I didn’t get up to see them off in the early morning, but I heard them joking, laughing, loading up and clopping off, the horses snorting in the dark. When they’d gone, I upped and went out to milk Tui. As I undid the leg-rope to let her off, I gave her a good hard whack. Some of the milk in the bucket slopped over my leg.

Mum was in the kitchen. She was frying eggs and vegetables – quite a good smell. Nevertheless, she went on from where she’d left off the night before: ‘We’re lucky to have these shearing jobs you know. There’s plenty with no work, living on eels and watercress. Can’t paint their house. Can’t pay their shop bill. Got no cow. Can’t go to the doctor. Clothes made out of sugar bags. So think yourself lucky, Aki.’

It was two days later when I came into the kitchen after milking Tui that I found Mum walking round the kitchen in her nightie, bending and sighing. She said, ‘Go and get your grandmother, Aki. Run.’

‘I got to feed the dogs, let the chooks out,’ I said.

‘No more of your lip,’ Mum said. ‘Get your grandmother.’

All right.

I turned to go out the door but heard this big groan behind me and Mum was telling me to wait.

‘I left it too late Son,’ she said, and she put some wood in the fire. ‘Get me a blanket, Son. Get me a sheet, Son. Spread them on the floor.’ I was ‘Son’ now. So I did what she told me and she sat with her back to the concrete fire-surround, puffing and agonising while Moonface came slithering into our lives. It was awful. I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t because in among all the sweating and groaning Mum was saying, ‘Don’t you dare run off and leave me, Aki.’

I had to bring her string and a pair of scissors, and when she’d finished tying and cutting I had to sit down by her and hold this squeaky, slimy, fishy-looking thing wrapped in a nappy.

I didn’t expect it to be warm.

The squeaking stopped, the face screwed itself and I nearly dropped the whole bundle when eyelids opened and two marbles rolled between them before they shut again.

You find glass marbles buried in the garden sometimes, or coming out of the ground round Grandfather’s place. These glassies are from the necks of old bottles and there’s a trick when you look at them. Sometimes they look green but other times there’s no colour at all.

These eyes had a trick, too. There was colour but you couldn’t tell what it was, couldn’t name it. It could’ve been bottle-brown, navy-blue, red, purple, chocolate or orange.