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On some afternoons the harbour smelled of brine and thunder. The clouds moved ashore in interleaved sheets; the rain came down like well-ordered handwriting.

The tide was in, the estuary muscled up into the town, and so from both directions there was water. Where these waters met on the steps, in the gullies, in the squared courtyards where the shearers had left a last smear under their boots, the clay bloomed. It darkened not with mud but with intention, like ink drawing itself out, line after line emerging to an extent that it could not be brushed away as coincidence or dismissed as some idle capillary trick of damp minerals.

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