Red leaned back in his chair and clapped. ‘I love it,’ he said. He reached for his beer and tipped the bottle to his mouth, then rested the bottle on his stomach. ‘It seems really complex but it’s just so simple. Two guys crossing paths. One the shadow of himself.’

‘Where were you last night anyway?’ Anouk asked.

‘One the memory of himself,’ said Red, picking at the label on his bottle with quick, tiny scrapes.

‘Dad?’

‘Eh?’

‘Where were you last night?’

‘Karaoke night at The Harp.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yep.’

‘Look,’ she said, and gestured with her chin to the counter where the newspaper still lay. She got up, grabbed the paper and dropped it in his lap. She draped her arms around his neck and leaned over his shoulder while he smoothed the pages.

‘It’s out?’ he said, scanning the page. He found her name and moved his finger over it, as if it were braille, as if it might disappear. ‘Well, fuck me,’ he said, swallowing hard, his voice wet.

‘Are you crying?’

‘Of course I’m crying. This is stupendous.’ He folded the paper carefully and turned it towards Fraser. ‘Look at this.’

Fraser looked.

Anouk hugged her father tighter and he felt too small in her arms.

On Saturday, Red asked Anouk to do a dump run for him, something she’d never done on her own before. He was worn out, he said. After an early dinner, after her meds and physio, she loaded the flatbed with the stuff Red wanted to throw away: a stack of boxes and her old tricycle, rusted. A defunct computer keyboard, a broken clock, a broken radio, the wasp trap that once hung from the back porch. She drove half an hour to the dump road, a hard-packed track that led off the concession road into the bush. She could smell the dump before she could see it: sour, faecal. Up ahead, carrion crows swooped and hovered, dirty against the darkening sky.

She parked the truck in a gravel lot and went into the office, a white trailer on concrete blocks. Inside, Canadian pop music on the radio. Anouk dinged the dome bell on the counter and waited. On the wall opposite the counter there was the mini taxidermy museum that never changed, pet project of the man who used to manage the dump: dusty glass cabinets displaying the yellowed skulls of deer and marten, bear and squirrel, some intact and others decrepit, as if moth-eaten. There was a collection of birds’ nests, twiggy and feathered with bits of string and moss and shards of pale, spotted shell.

Holding court on top of a wooden barrel in the corner of the room, a wolf. Claws yellow and chipped, brittle fur, the stitching showing through in places on the black hide. One paw was raised as if the wolf were about to say something important.

A woman came in through a ply-panelled door, and gave Anouk a key for a trolley and told her to watch out for bears. She told her to load the trolley and weigh it on the scales and then dump in an area marked B.