We came out from there and sat in silence for a long time. I said, ‘Make him a casket while I go and arrange his tangihanga.’ I went home to use the telephone and on returning saw that Chappy had the bamboo casket well under way. Noddy’s older brother arrived not long afterwards, and together he and I untwisted Noddy from his standing death.

‘Do we notify anyone?’ I asked his brother, meaning doctors, police, authorities.

‘The ones who matter to my brother have all been told,’ he said.

So we took our crate of bones to the marae for the ceremonies, and the next day buried Noddy by his mother and father.

Some time later, I was pacing out by the bamboo grove searching my soul. For several days I’d been backwards and forwards between there and the spring where, nearly fifty years before, as a fourteen-year-old, I had drawn water and allowed my attention to stray. It’s a distance of fifty impossible yards or more. Impossible yards. A four-year-old could not have, in that time, gone from one place to the other without my knowing. Could he? While we searched in other directions? But, no. He would’ve answered our calls, come running, his hiding game over.

The bamboo grove, which in the early days had begun as runaway shoots from my mother’s garden but which was controlled to some degree by animals, had taken up and thickened to a wide belt in an unused paddock. Other unwanted plants – scrub, thistle and blackberry – struggled against it as it broke fences, jumped ditches, clogged waterways.

Since the tangihanga of our cousin, Chappy had come to see me every day. On this day of my wandering, he told me he needed help with his garden, but I suspect that he was attempting to move me away from my thoughts. Tomorrow, I told him.

He went away and came back the next day with tools – secateurs and little saws, hand forks and trowels, which he used in his own garden. There were no slashers, axes, shovels, spades. Nothing big like that.

‘Take it down, piece by piece,’ he said. ‘Examine every leaf, every stem and every dab of soil, and then we’ll know.’ He paused, looking away from me. ‘Do you want to know?’ he asked, becoming my other voice.

In reply, I took up a pair of secateurs and cut the nearest cane. We examined the length of it and put it aside, next scratching the earth round the root, which we then extracted. We worked there until it was time for Chappy to go back to the tearoom. ‘Come and have a cup of tea with Oriwia and me,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll go home and cook up a feed – bacon bones, cabbage, swede …’ I hadn’t eaten since we buried Noddy.