THE LANDLORD’S SON arrived unannounced, just before dinner. Mia saw him from the window as he crossed the paddock from his own house. Passing the tank, he rapped his bony knuckles down the rungs. Keep an eye on the tenants, his father had told him. Despite his youth, the boy took his responsibilities seriously. He began a leisurely inspection of the garden bed. Mia had dug it the day after she moved in. Three tomato plants had survived the hot weather, and the fruit was almost ripe. The landlord’s son reached to squeeze a tomato, with a touch both tender and proprietorial. He pulled it off the vine and popped it into his mouth. 

He knocked on the front door. Mia waited a moment and took a breath. She’d begun to dread the sound of his knock and the uncanny regularity of his mealtime arrivals. 

‘Oh, hi, Simeon.’ 

‘Hi, I’m sorry to disturb you again, but I need to speak to you about something.’ 

He used one foot to dislodge a mosquito from his calf, then scratched the site with his toenails. Like most of his family, Simeon was habitually barefoot. Finding themselves heirs to a large property, no longer viable for cattle but secluded from the prying eyes of authorities, the landlord and his brothers had filled the paddocks with a sprawl of sheds and caravans. Tenants were referred by word of mouth, a last lifeline before everything fell apart.

The landlord went to great lengths, collecting people from the railway station or prison gates, or moving their belongings with his own trailer. He was a kind man, people said. He would do anything for you. The family no longer walked barefoot out of poverty, like their hard-grafting ancestors. Shoes were a social imposition on those whose time was not their own. Among the lantana and rusting car bodies, the landlord’s family were their own masters now.

‘Do you need to come in?’ Mia was conscious of an instinct to recoil, as well as the need to keep it from her voice.

Without being invited, Simeon sat down at the dining table. Mia had cleaned underneath it one day and found the names of the landlord and his brothers carved in childish letters. 

‘I just came to remind you that your rent is due. I mean, it’s due on Monday, but I’m reminding you as a courtesy because I’d like to avoid the same situation we had last month, if we can.’

Mia’s car had broken down, and she’d put off paying him. That was when his evening calls had begun.

‘It should be fine this time, it’s just with the car and –’ 

‘Yes, I realise you’ve had some difficulties. I’m just doing it as a courtesy to you.’

Simeon’s voice had a studiously maintained gentleness. His wandering fingers found a tomato seed caught in his whiskers. He rubbed it away.

‘How’s your dad?’ Mia asked.

‘Well, he could be better, obviously. They moved him into hospice care last week, so I’ve had to take on more of his responsibilities.’

He sighed, showing the weight of his heavy administrative burden. While he never admitted to loneliness, Mia suspected it was this, as well as an inability to cook, that brought him to her house on flimsy pretexts.

‘Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that.’ 

Though it was never discussed, they both knew that soon the boy would not be merely the landlord’s son. He would inherit all of his father’s property.

‘Hi, Simeon!’

‘Tommy, my mate!’ 

Her son, abandoned by his father, lived in awe of this older male. She left them alone while she finished cooking dinner. Tom came into the kitchen, under instruction, to ask for three glasses and some very hot water. 

Mia found them conducting a science experiment in which Tom had to hold his fingers in water of different temperatures. The finger in the hottest water was red and swollen. Simeon’s games were often tests of strength and endurance. With Mia, Tom was by turns hostile, distracted or in tears over small discomforts, but he submitted stoically to the older boy’s demands. Without instruction, he’d managed to absorb the rules of masculine behaviour. 

When the baby started crying, Simeon went to lift her out of the cot. Tom pulled his fingers from the water. His gaze flickered briefly across Mia’s own. Simeon was better with the baby, gentle and indulgent, but his voice when he lifted her up was the same one he used to remind Mia that the rent was due. Mia steeled herself. 

‘We’re just about to eat, if you’d like some?’ 

‘Thank you, that’d be lovely.’ 

During dinner, Simeon explained the theory behind their science experiment. Each finger had been preconditioned, so transferring them to the same lukewarm glass produced different temperature perceptions in exactly the same environment. The philosophical implication was that there was no such thing as reality: sensory perception was all relative. 

The family business gave Simeon time to read widely, and he could speak at length on any topic. He seemed genuinely baffled that other people lacked his store of arcane facts. Audaciously, he’d even advised Mia on childrearing. 

She interrupted Simeon’s monologue to tell Tom to put his pyjamas on. 

‘You’re sleeping in Nanna’s room,’ Simeon told the boy. 

‘It’s my room.’ 

‘That’s my nanna’s old bedroom. She died in that room.’ 

Simeon thanked Mia for the meal, then left to pick his way back through the paddock. 

Tom woke up later that night, haunted by Nanna’s restless ghost. 

Mia was restless, too, angry because she couldn’t speak her mind. You let people walk all over you, her mother had once told her. They were outside on a grey day. Her mother was attached to an oxygen tank, grey-faced in a white hospital gown, having cajoled Mia to wheel her out for a cigarette. These had been some of her parting words. 

MIA HAD THOUGHT living out of town would be peaceful, but she often felt besieged. A man inexplicably called Ferret – she didn’t know his real name – lived in the nearest shed. The night before, she’d seen him outside, stoking a large bonfire and drinking a stubby. She glimpsed firelight on his hard-bitten face. He turned up his speakers by increments, until she could feel the music vibrate through her floor. Ferret was expecting party guests, she thought, but after more than an hour, no guests had arrived. She tried to put the kids to bed, but Tom kept calling out for her, and then the baby woke up. 

Mia’s stepfather would invite his friends home late at night so they could keep drinking after the pub kicked them out. Mia would appear in her nightie, tearful, the party pooper trying to spoil their fun. For the first time, she’d encountered the contempt of grown men and its accompanying underbelly of danger. She’d been braver as a child, begging for the music to be turned down. Now she knew how it would go. 

She heard a knock and opened the door to find Ferret. 

‘How’s your evening?’ 

‘It’s okay.’ 

‘I’m just having a few beers, if you want to join me?’ 

Mia realised that she was the guest Ferret had been expecting. The fire and the music were meant to lure her. 

‘Um, I have the kids.’ 

‘You can bring them.’ 

‘Actually, they’re in bed. The music is pretty loud.’ 

Her fellow tenants were mostly single men. She knew they gossiped about her, the stuck-up new chick with her big house, given to her by the landlord because of the kids. She watched Ferret’s face fall. 

‘Yeah, no worries. I can turn it off.’ He held up his hands, placating. 

The silence was a relief, but she feared she would pay later. Any small victory seemed to go on a giant cosmic tab, to be recouped in sudden, unpleasant ways. 

HER CAR BROKE down on the way home from shopping. She pulled over into the weeds on the side of the road and tore open a packet of crackers to keep the kids quiet. She hadn’t yet told Tom they’d be walking home. Stupidly, to avert a battle in the moment, she’d let him go to the shops without shoes. 

She opened the boot and surveyed the shopping. Factoring in the baby, she knew it was more than she and Tom could carry between the two of them. Some of it would have to be abandoned to spoil in the heat. 

She left her daughter’s door open. 

‘I’ll be back soon.’ 

She didn’t want Tom to see her cry. Her own mother’s crying had usually come after the drinking. There were stretches – sometimes years at a time – when she was a good parent. Then, usually when a new boyfriend appeared, she seemed to lose interest, as if having a daughter were a hobby she’d outgrown. Mia dreaded repeating the pattern but at times found herself besieged with vivid fantasies of doing something worse, like leaving the kids on the side of the road and starting a new life somewhere else. 

A car pulled up next to hers. It would serve her right if they were abducted just as she was wishing them away. She ran but saw that it was Simeon. He leant in the window to talk to Tom. 

‘It’s okay,’ she called. ‘I’m just here.’ 

In the seat of Simeon’s ute, buried under the shopping and with the air conditioning on, Tom was thrilled to be allowed into his hero’s inner sanctum. Mia wondered if Simeon could see that she’d been crying. 

Once he’d helped her carry the bags inside, she had no choice but to invite him to stay. He stretched out on the carpet to play with the kids. 

Mia knew there was a rift of some sort between the boy’s father and his uncles. Simeon had mentioned a girlfriend. Sometimes he implied that their bond was a serious one, on a higher plane of maturity than those of their peers, but then he would forget his own narrative and parody the girl in an arch falsetto. Mia was familiar with her in passing but rarely saw her at the house. She didn’t know why, when Simeon’s father was dying, Simeon’s girlfriend would be absent. 

Then there was Simeon’s mother, the woman who really did leave her child for good, by way of a car and a tree on a straight stretch of road. 

They made a sad trio of dinner-party guests, Simeon looking for a mother, Tom for a father, and none of them getting what they wanted. Perhaps she’d been too hard on Simeon, Mia thought. 

After dinner, she watched him put on a puppet show for the baby, with witty asides aimed at her and Tom. He finished his performance, then stood abruptly and stretched. His eyes caught something on the architrave above the kitchen door. He put his thumb against the wood and it gave way like paper. 

‘Termites. We sprayed before you moved in, but they’re all the way through the place.’ 

He went down the doorframe, then along a floorboard, crumbling the wood with his hand and leaving a trail of pulp. 

‘Bastards.’ He wiped his hands on his shorts. ‘Thanks for dinner.’ 

He left without looking down at the mess he’d made. 

IN THE MORNING, Mia was surprised to see her car being towed into the yard. Ferret emerged from the vehicle in front, followed by Simeon from her own. Ferret would repair the car free of charge, Simeon told her. He’d arranged it all. He left them to it – just Mia and the man she’d rejected, perhaps angered, a few nights before. 

She was wary of Ferret’s hunger for company and the way his hopes for a less lonely future might fall, with single-minded focus, onto her. In the past, mistaking someone else’s need for her own inescapable destiny, she’d thought this was love. 

Ferret, clumsy in courtship, possessed a calm that eluded him outside the bonnet of a car. 

‘So, I hear Sim is pulling your house down.’ 

Perhaps this was a kind of revenge for him, to casually deliver the devastating news. Her shock must have been obvious. 

‘He did find some termites last night,’ she said. 

When he looked up from the bonnet, Mia glimpsed the shadow of a smirk. 

‘Apparently, the place is full of them. He’s going to gut it and start again with the frame.’ 

Mia had wondered if Simeon’s evening calls were a source of gossip among the male tenants – imagined sleazy assignations by a kid with an unfair advantage, a boy acting as silverback. She’d got her comeuppance now. 

‘Yeah,’ Ferret said. ‘I heard that’s always been the plan. They thought about it after the grandmother died, but his old man wanted to put you in there instead. The kid’s less of a soft touch.’ He looked back under the bonnet and twisted something languidly with his pliers. ‘I’m surprised he never told you all this. I’ve got plenty of room at my place.’ He gestured towards the shed. ‘Or I was thinking of just hitting the road again. Make a fresh start. I could do with some company.’ 

WHEN SOMEONE KNOCKED late that night, Mia’s first thought was that it was Ferret, there to collect his dues. But it was Simeon. 

She’d been awake anyway, going over everything she’d missed. He’d eaten her food, knowing what was to come. She’d put his bad manners down to a youthful lack of insight, but maybe he’d simply taken all he could while he had the chance. The image of him lifting the baby, with his saccharine patter, made Mia’s skin crawl. His occasional kindnesses now looked like pre-emptive penance. 

The boy on her doorstep appeared to have the swagger knocked out of him, though. He sniffled and wiped his nose with his hand. Mia smelt alcohol, though she’d often heard him disparage people who did not value their own mental clarity. 

‘Dad’s dead.’ 

He seemed to be wielding the words for the first time, testing their power. 

‘Oh no, when?’ 

‘I’ve just come back from the hospice.’ 

He began to sob loudly, and there was nothing Mia could do but put her arms around him. He accepted her sympathy greedily, squeezing her tight. 

‘Both of your parents are dead, aren’t they?’ he asked. 

‘Yes.’ 

‘How do you even go on?’ 

‘I don’t know. You find a way.’ 

‘I don’t know what to do.’ 

‘You don’t have to do anything. You just keep living.’ 

Mia’s parents had died without the good grace to leave her a large inheritance. Her response just now had been curt, but the boy didn’t seem to notice. He paused, pondering what she’d said. 

Just keep living, he repeated, as if the phrase contained some deep wisdom. 

She couldn’t send him back out into the night in this state. She pictured his mother, the car and the tree. 

‘Why don’t you sleep on our couch?’ 

She got him a blanket. 

‘Thank you. I appreciate it.’ 

Asleep, he looked like a child, despite his moustache. 

As the sky lightened, a thought appeared: she’d let Simeon walk all over her, just like her mother had said. Her kindness stemmed from a weakness of character, but nonetheless she’d saved him from himself. She’d fed him when he was lonely, then hugged him as he’d cried. That kind of bond was hard to ignore. She’d inadvertently incurred him a debt that could not be repaid with eviction. In the morning, Simeon was gone. The blanket was left trailing on the floor. 

LATER THAT WEEK, Mia saw a line of cars arriving for the wake and the family in black, picking their way across the paddock in uncomfortable shiny shoes. She saw Simeon with his girlfriend, who seemed to be back in the picture now. 

Tom had developed a newfound fascination with death. He leaned on the windowsill, watching. 

‘Will we have to move now?’ he asked. ‘Because he’s dead?’ 

‘I hope not. I don’t think so. I think Simeon will let us stay.’ 

‘Because he’s our friend. Isn’t he, Mum?’ 

‘Maybe.’ 

THEY FINISHED EATING the tomato crop, and Mia planted out the bed with broccoli. The weather was unusually cool and clear. Even if they had just one more year in the place, it’d be long enough for them to catch their breaths. 

After a few weeks, she noticed that Simeon didn’t visit anymore. She put the rent in an envelope and pushed it under his door. The house was peaceful without the prospect of his evening calls. Grief could make people do strange things, she thought. His girlfriend’s car was often parked in the driveway now, and she saw the two of them out pulling weeds in the landlord’s garden. Things had returned to their natural order. 

A letter arrived. Mia wondered if he’d paid someone to draft it; the language sounded so precise and bureaucratic. She was hereby informed that she was being given notice to vacate the property no later than a period of two weeks from the date of the letter. 

It was signed Sincerely, Simeon Collins (Landlord).