Then behind him, also naked, a woman appeared.

It was Ruth. She wiped her mouth on her arm. Her eyes were wide. Her moon-coloured flesh was like waxy paper. She paid no attention to the man. Her face was wet. She was beautiful. She stepped very carefully through the trees. Not an owl so much as a deer, Sylvie thought. A strange deer-woman. She did not seem to notice Sylvie. Her gaze was fixed on something else.

Slowly, more people emerged from the shadows.

And then Sylvie realised.

Of course.

The synthetic peyote.

Nine, ten, eleven of them.

They were not all naked, but some were. They were like a herd of nocturnal animals who had lost all sense of direction, who had strayed too close to civilisation. They were going to die soon, Sylvie thought. They were preparing themselves.

The procession, that’s what it seemed like, passed by without noticing her. Sylvie watched them wander away, bewildered, along the edge of the creek.

She sat down where she was, at the foot of a tree.

‘I’d like to go crazy before I die,’ Sylvie’s grandmother had told her once. They had been sitting on the balcony of a small country pub.

No worries there, Sylvie had thought.

Cath wore long, expensive, filthy dresses, and was very deaf.

‘Anyway,’ Cath continued, ‘I’ll be dead soon enough so, you know, feel free to tell me whatever you want.’

And so Sylvie had, eventually. It was like putting things into a locked box.

But something else had happened, too. She had not thought about this for years.

Driving back to Melbourne, Cath had nearly crashed the Volkswagen. ‘Can you see them?’ she’d cried, swerving into a petrol-station carpark.

Sylvie followed her grandmother’s gaze up through the dirty windscreen.

‘What? What?’

‘Angels.’

They flooded the bleak sky above the KFC, apparently. Luminous, in their thousands.

Cath had wept.

Sylvie hadn’t known what to say.

And a few months later, back in Melbourne, Cath suffered a massive stroke, then died.

Sylvie said goodbye to her dad at the office the next afternoon. They even hugged each other, and she did not pull away until he did. He smelt of alcohol and his own odour, almost familiar to her now. He didn’t ask about the gun, which Sylvie had left lying on the bed in the cabin. Nor did he mention the gravestones, which she hadn’t got round to repainting.

‘I hope you’ll be okay, Dad,’ she said.

‘Oh yeah, we’ll be fine,’ Joe said, raising his hand to shield his face from the sun. ‘Nothing to worry about here, Vee.’

It had rained briefly and then stopped, and now the clouds were moving in two directions at once, fast, low grey ones beneath zones of slower pink. She looked away and when she looked up again, a kind of giant black kitten was floating ominously over the paddocks towards them. The kitten turned into a hand with seven outspread fingers, then dispersed, and vanished among massive, inarticulate layers to the east.