Liv Hula put down in the suburbs, and they wandered about while Irene tried to find her old home. The wreckage resembled a heap of opened-out cardboard boxes. Everything had equal value – dead animals knotted in branches, water gurgling back to the sea along hidden sloughs and creeks, plastic chairs. At your feet a thousand pieces of broken tile; middle distances of uprooted garden shrubs and shattered wooden spars: behind that, in a curious reversal of perspective, the houses tilted and slumped into each other as if they were still floating. Above the high water mark the streets were full of soft toys. Every so often you saw a single figure in the distance; or a dog made its way along the street sniffing everything with enthusiasm, as if any moment it expected to be reunited with what it knew. Everything was entangled. Everything stank of sewage and the sea. There was no ground plan. You didn’t know where to assign value. The tarry light didn’t seem to come from the sun, diffused by haze, but to leak out of the wreckage itself. Irene sat at the kerb. She looked around at it all. Then she drew up her knees, wrapped her arms about them and wept.

‘Come on now, love,’ Liv said: ‘I can see everything you’ve got.’

Irene wiped her eyes. She tried to laugh. ‘Everyone in the Halo’s seen it anyway,’ she whispered.

She took Fat Antoyne’s hand and put the back of it next to her cheek, then pushed it away again suddenly. Her skin was wan, her expression indistinct, as if she’d been rinsed out of her own face. The things she missed about this town were gone. They had never been here anyway. They had vanished not into the current disaster, but years ago, into her own. The past wasn’t real but it was all she had: that’s how you feel when your life has faltered. She stood up and tugged her skirt straight. ‘I’ll just go into this house here,’ she said.

‘Irene!’

It was a building caught in the complex process of kneeling into its own yard. Windows full of broken glass gave on to rooms where the light fell in new and unexpected directions. Irene brightened up after she found an unopened bottle of cocktail mix. She began dragging things into the centre of rooms where she could examine them. ‘Oh look!’ she said, as if Liv and Antoyne were in there with her. ‘Oh look!’ They made faces at one another and shrugged, Don’t ask me. They heard her feet scraping about. They heard her murmuring to herself as she used the broken toilet. ‘You guys could help if you liked,’ she called. ‘Or don’t you want a—’ She checked the label of the bottle ‘—Kyshtym Cream? They’re good!’ When she emerged at last, her arms were full of clothes, kiddie’s toys and household items.