One morning, a few days into the big dig, I was woken around 7.00 a.m. – I was having a dream in which a man was continually yelling at me. ‘Rhiannon! Come here! Come down here!’ It was my dad in the dream.

But in reality it was Tenoch. My eyes snapped open. And he kept calling.

‘Rhiannon! Where are you? Get down here!’

I scrambled into my hoody and ran downstairs, across the lounge and out onto the pool terrace. Tenoch stood at the entrance to the pool house. He snapped his head round and saw me, eyes wild. ‘What the fuck is this?’

‘What?’ I said, still creaking my eyes open to see what he was seeing. ‘What’s the matter?’

He gave me The Look – The Look people always give me the moment they find out how batshit I truly am. ‘Why have you done this?’

‘Done what?’ I tugged my sleeve down over my hand and shoved it against my mouth. The bodies smelled real bad now they’d begun to liquefy in the already-intense heat of the morning. ‘Oh, you mean the Sylvanians?’

‘Why you… got the TV on for them? Why is this one dressed up in my dead wife’s clothes?!’

‘I found the dress in one of the bedrooms. It’s moth-eaten so I figured it wasn’t a big deal. He’s experimenting with his gender. Nothing wrong with that.’

‘They are… posed.’

‘Yeah. The one with the maggots likes the baseball results, and the bloated one’s having a nap after reading the paper—’ Something had been nibbling at his exposed ankle. Probably a rock squirrel. ‘I call him Rodrigo, and that one… John.’

‘And the one on the toilet with his teeth on the floor?’

‘Dwayne? He’s… a binge eater. Always in the lav. I don’t know why his teeth have fallen out though.’

Tenoch rubbed one hand down the length of his face. ‘I don’t understand. They should have been buried. Or burned. You fucking loca.’

‘Well, yeah, obvs. I haven’t dug the hole deep enough for them yet.’

‘I see you coming in here. Do you… talk to them?’

‘A bit. If you don’t actually look at them, they could be alive. I mean, when I’m watching TV with them, it’s like sitting there with a family.’

He stared at me. He paced. He stared at me a bit more. Then he said, ‘Clean this up.’ And he went inside the house.

The next few days were all about stiffs and shovels and scratching itchy bumps all over, courtesy of the damn mosquitoes. After the first day’s dig, I could barely move for lower back ache and my fingernails were caked up with mud. But after a while, I paid neither much mind. My back got stronger, my shovel technique improved and the hole finally expanded.