What if they say it because it’s true? Have you ever felt it, Dr Logan? Have you ever felt someone who was dead was right here with you?

In the pub, ash on the carpet and Flora in pigtails. Wine-gum Flora waiting with him in the dark car in Sawyer Street. All the other ghost echoes of Flora, categorized as after-shocks and hallucinations. But he can’t give April any kind of hold over him. And is conscious of the camera, in danger of recording him irrational.

No, he says.

A corkscrew look; she knows he’s lying. She shakes her head.

You’re too scared to say it’s true, but we’ve all felt it. We’ve all felt it, Dr Logan. Yet we make this big deal out of death. Even Christians treat death like the end, and they’re supposed to believe in Heaven. What if death’s a beginning, Dr Logan? Or a renewal? A chance to go back to your essence? What if, in this life, we stretch ourselves out like rubber bands and death just releases the tension? Snaps us back to ourselves?

What if? he asks.

Then killing them wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?

He hopes the camera is catching her smile. He no longer wants to save her.

But what about the Bible?

What about the Bible?

Thou shalt not kill.

You think God wrote the commandments?

I thought you thought He did.

She shakes her head. Draws her knees up to her chest, not in a protective move, but to pick a patch of dry skin from her feet.

And so the hour, minutely observed, goes by. The Old Testament, she says, was written by a bunch of prehistoric near-savages trying to control other prehistoric near-savages, and only in parts is it a true reflection of God. Thou shalt not kill, she says, is not one of these parts. How would we live, if that were true? We kill every day, Dr Logan. We kill mammals and fish for meat and leather, we kill plants to make way for homes and agriculture, we kill insects to protect ourselves and our crops, we kill each other. God, she says, doesn’t give orders. God doesn’t judge; Judgement Day is a human invention, a millennia-old instrument of social control. She is luminous with clarity. When he tugs her conscience back to the bus, like an owner collar-dragging their dog to the carpet-staining its nose must be rubbed in, she insists that they couldn’t have died had they not, on some level, concurred.

Every event, she says, is a co-creation. Murderer and victim agree on the level of their souls; one is ready to kill, one is ready to pass back into the ether. Every death’s a suicide. He repeats the words back to her, the idea smeared across his tongue so foul he wants to gag.