid," she said. "Look at you. Come here."

Elias went down the steps and was hugged, hard, in a cloud of expensive perfume and red dust. Aunty Prue always hugged like that: once, firmly, as if signing a document. Then she held Elias at arm's length and looked over Elias's shoulder, up and down the empty main street of Kanga Creek: the pub, the CWA hall, the police station, the roadhouse, the closed bank, the dog asleep in the middle of the road.

"Are they here yet?" she said. "The others?"

"Not yet."

"Good," said Aunty Prue, and went inside to complain about the air conditioning.