She pauses, breathing hard, one hand gripping the trunk of a sapling. ‘I don’t know. Maybe five.’

‘Five years old!?’ At five she passed a test that I can’t do at eleven. Maybe I am fooling myself. I look around at the trees, silent and steadfast. They don’t care if I pass a test or not.

‘She taught us young so we could busk,’ said Sylvie.

‘Why were you busking?’ I ask. ‘Weren’t you in a circus?’

‘Well …’ She looks at her feet. ‘We weren’t with a circus all that much.’ Her voice is quiet. ‘We lived in our car most of the time, actually.’

‘The four of you lived in a car?’

‘Yes. A station wagon.’ She looks back up the hill. ‘Let’s go.’

I scramble after her and try to imagine her as a little girl, sleeping with her mum and two sisters in the back of a station wagon, and busking on the streets. Does my mum know this?

‘Look.’ Sylvie points to the ground. ‘Possum scats.’

‘Scats?’ I say, staring at the jumble of dead leaves.

‘Honestly?’ she says. ‘You don’t know that a scat is an animal poo? And these are possum scratch marks.’ She crouches and runs a purple fingernail down a mark in the bark. ‘Without nature we wouldn’t have magic.’ Her voice has lost its usual slightly grumpy edge. ‘Really hearing and really seeing nature is the source of big magic, Tulsi. We must notice even the smallest ant or beetle, and hear the faintest sound from a tree. Everything has a vital role to play.’

She lays a hand on the tree’s trunk, as if greeting a long-lost friend, and tips her head back to look up at the leaves shifting in the morning breeze.

‘Did Merry tell you this is the country of the Bundjalung people?’ she asks. ‘They can hear this country like we never will. Because they’ve been here for something like a hundred thousand years. Our ancestral land is back in Wales.’ She stares at me for a long moment. ‘I can tell that you barely notice the natural world around you. Am I right?’

‘I do notice it!’ I say, still trying to spot a scat among the leaves. If I’m honest, I often get hot and tired being out in the bush, and I certainly don’t want to stop and inspect every animal poo I pass.

‘Really?’ she says doubtfully, and heads up the hill.

I follow her, making a mental note of a golden beetle on a tree trunk and a crumbly little mound of dirt which could possibly be an ants’ nest.