She sat up. All around her, people were huddled in blankets and towels and even sheets of cardboard. The early sunlight was sloping through the small high windows of the supermarket so that it looked like the nave of a church; and since it was now the sanctuary of the Church of the Practical Miracle of Los Angeles, Inc., the holy atmosphere was appropriate. There were 120 people here – men, women, and children – the majority of them from Granger Hughes’s congregation, although Mike Bull and his staff had managed to bring in most of their immediate families too.

Season had resisted coming to the Hughes market on Highland until the last possible moment. The pain and humiliation she had suffered at the hands of Oxnard and his Angels had enraged her, disoriented her, and frightened her more than she could have considered possible. She wondered if she would ever be able to carry on a normal relationship with a man again. She could hardly speak to Granger, and even Carl unsettled her. Every time he put his arm around her to reassure her, she thought what does he want?

If there had been no famine crisis, she would have immediately sought the guidance of Vee’s analyst, and tried to learn to live with the shock of her experience by joining a post-rape encounter group. The irony was that she had been discussing the subject on Monday with a woman who lived across the road in Topanga Canyon. The woman’s daughter had been raped at the age of fifteen by two blacks, out at Griffith Park, and it had taken her three years of intensive and argumentative therapy to make her understand that she herself hadn’t been to blame. These days, though, the girl carried a .38 in her pocketbook.

It was a brushfire, high up on Woodland Hills, between Ventura Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, that at last changed Season’s mind about staying in the house. It had probably been started by someone’s house burning, although under normal circumstances the fire department would almost certainly have been able to catch it before it spread to the surrounding hills. Now there was no fire department, and by early evening, with a dry north-easterly wind blowing, the sky over Los Encinos Park and all the woods around was dark with smoke. Carl had gone up to Season’s bedroom, where Season had been lying on her bed in a fetal position, with a half-empty bottle of Old Grandad beside her, and said, ‘Can you smell that? That’s smoke. The whole canyon’s alight, and we’re going to have to move.’

Season hadn’t looked at him. ‘Do we have to throw in our lot with Granger Hughes?’ she asked. ‘Is that really necessary? Can’t we make a run for it on our own?’