Memories, or what should have been memories, were instead ever-present realities in a time that was standing still. They were realities that moved when I moved, as when an opponent is blocking your way to the score line, facing you, moving when you move, side-stepping when you side-step, jinking when you jink, double-jinking when you double-jink, all the time reading you, all the time staring you down. There is no way through, no way past, no way ahead, no way of seeing beyond. You can only go down, only to be dragged up again, dirt in your mouth, by those who you only wish would leave you alone.

‘I killed him.’

‘Look here Aki,’ my mother said, ‘you think you’re the only one. You think everything’s to do with you. Who let him go with you when he’d already walked for an hour? Who was it who said not to worry, he’ll be asleep somewhere? The trouble with you Aki you think only of yourself.’ She banged open the flaps on the range, threw wood inside and the chimney was rumbling. ‘Everyone else has to get on with life, which at the moment, includes running around after you.’

I shut my mouth. I went to sleep for a while. The timbers were clapping like big hands.

One morning my father and grandfather were gone. ‘They’ve gone to find your brother,’ my grandmother said when I asked after them. A sense of dread came over me. I knew they’d gone into the ranges where no one goes.

Some days went by. I don’t know how many. What I remember is going to the outhouse in the dark one night and seeing the torch flames moving, strung out along the forest track. These were lights belonging to the people who had been waiting for the return of father and grandfather.

‘The torches are coming,’ I said when I went inside. Did I feel some kind of hope just then? If so, what was that hope?

People arrived bringing our horse with two men wrapped in blankets on its back, the man behind holding the front man collapsed against him. People helped the front man down, a formless individual. It was as if they were retrieving only the blanket. In it was my bearded and stinking grandfather, who they carried by me into the kitchen. I thought he was dead. The other man they helped inside was my father, though I hardly recognised him. He was bearded, matted, and half his usual size.