But that later me, the me walking along the cliff path with Candy, had lived near Veeklehouse about eight years. I came along this path every couple of wakings back then with a bag of the little things that my bloke Dave carved out from buckbone – knives, scrapers, earrings, beads – and Veeklehouse had come to be something ordinary. Things always do, I’ve found: you grow tired of the ordinary things and long for some bright and wonderful thing that you can’t reach, and then you find you can reach it, and it turns out to be just another ordinary thing. I never gave a second look at the buckfat lanterns any more, though their restless light had once seemed so strange and dangerous and full of possibilities. I didn’t look at the earrings made of coloured feathers, or the bats waiting in cages to be done for and cooked on the spot. I just went straight to the traders who would take the things I had to trade, and give me sticks in return, on to other traders who would swap those sticks for things we needed, and then back again to Michael’s Place.

As to the metal Veekle behind its fence, well, aside from taking my kids to see it – as well as Candy, I had my big boy Fox and my baby boy Mehmet: Metty as we usually called him – I never even thought about it. Yes, the Veekle was huge. Yes, it was made using skills we couldn’t even imagine. Yes, it came from Earth, and three men died in it. But all that was long long ago. I had people to look after now who were still in reach, real living people who needed me. And, when it came to people who’d gone, well, I had plenty from my own life to grieve over. There were three other kids for one thing, little Star, and Peter, and Happy. They all died a few wakings after they were born.

‘Mum, look!’ Candy said again. ‘Lots lots lots of boats.’

‘Yes, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘There are lots of boats here, aren’t there?’