‘You’re losing all the berries,’ she said. The world was beginning to tilt.

He lowered his head and took off his glasses and dropped them into the pocket of his shirt and, without his glasses, his eyes looked small and tight. ‘I’m not well, Anouk.’

These words, like storm wind coming towards her across the surface of the water.

‘I’m so used to it being you,’ he said. ‘This is a huge relief. You just wouldn’t believe.’ He smiled and his body seemed to relax.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your whole life, I’ve worried that I would have to watch you die. Finally, it’s me and not you.’

A horsefly cruised around her head and she swatted it away, but it only tightened its flight path, tenacious and mean.

‘I feel like, for eighteen years I’ve been stretching this rubber band tighter and tighter, waiting for it to snap. But you’re doing so well. You don’t need me. You’re exploding into this. Woman. I can breathe now.’

‘Make sense, Dad.’ The horsefly lunged at her shoulder, retreated. Lunged again.

‘I’m sick. Nothing they can do.’

‘They who?’

‘They who. Who do you think? Oncologists. Surgeons. Bunch of others. It’s the pancreas. Worst cancer you can get. Top of the charts.’ He smiled, his face apologetic and relieved.

She went to him and pulled the plastic bucket from his hand and swung it in the air by the handle. Released it and watched it fly into the trees. Berries soared. She turned and walked up the road a few paces to where it bent to the left and rose steeply; a sharp, short hill. She took the incline, grinding the balls of her feet into the hard-packed, stony grit of the road. The horsefly followed her. She stood at the top breathing heavily against the rasp of her pugnacious fucking lungs. Her pathetic lungs expanding and retracting, out of tune, a rusty harmonica. She put her hands on her knees and leaned over and took a deep breath and coughed and coughed and coughed, a sound like rocks tumbling in the dryer. Coughed again and spat a pearly globe into the dirt.

Everything was different now.

Suddenly, a concentrated strike in the flesh between her shoulder blades. A searing, mandible rip. Fucking horsefly. Roaring, she reached over her shoulder and felt the blood. Got her good.

She turned back down the hill, still coughing, and Red was thigh-deep in roadside ferns, collecting the berries out of the dirt. She wanted to crawl inside his body and curl up and sleep. He ignored her, and she sat in the middle of the road until the coughing stopped and all that was left were shudders of the cough. She went to him in the bracken and apologized, and he put his arms around her and she took in the old-sweat smell of his hat, felt his beard on her forehead. His body was soft; loose flesh gave way easily over bone. He held her face in his hands and asked her to help him find all the berries.