A couple of other things nearly ended up in the capsule. One was the bracelet from Scotland, with the silver thistle and patterns on it, the one that women and girls in our family have always worn. Nana Ailsa talked about burying it after Auntie Maggie was killed.

Yeah, killed. She had leukaemia when she was a kid, but she was all recovered by the time I was born. She started writing stories and magazine articles about it, because she’d always wanted to be an author. Quite a few got published.

Then one morning, when I must have been about four or five, she was coming back across the road from the cemetery. She spent a lot of time there, Dad says; reckoned it made her feel peaceful and gave her things to write about. This half-stoned guy in a hoon car came tearing around the corner towards the bridge, on the wrong side of the road, and hit her.

She usually wore the bracelet when she went to the cemetery, but that morning she hadn’t. Mum says Nana Ailsa couldn’t look at the bracelet for a long time; wanted to get rid of it. ‘It’s so unfair!’ she kept going. ‘After all Maggie went through. It’s so wrong!’ So she wanted to put the bracelet in the time capsule. But Marama and her twin sister Marika, and their mother Pania, said that if that happened, then the little greenstone bat their family always wore was going in with it. ‘Pekapeka and thistle: they have bound us together.’ Nana Ailsa didn’t say much, but she kept the bracelet.

The guy whose car killed my aunt went to jail for five years. But he met with Nana and Mum and Dad and the rest of our family. He said it was his fault, and he knew he couldn’t ever bring their sister and daughter back, but he promised to spend the rest of his life trying to make up for it. So he should. But OK, he did the right thing.

Dad didn’t want to listen to him at first, until Nana Ailsa went: ‘Remember Sheree, Cam.’ Sheree is Marama’s daughter; Melody’s mother. She lives somewhere in town; she’s been on drugs ever since she was a teenager. Dad went out with her a few times before he met Mum, and he tried dope, too. He stopped; Sheree didn’t, and they split up. Even after Melody was born, Sheree kept using, until Marama took her daughter away. She’s a mess.

You’d never guess my father used to be young and pretty wild. He’s so … respectable. He did finally come to the meeting with the driver, the restorative justice session. Now the guy’s out of prison, and he works for anti-drug projects. Pity a few others I’ve seen around the valley aren’t like him.