“I’m not surprised. I’d have run for my life.”

“Did I tell you we danced?”

“Where?”

“Over there.” Sarah gestures with her stick to the silos. “We cut the fence, put ladders up, climbed over, and danced in the moonlight. It was New Year’s Eve. We made our own music. We danced beneath the moon.”

She is a witch, thinks Lissa, as Sarah begins to sing again, softly this time. My mother is a witch.

She wanders a little away, to where brambles crowd the path. The blackberries are ripe, and she plucks a handful and takes them back to Sarah; an offering held in her palm. “Delicious,” says Sarah, “thank you.” She has found a feather from somewhere, and put it in the band of her hat. “We should pick more. Take them home and make a crumble.”

They do so, Lissa lifting the brambles so Sarah can reach in and pick the darkest, ripest berries from the middle of the bush, taking the sandwiches she has packed for later out of their box and filling it instead with the glistening fruit. When the box is full, they walk on, through a small, thick copse, where birches and sycamores dapple the light and bracken is chest-high and the silos are invisible. “Ah, yes, this way,” Sarah says, “I know this path.”

They reach a tree with many trunks, and Sarah steps off the path towards it, reaching her hands up to it. “Hello, old lady, I remember you. This is where I camped,” she says, “just beside this tree.”

“I remember,” says Lissa. “I was there.”

“Yes.” Sarah turns to her. “Of course you were. For a short time. I always forget.”

They walk on slowly and emerge again into the sun by a gate. A section of perimeter fence still stands, a concrete panel set behind a newer fence. It is painted with serpents, with a simple green butterfly—they are crudely done, little more than daubs, but they have an eerie power to them. It is like coming across forgotten cave paintings. Beneath the rusted metal, green paint is still visible, flaking with sun and with age. The air feels close, the vegetation pressing at their backs.

“I remember this,” Lissa says, threading her fingers through the gate. Tarps slung up in the rain. Women’s ruddy faces. The smell of wool and fire and bodies.

“Thirty thousand people,” says Sarah, “hand-in-hand around the base. They came and dragged us from our tents. Told us we were unnatural”—she laughs—“as though it were natural to keep missiles of death on common land.”

“I remember them coming.” Lissa’s hands close on the wire of the fence. “Taking you from the tent. It frightened me. I hated it. You being here.”

“Why?”

“I thought I would lose you. That you would be shot.”