A few days into Mel’s visit, Anouk sat in the sand near her mother and her aunt, ploughing a trough with her heels. She didn’t sit too close to Nora because if she did, Nora would start pleating her hair, looking for louse eggs. Anouk had made the mistake of scratching behind her ears at breakfast the day before, and now Nora was obsessed. Anouk’s scalp was indeed crawling with lice, and Anouk knew it. She wanted to scratch the shit out of it but didn’t want to give Nora the satisfaction, so instead, she got up from the sand and walked into the river. For Anouk, in the summer, the river was the land was the river was everything. She moved effortlessly between the two, picking up her damp bathing suit first thing in the morning, picking it up from the floor next to her bed and uncoiling it from the pretzel shape it took on when she’d rolled it off her body before going to sleep. She waded into the water now until it was up to her scabby, mosquito-bitten knees and dunked herself, eyes open to the sting of freshwater the colour of tea. She exhaled all the air out of her lungs so she could sit on the silty bottom. Underwater, her skin looked melted-butter yellow, dotted with black particles of river matter. When she needed to breathe she resurfaced, turned to see if Nora was watching her.

Nora, speaking to Mel, held her hand above her head, as if shielding her eyes from the sun. She was doing this to keep the river midges away from her face; they were attracted to the highest point, like lightning. Mel had a T-shirt wrapped around her head against the bugs. She slapped her upper arm and plucked something dead from her skin, said to Nora, ‘I don’t know how the fuck you can stand living here.’

To which Nora replied, ‘Who says I can stand it?’

Anouk dove under again, avoided a stand of water lilies with a few strong frog kicks, then resurfaced and flipped over to float on her back. Pedalling her feet lazily, sculling her hands, she peered up at the sky, so empty that it looked like there were swirling bubbles up there, like water in a pot the instant before boiling. She swam to the ledge of rock at the stern end of the island and pulled herself up, careful not to scrape her shins. The bald rock was sun-warm, and through the arches of her feet, she could feel her island buzz. She stood for a minute, catching her breath, then clambered up the rock, toeing the solid folds between the slabs, to where the island was a soft carpet of copper-coloured pine needles and moss and old leaves like brown paper. The frogs had been prolific this past spring and there was the rock pool in the middle of the island to be visited, amphibians to be counted. She picked two buttercups and a couple of delicate bluebells from the thin island soil, twisted their stems together and tucked the arrangement behind her ear. It was hot. Sweat pricked her itchy scalp. A yellow cricket javelined past her knee and was gone. She practised the fox-walk. Bare heel on the ground first, feeling for sticks or rocks. Roll the outside of the foot into the step and land gently on the ball of the foot. Repeat. Slow and methodical. If she were in a group, each person would step into the others’ footprints, like voices overlapping in song. This was the way the first people did it, how they moved undetected through the bush.