She nods at me, and sobs. She takes the platter out, looks at it, and gasps once. It is a gasp of pain, but not surprise — simply an acknowledgement of something she already knew. She puts the platter down, and walks over to a small table against the wall. She picks up an object wrapped in tissue paper, and brings it to me. I unwrap it, and see that it is a platter, very similar to the one I brought here.

I am afraid of what I am supposed to be looking at. This platter also has a photo stuck to its centre. I know the photo. It is one that was in the local papers: a head shot of James at a football competition, smiling shyly after he was presented with a trophy for ‘most improved’. My heart is trying to vomit itself out of my body as I attempt to read the words scribbled in marker pen beneath his shining face: ‘Your son would look good in a plate. Don’t push your luck.’ I hug the plate to my chest, and slump to the ground. I am not crying. I am red-faced, snorting like a threatened bull. I could kill over this. I could do the worst things. Now I really hope they come. Let them come. No one will survive. I sit steaming, soundlessly repeating phrases of revenge. These bastards don’t know what they’ve come up against.

Eventually I stand, remove the photo as best as I can, go outside, put the platter in the back of my ute, get a hammer from the toolbox, and smash it until it is only fine grains of porcelain.

Then I lean back against the ute, and weep for James and for myself. How many times does he have to die? Every night in my head, and now again at the hands of these people. Elaine appears. She puts her arms around me, and her head against my chest. I hug her, but I can’t register her pain; only mine.

She mumbles: ‘I didn’t know. I thought it was just the pieces they wanted. How could I believe he was cremating bodies in our backyard? I thought there was something strange, bad, about the pieces they forced him to make, but he wouldn’t tell me what. He said he was protecting me.’ She is pushing her forehead hard into my chest, and I don’t know whether she is talking to me or herself. ‘I thought, if you received the boxes, you would go straight to the police. Then the people who were blackmailing Tito would get angry at me and never leave me alone. So I had to do anything I could to get those boxes. But I didn’t know why the pottery was so important. I thought it was because they were expensive pieces.’