Later still, with the sunset lodged in the sky above the central massif, the boy slipped out from where he had been hiding. Before Liv could say anything, he had dropped the bird at her feet and run off. Without quite understanding herself, she followed. Irene the mona stared after them, shaking her head.

The boy made his way quickly through the suburbs. Every so often he stopped and beckoned. His feet were bare. A mile or two south of da Luz lay a line of steep undercut cliffs, the buff-coloured guardians of some ancient fossil beach. He ran to and fro along the base for a minute looking for the way up; finding it, he turned and waved his arms. ‘Not so quickly!’ Liv called. He vanished. The cliffs swallowed the last of the light. The boy stared down at her as she climbed steps in a gully. All she could see was his head against the sky. ‘Infierno,’ he said quietly at one point. ‘Infierno.’ Above the cliffs long ridges of yellow earth rose to the dry central massif, where at noon the heat would ring in the dusty aromatic gullies and across the rocky pavements. Now it was faint night winds in the lava tunnels that threaded the country like collapsed veins. She stood at the lip of a jameo, listened to water thirty feet down, threading its way through the tumble of fallen rocks. Paths glowed in the starlight, so clever in their use of the contours that after a while she seemed to be finding her way without the boy. He was leading her, but he was less obviously there. She came upon him from time to time, squatting on a rock, or made him out half a mile away, a pale flicker against a hillside. If the route became difficult, he fell back; otherwise, she was on her own under the blaze of stars. In this way he brought her to a plateau strewn with rocks, the only feature of which was a low, ramshackle structure – bits of bleached, unshaped wood, stones piled on one another, a door banging in the wind – built over a jameo.

‘I’m not going in there,’ Liv Hula said.

The boy smiled at her then, turning away and pulling down his pants, pissed loudly against the stones, sighing every so often, straddling his legs and tightening his buttocks, staring over his shoulder at her with a grin. It seemed to take a long time. When he turned back he had left his little white penis hanging out.

‘Put that away,’ Liv said.

He laughed. ‘Here,’ he said, beckoning and holding open the door.