On and on, the story getting bigger and better every time, and scary enough to keep us away from the trees. It kept us safe in the same way that the taniwha kept us safe from certain known dangers in the rivers and sea.

My grandfather spoke. His words were for me. ‘The reason your little brother is no longer with us’, he said, ‘is because he never belonged to us in the first place. They came for him. Now he is where he belongs, with his own people. There are other worlds. Little Marama was always of a different world.’

Yes, I thought, other worlds, like heaven and hell and Hawaiki, but you’ve got to be dead to get there. I didn’t believe any of them. They were all liars, traitors. My brother was dead. I killed him.

‘This way you have him with you always,’ Grandmother Nunu said, tapping all her kindling-wood fingers on her chest with a sound of pecking chooks.

My father went on talking, describing the density of trees, the tameness of birds, the changing light, being watched by the kehua, all the time keeping his eye on me.

Footprints, footprints, footprints, I thought. How do we know your minds didn’t go walking, putting those footprints down in front of you as you made your way? What else did you see? What else did you find? A discarded jersey? Isn’t it true that the patupaiarehe run naked, dance naked, their bodies incandescent in the dark forest light, their lustrous hair flowing like the night-time fish which weave green light in and out along the backs of darkened ripples? Did you see?

You were there.

Did you see the tail-light gleam that each of the fairy people carries? Did you watch them do the dance of the fireflies?

My father looked at me. He knew the questions I had in my mind.

‘We saw no more than the footprints,’ he said. ‘But …’ He paused for a long time. ‘But we heard the singing. We heard laughter, like the laughter of children.’ He was looking straight at me, right into my eyes, telling me this from his heart.

In a way it was a happy story, a potent image, this one of my little brother dancing with his kin, laughing with children, playing forever in the night-time forest.

Over the next weeks, with much on my mind, I decided I had to believe. That was the best thing to do. It was a question of locking one door and opening another, which is what my father had had to do as well. And wasn’t it true after all, on looking down at the ferny bed on that late afternoon, that my first thought was that my brother had been stolen?