‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ asked Nia.
The numbness had left his body, but his brain still felt frozen. Something shivered inside him, and then he felt her hand on his: warm, soft, firm…
‘Please, Farlan. Please talk to me.’
‘I don’t know where to start,’ he said after a moment.
He felt her hesitation. Then, ‘Did something happen?’
‘Not something. Someone. There was someone in the crowd I knew.’
He could taste metal in his mouth. The pain felt as though it would burst through his skin.
‘His name’s Cam. He’s my brother.’
Nia stared at him. Outside the car, clouds were starting to tumble over the hills. Seconds later fat, globular raindrops began hitting the windscreen. Inside her head she was shuffling the assumptions she’d made, thumbing through them like a deck of cards.
‘I didn’t know you had a brother,’ she said carefully.
The expression on his face made her stomach muscles tremble.
‘I didn’t know if I still had one. We lost touch…must be sixteen years ago. After he moved out.’
She hesitated, not wanting to press against the bruise in his voice, but even less able to just sit and watch his pain. ‘From the farm?’
He stared at her blankly, then shook his head. ‘No. I had to go to the farm because he left.’
Nia blinked. What did he mean by ‘had to’? She took the easier question. ‘So why did he leave?’
‘He wasn’t going to.’ Farlan’s mouth twisted. ‘But then he met this bloke down the pub. He was a roustabout on one of the oil rigs, and he talked Cam into taking a job on one.’
Nia frowned. Usually the answers to questions left her understanding more, but with Farlan she seemed to understand less and less.
‘Why did that mean you had to move to the farm?’ she said slowly.
His face shuttered. ‘I couldn’t live on my own. I was only thirteen.’
‘So you were living with Cam? It was just the two of you?’
Was that even legal?
‘What about your parents?’ She’d thought they were divorced and both had remarried, but if he’d been that young…
There was a long pause.
‘My mum left when I was seven. I haven’t seen her since.’
Nia was starting to feel sick. In the restaurant, she had wanted him to tell her about his family. Selfishly, greedily, she had wanted to share more than sex with him. Now, though, every word he spoke hurt her.
Worse, it hurt him.
‘When she left it was okay for a couple of years…’
She felt his hand tense.
‘And then my dad met Cathy.’ He looked away, tracking the clouds that were racing across the sky. ‘She didn’t really like me and Cam, and she had three kids of her own, so…’ His voice falter
ed. ‘Anyway, she persuaded my dad that it would be better if we moved out, so he bought us this caravan and me and Cam moved in there. Only then Cam left.’