Naked and forty-seven, Leon K. backstroked steadily up and down his lap pool, an eddy of drowned insects in his wake. Of course he knew his rhythm by now; he automatically counted strokes as well as laps. Each of the forty laps that added up to one kilometre took him fifteen strokes. On each fifteenth backward reach he trusted that the fingertips of his right hand rather than the back of his skull would strike the wall first. Stroking, breathing, stroking, breathing, he swam almost in a trance.

Despite the pool's cool temperature (it was a windy autumn and the connection to the solar panels on the farmhouse roof was broken) he needed to swim in order to relax, to cope, to live the current version of his life. He swam as early dawn rays struck the surface and again as the shadows of the palms crisscrossed the pool in the late afternoon. Nowadays he preferred backstroke, and swimming naked made him feel momentarily free of his current restraints. (It wasn't as if anyone was likely to drop by.) Swimming on his back was also therapeutic; there were the clouds to observe through the palm fronds, and swifts scooting and flicking after insects, and kestrels hovering like hang-gliders over the orchard. In its constancy this silent aerial activity was immensely soothing. There was always at least one bird somewhere in the sky.

A Google search attested to the State swimming successes of his youth. Thirty years later he was a tall, keg-chested man with arms and legs less disproportionately long than they'd seemed back then. A more bowed and slope-shouldered specimen, too, he'd noticed lately, more weighed down by the gravity of anxious time and snowballing events than even a year ago.

His sixth month alone and the farm was so quiet these afternoons just before the cockatoo clamour of sunset that from the pool Leon K. could hear his daughters' downcast ponies tearing grumpily at the grass in the home paddock. Awaiting his trial, which had been adjourned for yet another four months while the authorities strengthened their case against him, he swam his two lap sessions and paced his overgrown boundaries, scrutinising nature. The rest of the time, or during the region's frequent electrical storms, he restlessly roamed his veranda, by day with a pot of green tea and a sudoku puzzle, by night with a bottle of his cellar's dwindling supply of merlot or pinot noir.

By now all the official delays, court adjournments and tax investigations were jumbled together in his mind. The future appeared increasingly hazy and he felt the same fatalistic confusion he knew on that dip in the coast highway near Sugar Cane Road, when night sea-fogs suddenly swept over the cane fields. What should he anticipate around the next murky bend? A riskily unlit hippie cyclist, an invisible hitchhiker, a petrol tanker thundering across the imperceptible lane markings? Would he ever see his way clear?

Against his own best interests he'd come to dread the weekly visit of the one person who might at least clarify matters for him, his solicitor, Gareth Wyntuhl. As the legal process dragged on, he increasingly resented spending every Thursday afternoon and Friday on the lawyer's highly expensive devil's advocacy and narrow legalistic interpretation of the prosecution case. He also resented him for eating into his swimming time. This wasn't strictly true. He still swam his usual laps, though less calmly with Wyntuhl hovering enigmatically at the pool edge, whistling tunelessly through his teeth and forever looking at his watch. With the lawyer present, he felt bound to don his Speedos ? and resented not swimming naked, too.

Unavoidably these days, after an hour or so in the lawyer's presence he lapsed into a mild fugue. On a bad day Wyntuhl's monotone could make his brain shut down completely. At the start of his troubles he'd tried to fight the unusual effect it had on him: the gradual fainting sensation and cloudy vision, leading to a total mental fade-out, a sort of grey noise where only background sounds had any relevance. The tap-tapping of the pool's filter box, magpies calling on the lawn, brush turkeys scratching in the shrubbery. Now he went with it. It wasn't unpleasant, it was almost a reverie, and he wondered whether it felt like this to be hypnotised. Maybe Wyntuhl should grow a goatee and get himself a stage act. When he fell deeper into this particular stupor ? a sort of painless, aura-free migraine ? everything about Wyntuhl, from his endomorphic physical outline to the veranda table he'd heaped with files (the lawyer's attempt to claim his attention with a crisp conference ambience), faded into the rural hum and buzz and became as abstract and misty as dreams.

After the past year of examinations and committal proceedings it wasn't surprising his mind needed a rest. Tired of raking through the ashes of disgrace, his brain had called a halt. Maybe he was having a mental breakdown. How easy it was to forget the minutiae of the case ? the dates, the amounts, the stock transfers and telescoping bank loans, all that paper-shuffling ? and sink back into the vibrations of trees, livestock and wildlife, of cattle lowing, water dragons scuttling under the veranda, and palms rattling in the wind. Pulling this blanket of nature around his shoulders, he felt safely hidden, a snug wombat in its hole. Somehow less ignoble, he could even fantasise about the puzzling uniqueness of his position. Instead of a former company director under indictment for alleged 'corporate misconduct' and 'breaches of directors' duties', he could be a beleaguered sovereign awaiting news from the front. Maybe a Caribbean president anticipating a peasant uprising from the sugarcane fields below.

If only the calm didn't end at the last lap, at the moment his fingertips tipped the wall behind him and he stood, removed his goggles and allowed the dusk's pink-grey shadows to settle on his body for a few seconds. But, inevitably, reality returned. He stepped heavily out of the pool, shivering now and streaming water, and stamped bare-arsed across the terrace to the house.

Lushly green, thanks to their prime position between the coast and the Nightcap Ranges, his thirty-two acres lay along a north?south valley of carved-up dairy farms, formerly dense rainforest known as the Big Scrub. Cleared of its native red cedars a century ago, the rich volcanic soil now nurtured in their place a thriving feral tree, the camphor laurel, imported from China during a nineteenth-century preoccupation with arboreal neatness. Long escaped from its municipal parks and government schoolyards, the camphor laurel now ran as wild and free as the thistle and dandelion throughout the Northern Rivers. And, disgracefully, at scenically unrestrained intervals, over Leon K.'s acres.

Of course his neighbours, real farmers, many of whose ancestors had razed the original rainforest to plant grass for their cattle, detested the camphor laurel as an alien weed, a timber version of the Asian Hordes. If he might harbour some guilt deep in his heart for his alleged misdemeanours (uncharacteristic errors of judgement through overwork, a misplaced trust in subordinates, unforeseen vagaries in the market were the forms of words Wyntuhl suggested to explain them) he hadn't a leaf, a twig, of environmental guilt. How could those farmers understand the quiet pleasure those camphor laurels gave him, their gentle tiers sloping and rolling away towards the cane fields and the sea? He found the trees' leafy density and undulating outlines attractively foreign. At dusk their voluptuous silhouettes filled him with nostalgia for something ordered yet indefinable: contentment, even romance.

There was a cosy childish component, too, in the trees' rounded, European appearance. His daughters used to call them 'broccoli trees', the camphor laurels reminding them of that unwelcome clumpy vegetable on their dinner plates. For him they recalled the trees in the picture books of his youth; The Magic Faraway Tree was a favourite. Even the word 'camphor' brought back aromatic childhood memories: his grandmother's wardrobes and linen chest in Budapest. His own camphor laurels, meanwhile, were forever striking new shoots, which he made no attempt to cut out. It was another count against him, this city gent's whimsy, a hobby-farmer's un-Australian and neglectful misuse of the land.

His property was L-shaped, with the farmhouse and his sixteen highest acres forming the vertical part of the L. On the horizontal bottom sixteen, beyond the red-clay dam and the orchard, with its rotting and desiccated fruit, his twenty-three beef cattle ? a token herd to fatten and sell ? grazed behind a multicoloured foreign tangle of blackberry, lantana and bougainvillea, the subject of monthly noxious-weed-action warnings from the local council. Lately, a couple of headstrong yearlings had begun squeezing through the electric fence and barbed wire into the neighbouring property. Their dopey discontent ? they were happy to be zapped and lacerated every day just to sample the identical grass on the other side ? astounded him at first, but no longer. That was the country for you.

He had never claimed to be any sort of farmer himself. In the first enthusiastic flush of ownership he'd keenly planted a wide sample of regional produce: mangoes, guavas, macadamia and pecan nuts, a few coffee bushes for novelty's sake, some custard apples, imaginative hybrid citrus like lemonade trees and tangelos, also papayas, bananas, lychees and avocados. He'd imagined satisfying strolls through his orchard after Sunday lunch parties, and healthy family breakfasts of his own exotic fruits: icy glasses of guava and citrus juice; mangoes sliced into clever cubes. But once the troubles began, the Sunday parties quickly fell away, and breakfast somehow never progressed beyond toast and coffee. Soon he was eating, and living, alone, and those few trees still bearing fruit were taken over by fungus and fruit fly, birds and flying foxes.

Since the sale of the yacht and the ski lodge, the farm was his only nominal asset. The house, a century-old hardwood Queenslander, badly needed renovating, but under such close financial scrutiny he couldn't carry out the necessary repairs. The authorities were monitoring his accounts. He imagined teams of investigative accountants trawling over his petrol and grocery bills, frowning at the cheques for swimming-pool chlorine and pony feed. But frankly it wasn't just the financial block preventing him from acting on anything. It was a deep lack of will. Even a phone call to a local tradesman was a daunting prospect, requiring more mental effort than he could muster. Meanwhile, unless a southerly was blowing, the septic tank reeked intrusively, the house's timbers were peeling and cracking, and the electrical wiring was questionable; increasingly, light bulbs popped after a few days. The tennis-court lights were failing, too; the last bulb was flickering and ready to blow. But to change them would also be expensive; he'd have to call an electrician and hire a cherry picker. It hardly seemed worth the effort now that he had no tennis companions, night or day.

More importantly for his daily wellbeing, the pool ? built ninety years after the house, the first, vital change he'd made when he'd bought the property ten years before ? already required extensive doctoring. Electrical fade-outs affected its pump, the tiles were loosening and blue-green algae always threatened. He swore he could see algae spores borne on the breeze and grey fungal scales clinging to the trunks of the poolside palms, awaiting their chance to poison his water. This was one problem he knew he must act on. If the structure of his life was crumbling, the pool was the only thing keeping him sane.

His old city friends shunned him as if he were contagious. And except to complain in terse phone calls about his trespassing cattle and noxious weeds, his farmer neighbours didn't communicate with him, although most days their vehicles passed him at high speed. The shared lane to his farm was a winding tunnel of blind turns, ferny overgrowth and furry road-kill through, and over, which every other driver drove murderously fast. Whenever he went to town, purposely observing the speed limit, his car was tailgated by furious motorists, and sometimes also by mysterious white vehicles. Several times he'd noticed a white car parked in his lane while someone photographed the house and property from the front gate. When he stepped outside to question the photographer, the man (he couldn't tell if it was the same man) nonchalantly sauntered to his car and accelerated away. Some authority keeping tabs on him, he supposed. One of the many gung-ho State and Federal acronyms fighting corporate crime nowadays, all competing to capture the big-business scalps. Perhaps the prosecution or the tax office, working in cahoots. Maybe a private investigator acting for a major creditor. He'd felt paranoid the first time he spotted this overt surveillance and for several nights was unable to sleep. More fatalistic these days, he expected nothing less ? and still slept badly.

As for the road-ragers, it had jolted him for a moment to think they might be financially wounded shareholders, retirees who'd lost their life savings, small mum-and-dad investors like his own Anya and Apa. Lifelong hard workers and money-savers. Little people, some media hacks had suggested. That thought didn't bear considering for long. No, he assured himself. They wouldn't be chasing him. He had a silent telephone number; he wasn't on the local electoral roll. Probably just impatient tradesmen ? testy plumbers or electricians in a hurry to the next job or the pub. Whoever they were, most of these journeys ended with their angry horn blasts and aggressive two-finger salutes.

Nevertheless ? and this was a hard-to-break habit from his swimming training of thirty years ago, an urge to become a regular Australian, a suntanned sporting champion ? he hadn't given up trying to adapt to his surroundings. Early on he'd grown a beard and shelved his conservative city casual-wear of polo shirts and deck shoes for work boots, jeans and heavy hemp shirts bought from a hinterland shop called Don't Tell Mama. (The labels warned: Do Not Consume.) However, the change of image ? the green and khaki hemp, the boots, the greying whiskers ? hadn't prevented a raddled old hippie from accosting him in public.

This was in the main street during his Saturday morning shopping. Out of a weedy nook between shopfronts leapt this shoeless scarecrow, ragged and bony as Treasure Island's Ben Gunn. As if some dervish-releasing button had been activated, he began whirling about on the pavement, dusty dreadlocks spinning, flailing veiny arms and kicking the air. At first Leon K. thought he was having a fit. But when the assailant swung a wild punch at him, shouting, 'Fuckin' yuppie wog! Go back home, wanker!' he had to duck. He reeled back in surprise. 'Take it easy, mate.'

People peered out from doorways and cafes. 'C'mon, I'll do ya!' The aggressor launched another childish haymaker that swiped his shoulder. Who was this lunatic? Leon K. was twice his size, with enough pent-up tension of his own to knock him back into his cave or swamp. What he did was hold him off, his pulse pounding in his ears, while he wondered what to do next. Punch him to the ground? (Self-defence, plenty of witnesses.) In another second he imagined what a delicious time the Sydney scandal sheets would have of that. (At least half of the witnesses would have camera-phones.)

Leon K. brushed him aside again as the man's nonsensical obscenities mugged the gentle weekend air (Shithead-poofter-wog! City-dickhead-cunt!). 'Steady, tiger. I'm a local,' he protested, mildly enough in the circumstances. Inviting the onlookers' sympathy, he forced out an indulgent laugh.

Suddenly he craved sympathy, just as he ached to broadcast the fact that this nutcase, the whole community, everyone, had got him wrong. 'My mother sewed piecework in Surry Hills,' he wanted to yell. And his father, gallant and exhausted Apam, a civil engineer back in Hungary, a respected kulturmernok, had worked two jobs round the clock in Australia ? tyre re-treader in Granville, nightwatchman in Parramatta ? driving his son to his daily five a.m. swimming training between shifts. 'He never had time to swim himself. Never even had time to learn how,' he could tell them. This is what he wanted to share with the onlookers: his family's noble struggle and how he was absolutely his parents' son.

But disapproval flooded the street, and it wasn't aimed at the punchy scarecrow. 'Now Sonny,' a middle-aged woman murmured. 'Don't get yourself het up, darl.' So this reeking Sonny was that protected species, a local character. Fizzing with adrenaline, Leon K. dodged his windmilling fists and pushed past him. Sonny was still dancing on his cracked and crusty feet like a manic flyweight. His clothes and bouncing dreadlocks gave off aggressive, pungent odours of smoke and sweat. 'Big-city wanker! I'll be dealing with you!'

Rather than the altercation itself, it was the unfairness of the presumption behind it that shocked him that Saturday morning. How could this feral junkie whose stink now impregnated his own clothes think he represented the city and all it stood for? He was an interloper there as well. The city ? the City! ? that wished not merely to punish him but to knock him out of existence.

For better or worse, he'd chosen the country. Moreover, he'd tried to experience its essence. The annual district rodeo at the showground had seemed the place to start. But if he'd expected to see Outback Australia on show he'd mistaken the event. It was more American Western. Hollywood Western. Country-and-Western Western. Everyone ? men, women and tiny children ? in Wrangler jeans and pearl-buttoned shirts, in boots and cowboy hats, those country-singer Stetsons that looked three sizes too big. All of them dressed to the nines in order to see cows and horses discomfiting people in a flamboyantly painful way.

While the animals took their revenge, he'd shared a bench with some rum-and-Coke-drinking rodeo wives and their squabbling children. The crowd oohed as a steer threw a rider heavily against the barrier and then trampled him. Attempting to distract the steer from the prone cowboy, the rodeo clown also caught a horn in the bum, which lifted him two metres in the air. Watching him thud to earth like a polka-dotted sack of potatoes, the smallest rodeo offspring, a boy of about five, announced grimly, 'I'm never going to ride those cows.'

Embarrassed in this company, his mother shrieked, 'Don't be a girl, Chad! I'm gonna put a dress on ya!' Her friends sniggered. Chad's mother went on, 'I'm gonna put a bra and panties on ya!' Raucous laughter from the other rodeo mothers. She was on a roll now: 'You'll be sitting down to wee next!'

This was obviously another side to the country. He seemed doomed to be confused here. Best to keep his head down. He stayed away from potential hot spots like bars and clubs to prevent any more Sonny-type blow-ups. For serenity's sake he even gave up the city newspapers and read only the local rag. Better its bluff mixture of shire jottings, vandalism round-ups, New Age guff and Beef Queen updates than feline financial gossip and always seeing his name maligned.

The countryside might have become his choice, but he hadn't chosen to live there alone. While he'd submerged himself in the country and his wife and daughters had remained in the city, he still clung to the belief that he and Kate weren't separated in the pre-divorce sense of the word. It was just that she chose not to live here ? and this was where her husband had to be. She'd cited the difficulty of their daughters' schooling, plus (he could still see her pacing up and down the kitchen as she delivered this particular body blow) she needed time to 'adjust' to the scandal, and so on. And so on, and so on, all the way back down the tortuous bends of the Pacific Highway in the BMW with Jessica and Madeleine to Sydney. So his family remained in the Vaucluse house transferred to Kate's name. Her acceptably-Anglo-and-incognito maiden name, to which she'd reverted with far more readiness than he'd anticipated. Yet another knife in the gut.

Now he rarely went down to Sydney. In any case, his movements were circumscribed by his bail conditions. His only regular travel these days (he'd had to surrender his passport) was the 100-kilometre round trip twice a week to report to the nearest police station. Standing at the station counter certainly killed some more time; never less than an hour, sometimes two. All he needed to do was sign the bail-appearance form and walk out. Five minutes maximum. But in six months that had never happened, the cops being such specialists at ignoring him, acting busy and strolling about purposefully with their takeaway coffees and Big Macs. Or insisting that the relevant officer was off-duty, or that the bail-appearance forms had gone astray. Even the spottiest, most self-conscious probationary constable stared right through him. Why not? He was that most invisible of felons, the white-collar criminal. The class-loathing was palpable. Give them a local wife-basher or gang-banger any day.

In the meantime his only contact with the city and the trial was Gareth Wyntuhl. But 'Wyntuhl of My Discontent', as he thought of him, was definitely contact enough, bowling up in his hire car every Thursday morning after slumming it on Regional Express's one-class 8.10 a.m. flight from Sydney. 'A plane with propellers!' Wyntuhl never failed to exclaim, amazed at his own crazy courage.

Did Leon K. welcome the company? Not at all. Having another man in the house was unbearable. Even such a relatively hygienic urban-middle-class specimen as Wyntuhl was an intrusion. Six months' solitude must have oversensitised him, Leon K. thought. Before Wyntuhl's visits he'd never noticed male breath or male hormonal whiffs, nor middle-aged male nostrils and ears, over-loud male laughter ? and, whenever Wyntuhl did laugh, that superior nasal snort and white-coffee tongue.

Male habits made a disgusting list. The deep indentations their buttocks left in the sofa, the everlasting stink in the bathroom, the eggy detritus of their breakfast plates. Representing his gender, irritating and unaware Wyntuhl had a lot to answer for. Men were so rooted to the ground, over-earthed and overbearing. Like Wyntuhl, they were forever at large. They took up all the space in a room, like one overstuffed armchair too many. Christ, Leon K. wondered, how did women put up with them?

Indeed, Wyntuhl's presence pointed up the painful absence of women. More than ever, Leon K. longed for a woman's ministrations and company, an affectionate female touch. A sympathetic kiss. But even loneliness was preferable to another male on the premises. Each Friday evening more than the last, he counted down the minutes until Wyntuhl packed up his bag and briefcase, until his airport-bound Avis car accelerated down the driveway and was absorbed by the tunnel of verdant foliage and the gagging cries of crows.

The lawyer's last visit had brought from the city not only his cold germs (Wyntuhl couldn't stop sneezing and coughing) but news of recently increased penalties for corporate misconduct. 'In your case, we're talking maximum five years inside and a $250000 fine,' Wyntuhl had informed him. 'Not counting the tax problems. But let's not go there right now.' He emptied his lungs into a Kleenex. 'Listen, how are those pet cows of yours? I was listening to the Country Hour on the car radio. Beef prices are going through the roof. Red meat's back in a big way. By the way, I've been meaning to say, do yourself a favour. Lose the beard.'

'Five years! Only criminals get five years!' Sometimes, nowadays, Leon K. didn't realise he'd spoken aloud.

'Yeah, well. Five at the most. My guess is probably less.'

Finding it hard to fall asleep, then unwilling to wake, Leon K. cursed his bladder for forcing the issue, rousing him most mornings before dawn. This was the time of day ? the aftermath of lustful, anxious dreams ? when he most missed a woman. He missed Kate. More precisely, Kate as she used to be, the Kate of their shared youthful struggles, dreamy summers, poverty, fun and ambition. It was hard now to recall that sensual and reckless Kate. These grey pre-mornings better suited the current cold and impassive Kate, the socially humiliated Kate. The Kate who'd sobbed just before she left, 'They'll all think I'm corrupt as well.' How readily she'd fit into this landscape, where ocean and sky were often indistinguishable these autumn days and the dawn mist turned every hollow between the farm and the sea into a lake of ash. There was no horizon and the grey air was tense and heavy with frustration. But in any case she wasn't here.

Already slick with dew, the tennis court was also sheeted with snowy egret droppings. This particular dawn he was sitting on the veranda steps watching the egrets' court performance. The birds paced the surface for frogs and bugs, every so often interrupting their hunt to mate noisily and aggressively. In this bucking-and-dodging dance of food and sex, one male bird was more raucous and demanding than the others. And when the first rays speared across the court it was the rowdy fornicator who led the flock in obedient V-formation into the rising mist.

In the pale early sunshine, Leon K. trudged down to the ponies' paddock to change their rugs and throw them some hay. Out of sentimental love for his daughters he bought the horses a bale of lucerne hay every week. Increasingly forlorn nevertheless, the shaggy old Shetland had taken to obsessively scratching its hindquarters against a particular fence post. The pony's hairy rump reminded him of a fur coat, a particular woman's garment from long ago, from the days of camphor-lined wardrobes, but whose fur, or where he saw it, he couldn't recall. His mother's? Grandmother's? He remembered a real fox head peering out of a shoulder ? sparkling-eyed and eerily genuine. These days he had his own resident fox. Some dawns he spotted it crossing the lawn into the lantana-bougainvillea-blackberry thicket, like a guilty teenager sneaking home late, head down, ginger pelt dishevelled from the night's anarchy.

An air of suspense always hung over his next task: to clean the pool of its overnight denizens. What would it be this morning? The surface usually whirled with floundering creatures that had fallen in overnight, each one paddling in its own panicky circle. With the pool net he might scoop up spiders, moths, frogs, beetles, worms, cane toads; once or twice a bush rat or a half-drowned possum. Next, even more suspenseful, the check of the filter box for unwelcome occupiers. Then, the pool cleared of its bigger interlopers (only the inevitable gnats remaining), and as the sun headed higher over the first line of camphor laurels, Leon K. would step out of his clothes and mud-reddened boots and, naked and shivering, jump into the water.

However, on this late-autumn morning he was feeling off-colour (bloody Wyntuhl's cold?) and the southerly breeze seemed to pierce his lungs. Scooping up the obvious floating creatures, and weighing up whether it was sensible to swim (he hated missing that first morning kilometre), he glimpsed a ripple of activity at the deep end. Squirming from the shadow of the wall was a darker ripple, a ripple that suddenly took the form of a torn strip of tyre on the highway verge. But only for a moment. The sliver of black rubber straightened, moved assertively forward, raised its head and surged towards the shallow end. Impressively and weightlessly at ease in this pH-controlled, salt-and-chlorine swimming pool was a black snake.

The snake was so commanding of its environment it was like a mockery of itself: a wildlife-park souvenir, a plastic toy. Recognising it as a red-bellied black, however, Leon K. jumped back from the edge. Although they were common here, it still gave him a shock. Any snake, even a harmless tree snake or diamond python, had this mythical power. In summer he'd spot a snake almost every week. Whether they were dangerous or not he always gave them a wide berth and they slid harmlessly back into the shrubbery.

Indeed, he'd long anticipated finding a snake in the pool one morning: hence the extended handle on the pool net. But his chest still tightened with nerves. He suddenly ached to cough but subdued the impulse in case he agitated the snake. Circling the pool, it looked so natural, so perfectly at home. It was at home. According to all the wildlife books, the red-bellied black preferred to live beside water, where it could catch frogs and water rats.

No doubt about it, it had to be removed ? and Leon K. decided to act. The snake was about a metre and a half long; it wasn't difficult to swing the net under it and scoop it up, tail first. It tumbled into the net surprisingly easily, a concentrated black clump. Just as easily, it immediately unravelled, paused for a second ? its eyes seeking and, disconcertingly, finding the eyes of the net wielder ? and sped along the pole towards him. Leon K. quickly dropped both net and snake into the pool.

Unable to concentrate on anything else, he checked regularly on the snake throughout the morning. Obviously it couldn't climb out; nevertheless, whenever it swam towards him he stepped well back from the edge. At lunchtime, while he ate his sandwich by the pool, he studied the snake, almost mesmerised by its urgent bow-wave and faint rippling wake, noting that immersion made its skin darker and glossier and that when it rested and floated, its uppermost skin faded to dull slate. But generally it kept swimming back and forth, ever seeking escape. By now it must have swum more laps than his own daily quota. Surely it couldn't keep going much longer and would soon weaken and drown.

By mid-afternoon it was floating only half coiled, as static and dead-looking as a comma. It hadn't moved in two hours. Tentatively, he splashed the pool's surface with the carefully retrieved net, whereupon the snake plunged to the bottom and rose again, its belly flashing blood red, all springy coils and searching intent. It was an angry question mark. Again he stepped back from the edge, but the snake was already floating gracefully on the surface, conserving energy, an elongated S. Who was waiting out whom? It had been in the pool now for twelve or fourteen hours. If he was ever going to swim again, Leon K. realised he needed professional help. He consulted the phone book and discovered an organisation called The Wildlife Saviours.

He was drinking his breakfast coffee at 7.30, on edge at missing yet another swim ? the third lap session the snake had cost him ? when a Wildlife Saviour arrived. For some reason he'd expected a man in khakis and boots, not a young woman wearing jeans and a green T-shirt, with a baby in a carry-cot. The sunlight emphasised the shine of a wide scar on her right cheek. Her straight hair fell behind her like dark water. 'You haven't injured the snake, have you?' She frowned at him. 'Some men can't help it. They're on a sacred mission to bash snakes to death.'

'I haven't harmed it.' Seeing him glance at the sleeping baby, the young woman said, 'We're all volunteers. We have to fit in the wildlife rescues with our normal lives.' She set down the carry-cot on the veranda. 'Everyone's sorry for the cuddly things when they're hurt or in trouble but snakes are just as much part of the big picture as koalas and wallabies.'

She introduced herself as China Mason. He was pleased his name seemed to mean nothing to her. Indicating the pool, he said, 'There's my problem.' The snake was noticeably more faded and listless this morning. It obviously hadn't eaten for a while: as well as losing sheen and energy its body seemed to have contracted. 'It's stressed and exhausted,' said China Mason, fitting a meshed metal trap to an aluminium pole. She opened and shut the trap from a latch on the handle. Bending over the pool, revealing a tattoo of a lyrebird low on her right hip, she took only about twenty seconds to scoop up the snake from the pool and snap the trap shut, and perhaps another minute to detach the trap from the pole and place it in the back of her van. 'We release them out in the bush,' she told him. 'But if you want I could let it go in your garden ? its home territory, after all.'

'No, my snake-sympathy only goes so far.' His gratitude was almost boundless, however, and as he served her coffee on the veranda he found himself talking ? and listening ? more enthusiastically than he had to anyone for many months. In the beginning the conversation was of snakes, of course. Blacks, eastern browns, tigers, adders, pythons. She repeated her mantra about snakes deserving the same respect as furry marsupials. 'For a venomous snake, that one in the trap is relatively timid. It attacks humans only as a last resort.' His interest in the topic surprised him, as did the novel sound of his own animated voice. All this unaccustomed chatting to a woman was making his throat dry, and when the baby woke and started to yelp like some small bush animal itself, and China Mason said, 'Do you mind if I feed her?' his answer, 'Of course not,' came out as a croak.

An unanticipated bare breast was a shock. Although he politely averted his eyes when she lifted up her T-shirt ? not the least self-consciously ? and applied the baby to her nipple, its effect was to make him stand up and offer more coffee. 'Thank you,' she said, smiling slightly. 'She's Ayeshia, by the way. Sounds like the continent but spelled differently.'

Keeping up the China connection, he supposed. He felt a little dazed. Returning with the coffee, still a little giddy but anxious not to show it, he asked whether her parents had named her China because of their admiration for the country and Chinese things.

'No, they named me Janelle.' When she was small, she explained, her father liked to call her China, as in rhyming slang: China plate ? mate, because she always hung around him, his little pal and helper. 'Then when I was nine he went out for cigarettes, just like in a film, and never came back.'

Leon K.'s first instinct was to pat her arm or shoulder, at least register his sympathy by meeting her steady gaze with his own. But the overt breast handling ? the sudden switching of sides, both nipples simultaneously visible for a moment, then the replacement of the first breast inside the T-shirt and the complete exposure of the second one for Ayeshia's benefit ? hampered any such response. For a while there was a lot of fleshy bustling and bouncing going on, and of course no touch was possible. The breasts dominated the veranda, the way they introduced intimacy, presumed it, and at the same time forbade it. Anyway, she was a stranger. For God's sake, he'd known her less than an hour. But despite himself he felt a sunburst of lust, instantly overshadowed by guilt. You were supposed to be favourably inclined towards the naturalness of nursing mothers yet always remain sexually detached. But he felt swamped by intense sensations, conflicted on several levels and, basically, like a pimply fourteen-year-old again. Something in his being had shifted. He tried to focus on her scar.

'Dad was good with animals,' China Mason said, very calmly, as she burped the baby on her shoulder. 'Kind, not the shooting sort ? not even rabbits. He could handle reptiles, no worries. He could get possums out of the ceiling without a scratch on him.' Ten years later, she went on, she was working behind the bar in a Newcastle hotel when he walked in. 'That was a shock. He saw me, too, downed his beer and walked out. I didn't run after him. If that was his attitude, bugger him.'

'Whew! ' Genuinely moved, he was still trying to meet her eyes, and succeeded.

'At least I inherited the animal thing from him,' said China Mason. 'The lifelong interest.'

'Yes.'

'I see you're wondering about my scar?'

'Not at all,' he lied.

'Acid,' she said.

'Oh.'

His unasked question hung burning in the air. She didn't elaborate, but finished the breast-feeding then. What passion must she have aroused to cause the acid attack ? and what sort of jealous, evil bastard would do that to her? To Leon K., the time it took her to adjust her clothing, burp the baby again and place her in the carry-cot flew by incredibly fast. His brain raced with possible delaying tactics, but he could hardly offer her a drink this early in the morning, or round up more suffering wildlife. 'Ayeshia doesn't much resemble me, does she?' she remarked absently. 'All that blonde hair. She takes after my ex-partner.'

Why did he feel elated at that little prefix, the simple ex-?

And at her bringing it to his attention? His gratitude extended far beyond her ridding him of the snake. It stretched all the distance over different years and landscapes to the scar on her cheek. She was becoming more attractive and mysterious by the second, the scar adding vulnerability to her sensual intrigue. Not to mention the lyrebird tattoo on her hip and her hair like dark cascading water.

It dawned on him suddenly that he could easily embarrass her, and himself, with an inappropriate outpouring of enthusiasm. With wild compliments and avid interest. She'd think him mad and creepy. Actually, he did wonder if he'd become completely stir-crazy lately and he was glad it was too early in the day for him to be anything but sober. Really, he should watch himself in company, especially in female company. He walked her sensibly to her van. There was a danger his feelings might show in his tight facial expression; he realised his emotions were in a precarious state but he still had some self-restraint and dignity left, and all he ended up saying to her was, 'How much do I owe you?'

She gave him her card. As well as her name and contact number, it said: We volunteers gratefully accept what you think is a reasonable donation towards saving our wildlife. Her eyes widened at the reckless cheque he pressed into her hands, an amount certain to perplex the investigative auditors in days to come. 'Seriously? Are you sure? Wow! Thank you!' She sounded like a teenager just handed prized concert tickets. 'Call us if you have any more creature problems,' said China Mason, Wildlife Saviour, tooting the horn and waving blithely as she drove off through the tunnel of camphor laurels and down the driveway.

For perhaps half an hour Leon K. sat in a patch of sun on the veranda steps, considering a cloud of gnats hanging over the pool. Vibrating, thousands of tiny wings beating in unison. Beyond the tiers of camphor laurels and over the cane fields, a thin stripe of sea stretched in a north?south rectangle between the headlands. The vista of parallel pale blues and greens was like the flag of some temperate northern country. Birds called, the filter-box lid tap-tapped, and eventually the hovering gnat mass moved on.

So he was able to swim again ? but with the obstacle removed, there seemed to be less urgency. Eventually he stood anyway, stepped out of his clothes and walked to the pool, swinging his arms to loosen up after the enforced lay-off. He dived in, turned on to his back underwater and began stroking. Striving to appreciate the streaming clouds as usual, the skittering swifts, the pelicans soaring high today over the cane fields, he swam one lap, two . . . It took three laps before the waves and backwash from his progress agitated the filter box enough for the snake to curl out from the air-space between the filter and the pool's surface.

Desperate to escape the pool, a red-bellied black, longer and sleeker than the original ? or maybe this one was the original ? slid up his torso, rode his panicking body to the edge and escaped into the palms. As China Mason had pointed out, black snakes, though venomous, are relatively timid. A measure of its anxiety was that it bit Leon K.'s neck on its way to freedom.

He got inside to the telephone, even found her Wildlife Saviours card in his trouser pocket. Her number rang and rang but finally she answered. Water was puddling the carpet and a thin stream of watered blood dripped pink from his neck and down his chest. Already his throat was constricting. Finally she answered.

'What do I do now?' Leon K. asked her. Repeatedly. 'What do I do now?' He pictured her face. His voice was dry and already disappearing, so he had to hurry. 'I'm sorry,' he apologised. 'I'm not from here.'