‘That depends. The average students would say the driver. The better students would think of a way to sue the manufacturer of the car, or whoever maintained the roads. The best students say things like “Well, for all we know, a bee flew into the car”. They don’t accept things at face value.’

I didn’t know what to say. I was thinking of the pinch of a bee’s sting when it lodges in your calf; the way rubber screeches when it’s burned into a wild curve on the asphalt. I was thinking of that car smashing through the barrier and launching over the edge.

When Marc was working at home, my job was to maintain silence in the house. This meant keeping Lee quiet.

How long and slow the days became that spring. Often I spent entire afternoons speaking to no-one but the baby. At night I would lie still and hear the calls of nocturnal birds – trilling and knocking sounds, throaty sounds, calls that sounded like choking. And occasionally a woo hoo… woo hoo… woo hoo called long and loud over the night.

Marc had been correct about one thing. The baby didn’t give me any trouble. She was good, quiet, a warm little weight that I picked up frequently, as much out of my own boredom as because she cried or reached for me.

But even good babies cry, and sometimes, though I jiggled her and sang to her and cooed and patted her back, she would wail and wail for a reason I couldn’t discern.

Early on, at one of these times, Marc descended the stairs until he was standing on the bottom step, his toes in cashmere socks curling over its edge.

‘Perhaps a walk?’ he said.

‘To where?’

There wasn’t much where he lived. No shops in walking distance. No beach, no cafes.

He waved a hand irritably towards the trees. ‘She likes it out there,’ he said.

I went outside with the pram and pushed Lee to the end of the street. I could see the path that led into the park, where the trees shivered and made a hissing sound in the pollen-littered breeze. But I had no interest in approaching them.

I settled for walking up and down the street.

Eventually, the baby stopped crying.

I looked at her plump face, creaseless in sleep. It struck me that it was impossible to remember being a person to whom nothing terrible had happened. A person who wasn’t conditioned to always be waiting for bad news; to always expect the worst.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I wheeled Lee’s pram to the middle of the road. There was no traffic. It’s not as though I thought anything was coming. I just wheeled it out, left it there, walked back to the footpath and watched for a minute, or maybe two.