"Nothing is repeatable," said the older man. "Not even the moments that we relive a thousand times."

She seemed to have been a reasonable kind of mother to Jenny; at least she hadn't stimulated any of the strong resentments which seemed to lie uneasily dormant in most daughters, especially those very fond of their fathers.

There isn't a God, thought Pascoe. No one capable of creating kangaroos could have resisted hitting him in the face with a divine custard pie.

"Tell me, Ted," she began, but he wasn't finished yet. Like the good gossip he was, he had merely been marshalling the various elements of his anecdote to their best advantage.

Dave Fernie, big Dave Fernie. He knew. He always bloody well knew. Not even God Almighty was as certain about things as Dave Fernie.

Buses and trains both set you thinking, she thought. But not in the same way. Trains gave you a rhythm, sent you into dreams, cut you off from reality. Buses were always stopping and starting; traffic, road-junctions, lights; and of course, bus-stops. The world you passed through was observable. And real. So was the world inside your head. Buses were good places to worry on.

In any case the desert Connon really wanted to visit was not in any of the brochures, not even the most expensive. He recognized it by its absence, that is, he knew what he wanted was something out of reach of a camera; something untranslatable into colour photography and glossy paper. He wanted rock that had absorbed terrible, endless heat for a million years, that had writhed in infinitely slow violence till its raw bowels lay on the surface, yet without a single movement noticed by man. He wanted sand which rose and fell like the sea, but so slowly that it was only when it drowned his own civilization that a man recognized its tides.

Dalziel's wife, now divorced, had gone off with a milkman fifteen years before. At least, she had gone off. The milkman might have been malicious invention.