When Georgie first met Muir he was just about the most effortless character she’d ever known. She’d arrived in Melbourne only a few weeks before, but was already finding life there more inhospitable than she could ever have imagined. The men she met were either anti-women or anti the fact that she was from Sydney, she couldn’t tell. Whatever the case they were consistently stand-offish, so that when she was introduced to Muir at a lecture at the Stravinsky Club he seemed quite above all that. He had had two books published and was in full well-flannelled flight, cheery in just the way she needed. He was a bear of a man too, and she needed that also. Sometimes she felt as frail as a reed.

Life was other people, he told her in his unusual brogue, as they went from party to party, from city to country, along the Yarra and into the uplands and beyond, visiting, always visiting, and making love in bluestone alleyways or bush tracks on the way, never staying in hotels or guest houses, always with people he knew, where they would talk and smoke American cigarettes and drink claret all night, with sculptors in the Strathbogies or sheep farmer novelists holidaying in town. They stayed with all sorts and Muir was always ready for it, so garrulous and recondite, keen on the cricket if the circumstances demanded it, or western plains geology, or the dismantling of the atomic program, the new expressionist horizons, whatever it was that was going down. Those nights were rife with arguments about Nuremberg or Mopsy Fraser or Olivier’s Hamlet, with declarations slipshod from the booze. But come the morning he would always, without fail, haul his Remington away from the group and disappear. To the garden if there was one, to a park bench, to the local Mechanics Institute, while she stayed in the house, with the lecherous anthropologist, or the silent poet, or the chauvinist magazine editor, propping up Muir’s connections in ordinary time, the connections that allowed him to stay insouciant, to keep his depth for the cubisms of his writing, so that together they could lead their breezy peripatetic life.

When the children came: first Gus out of that nowhere-blue-land from which so many eldest children come, then Jo, to make a family out of them, and finally Mossy, to keep it glued together, it was all those connections Muir had, all those people scattered like thistledown across the land, that saved them time and again. It was no longer possible to lob on the doorsteps, not with three newly minted Australians in tow, wheezing and lachrymose or cowering in the corner from shyness, as Mossy often was. They had to get their own place. Their own hearth, Muir preferred to call it.

That was when he had unexpectedly fished out his family portraits from where they’d been stored in the garage at his brother’s. He hung them on the walls of their first house in Wattle Park to symbolise their settling down. Georgie didn’t realise it at the time, but it was the only way he could consent to the stillness. By casting out bohemia and becoming a modern-day laird. Even in rented rooms. In Muir’s mind he was still some kind of king of the clannish heaths, as his Scottish ancestors had been in the 900s. As a boy in Glasgow he’d been raised on such legends, and his own social ease was proof that, despite his new world freedoms, he had never ceased believing.

Like they had in many dwellings since, the portraits looked a little out of place in that first house, with their heavy black-oak frames and sombre vermillion tones; but even Georgie had to admit they brought a certain something, a sense of their own belonging perhaps, even to the rented weather-board of a friend.

As it turned out, their peripatetic life was far from over, and that first house seemed aeons ago to Georgie now, it might as well have been as far back as those clannish 900s. Does time contract or lengthen depending on how many different beds you lay your head down on at night? She wondered about this, in a rhetorical way, for she felt in her bones that she had the proof: not only was time drawn out by the perpetual evictions and last-minute salvations of her life with Muir, but, understandably enough, when she looked in the mirror she found that she had aged as well.

So now little Mossy lay, at an odd angle in his new bed near the window, amidst the breathing sleepdom of his brother and sister, with tears drying on his cheeks, as he listened to the bird.

He had counted. They’d lived in fourteen houses in five years. Eight back when they still owned the Standard Tourer, and six places since, which they’d moved to either on foot or by bus or train. Once, flying right into the teeth of a cold city wind, they had all piled, portraits and all, into one of those two-tone FJ Holden taxis. Taxis of course are very expensive. As they stood with their bags and the portraits in front of the shining car, Muir had reminded their mummy of this. But she was angry, and insisted. They cannot walk through the night to their new home, Muir, she exclaimed. Carrying these stupid heavy pictures! Mossy had felt the waterworks about to burst in him when she raised her voice like that. People were staring at them on the street, and the wind felt like a woodaxe cutting through you.

But this place was different, they needn’t argue like that anymore. He had never known that a magpie would sing such a friendly tune as this and he didn’t want to ever be away from it again.

Muir’s fourth novel, in which he felt he’d quite strategically branched out into a fashionable science fiction, had found no takers. The book before had sold few enough copies, and the last thing his publishers wanted was a leap across genres. Since then he’d moved the family from the caretaker’s house of a remote scout camp in the Croajingolong to a claustrophobic boarding house in the heart of St Kilda. They’d climbed the Dandenongs to a damp-riddled chalet once owned by the Streetons, where Jo had nearly died of asthma, necessitating another expensive taxi fare in the middle of the night. They’d camped in a narrow fumy house at the bottom of a chicory kiln on Phillip Island, and had walked a rope-bridge across a creek to a house in Blackwood, blowing smoke-rings with the fog in imitation of Muir, having been dropped off by an old mate of his from the theatre – Brownie was his name – who’d started a removalist business that had never really kicked on. They had also sat in a downcast family cloud, each of them bar Mossy cuddling one of the hessian-wrapped portraits, on the train to Geelong where Muir had lined up a new brick veneer near the saltworks.

The house in Blackwood had been Georgie’s favourite – up high on stilts it had verandahs all around, a lovely big kitchen with an electric refrigerator, and a sprawling dewy garden – but Muir had felt uneasy there. He said he was worried about the effect of the moist air on Jo’s asthma, but actually the rent was as steep as the block of land and he hated the person they were renting it from. So they’d up and left again, with the money from the sales of his last book almost gone now, their credit options bleakening, and the kids barely literate even despite their semi-famous father, whose old stories they still loved to hear if he ever found a clearing to tell them in.

Georgie had found it curious the way the watery swelling of the bird in the half-light had clearly simplified into song. No more imitations of the milkman’s Clydesdale clop, or the whisk whisk of hand-mowers. It was one single tune, over and over. She’d never heard a magpie sing something you could pick out on a piano. When it first happened she made a motion in the bed, to get up, to go down the hallway and do exactly that, but then she remembered. She wasn’t sixteen anymore, she wasn’t at home in Ithaca Road, it wasn’t Potts Point. It was Victoria, and they didn’t own a piano.

Instead they had Muir’s portraits. His great-great-grandfather, Davin Kentigern Muir, the Glaswegian civic genius into whom those high 900s had funnelled. Standing as an old man with the turkey bustard by his side, glowering under moustached eyebrows at the artist. His great-grandfather and -mother, posed in a studio in the Bishop’s Byres, he with a crossbow and a book, she with what looked like a posy of lupins in her hands. His great American uncle Boldy, standing more like a lair than a laird, in linens beside an orange tree on the coast of California. And Muir’s grandfather Robert, looking out from the gilted frame that had been chipped when Gus dropped it as they were boarding the boat to leave Phillip Island. Robert was the one who made the family’s first entrepreneurial money, the one with modern enterprise in his step, the cordial factory, the woollen mills, and the eyes Georgie thought of as occult. At any rate, they’d always scared the children.

They were only two weeks in the new house when Muir’s professional hopes were raised after so long in the doldrums. It was just as they were having to wonder again how they might find the next month’s rent, with Muir adamant as always that taking menial work would put paid to any long-term hopes for his writing, and as a consequence, their eventual prosperity. As Georgie raised herself from bed, the memory of the tune of the bird was wiped by Muir talking thirteen to the dozen about the encouraging letter he’d had from Macauley his publisher. Could he put his own work aside and knock up a book about the Aborigines, Macauley wanted to know. Something ethnographic. But digestible. For an overseas market. And yes, he told Georgie, he thought he could. He’d always had an interest, and the retainer Macauley was offering was too good to refuse. If things went to plan it would mean they could stay put in the house indefinitely. Even buy a place of their own.

All the while Mossy was listening to the bird, and when Muir took a trunk call at the post office the following week, telling him the plan had backfired, that Macauley had been sacked and the offer revoked, he listened even harder. The mood in the house had reverted but every morning, usually just before the light, Mossy found he could nestle somehow, right in between the notes. When the stuffy room, its windows bare of curtains, changed from the jet black of Grandfather Robert’s eyes to a lighter grey and then a soft possumy brown. And through it all, a winding thing, came the ribbony light of the song.

Georgie was listening too. However many selves it had, however many names, however many throats or beaks or feathers, however many trees it had lived in, and no matter how many friends it had in its flock, it was now quite happy enough, unlike any magpie she’d ever known, to sing only one song. In the soft nest of the adjoining room at dawn, Mossy lay in a deep burrow of his mind. Georgie wondered how the bird never once strayed into other possibilities, the polyphony of possibilities, all the other notes he must’ve known, the sounds he must have heard and could so easily reproduce, while Mossy simply memorised the tune as the light grew up around him.

Muir may have been profligate and the eyebrows of all his friends may have been raising increasingly against him – hauling his children from house to house, often in the middle of the night due to some unforeseen sense of shame he’d developed, and with his wife so loyal throughout – but he was not stupid. Well, not in any ordinary way. So that when Macauley was sacked and the crunch was therefore coming again – like one of those mustard-coloured bulldozers he’d seen roaring over the hills of the A.V. Jennings housing estates – and Georgie demanded that he at least have the portraits valued, he conceded. He began to write some letters. Eventually, through a vestigial contact now working for an art auctioneers in Melbourne, he was able to secure an appointment.

He boarded the train, and with roneographed printouts and much trepidation he arrived at the auctioneers one morning to find, almost to his disappointment, that yes indeed, Aubrey Wade Mackenzie was a Scottish painter of some importance, and yes indeed the paintings appeared to be authentic, and the frames, although damaged, were also of their day, which added value, and thus if he was inclined to part with these family heirlooms they might fetch a healthy sum overseas, as much as £1000, the paintings being examples of the portraiture Mackenzie performed, both in Scotland and later in America, in order to finance his more important landscape canvases, some of which were considered now to be canonical with respect to the American Romantic tradition.

Muir had a beer and a steak in the South Yarra Arms on the way back to the train. He spilt sauce on his waistcoat and was filled with conflicted feelings, but nevertheless enjoyed the few moments of solitude enough to consider scribbling a poem on his napkin. He took out his fountain pen and smoothed the napkin flat on the table. He was waiting for the words, but the pen only hovered there in his fingers, and nothing came out.

As another day of financial reckoning drew near the family sank into an all too familiar mood. A different house, but the same caesarian atmosphere. The children felt it deeply, Mossy the most. Morning after morning he’d lie listening to the tune, the wet tears on his cheeks gradually replaced by a firm resolve. What is it that deepens a child so? Georgie asked herself later on. How could it be that someone so young could carry and clarify the whole teeming world?

Somehow, with his usual miraculousness, Muir had managed to save the portraits by conjuring up a new house for them, this time above a barber’s shop right in the heart of Ballarat. They could take the mailman’s van he told her, then catch the last train and walk the rest. If we arrive in the dark we might even see the ghosts of the old gold-diggers, he told the children.

She swore black and blue she wouldn’t move, demanded that he sell one of the portraits, but both of them knew she would follow him no matter what he decided. With the attention he had given her when she’d felt so alone in a new city, with his tender-ness and the excitement of their early ramblings, with the words he had written in his books, she had fallen under his spell.

But Mossy had fallen under a different spell. And when the time to leave approached and Georgie told the children, he was already prepared. I will not go, he said, and she closed her eyes with the burden of the words. When she opened them again he had already raced to the cupboard under the sink, taken out the brown canister of kerosene, unscrewed the lid, and was on his way to the portraits.

What are you doing with that … Mossy! she screamed.

He squirted the kero, then tossed the canister and all, at the face of his ancestor, Davin Kentigern Muir. Half the liquid hit the target, half went splashing down the walls.

Mossy! she screamed again, and knew that things were changing.

Now it was as if the walls of the house were a tinderbox, one false move, one careless match flung by Muir in frustration, and they’d all burn.

They stayed for another fortnight, with things caught in the balance, until the word came through from the auctioneers that one portrait had been sold. For £900. It was the American one, of Boldy standing next to the orange tree in California. Muir was informed that Mackenzie’s star was on the rise and the others could fetch a similar sum whenever he was ready.

It was then that Muir took to calling the portraits The 900s, not because of his family’s halcyon century on the medieval highlands but because that was what he could get if he sold them. With this large sum of money Georgie presumed that finally they would settle and buy a house, but instead Muir took the opportunity to go on a spree. He also began to write again, like a demon. He climbed back into the modernist guise of his first books, with a darkly picaresque tone inflected with his bitterness. Great Uncle Boldy, transposed to the antipodes, was the main, and insolvent, character.

Six months at the one school took the children to unexpected places. A girlfriend with red hair for Gus, a clearing of the asthma and the coming of her first period for Jo. Mossy remained steadfast.

Muir started insisting that they hold dinner parties for the locals: fishermen and graziers, the schoolteacher and the land agent, the publican and his wife. These were slap-up affairs, with oysters and gin & tonics, lamb on the spit, even Baltic caviar ordered in from Melbourne. Buoyed by the money in the bank – which was actually under the mattress – he made donations to the local school and the golf club, grew popular in the thereabouts, and for that Georgie was happy. Until finally one evening he came home down the starlit hill from the hotel in a slump, and she knew that any happiness they might have found had once again been squandered.

At least this time though they had a precedent to give her hope. There was a blank space on the wall where Boldy once had hung, but wasn’t Muir bringing him back to life in his half-written novel? Who could say that the same couldn’t happen for his grandfather too, and for the great-grandparents of the crossbow and lupins?

But Muir was adamant. What is this? he shouted, gesturing at the kitchen table and chairs, with whiskey on his breath. What is this but a house? Me, I’d prefer a writers’ camp. And what are they? he went on, pointing at the two remaining portraits on the living-room wall. Are they anything at all to you or I or the children, or are they just bread and salt?

What is it, Mossy, she asked him quietly as he sat on the tree-swing, the day after the second portrait had been sold. What is it you love so much about this place?

The boy gave her a curious look in reply. Only later did she realise it was a stare of disillusion. He had already told her the answer to the question. The magpie sings a song here, Mamma, he had said.

As eventually the spectre of gold-diggers’ ghosts was raised again by the inevitable next round of dwindling funds – the place above the Ballarat barber’s shop remained available – an irate Muir descended into another inebriated outburst. My old Boldy is one thing, he roared, the crossbow and lupins too, but if that child so much as lays a drop of god’s own water on my Grandfather Robert, I’ll throttle him.

A mood of wariness settled in on the house. With his nerves frayed Muir was threatening to leave them all. That was uncharacteristic. Georgie told him so. And one Sunday morning Mossy put down his Phantom comic and came over to stand by his chair. Tell me a story Daddy, he said. Tell me the story about when you were a boy, when you left Scotland to come and live in Australia.

As Christmas approached, the school holidays too, the surf nearby was a revelation. Gus rode it on a board with his friends and it crept into Muir’s sentences, first as a momentum then as a dialogue, then as a pure hissing in the air. He’d sit out into the evening by the beachstone barbecue, with a bottle of beer on the card-table, and Georgie and the children would go to sleep to the sound of his fingers’ click-clack and the ding! of his typewriter’s carriage.

He reviewed his position in the pages he wrote. He reviewed past postures, the narrowing in his life. But he could not bear to let go of the last picture. To cut himself adrift like that. Each sentence he wrote seemed to will him towards an erasure, until eventually each word was like a spadeful of soil flung out of his own grave. He saw the dirt sailing through the air. The space prepared for him in the dark eternity of the past. When he became conscious of that, with a jolt, his vision switched. He saw the future rushing towards him as a stream of southern light and knew what to do.

What Mossy knew was that the magpie’s song was like a magic string. Sometimes he felt it wind and wind about him, other times he felt it pulling the darkness up off the earth. And then it was an airy tether, a timeless clock ever so lightly spun around his wrist. His ears were pricked, even in the middle of the day. And when he woke deep in the night to the last of the typewriter’s dings, when in the darkness his father could write no more, Mossy was ready.

He got up in the dark, stepped carefully over Jo where she lay on her camp-bed on the floor, felt the hallway walls all the way into the kitchen. He padded soflty to the cupboard under the sink.

With the cold canister in his hands he made for the bookcase, his father’s tobacco tin and pipe. The matches which were always next to them.

Outside the house the southerly gusted. In her bed Georgie stirred, noting the plover’s alarm. There was a flash through the window, a single washed white singlet flapping on the line. Or was it an angel’s wing?

Mossy placed the canister on the table so he could feel for the matches. A wheel began to shoulder at the dawn. He looked outside and saw first a ghostly shape, then the white singlet, resolving in the light. Finally, after false tries, after fumblings in the dark and three muted clearings of the night’s long wait in the throat of the bird, he heard the song. The song of the light. That single binding tune.