There were a few teenage years there when Sylvie had been as fanatical about martyred saints as other girls were about phones and boys. But why? Something to do with suffering? Her own suffering lifted to a higher realm by association? Maybe. But she had also always just liked the idea of the past, of history. The funny clothes. The way everything must have felt just as real for them, just as non-negotiable, even though they had no internet or proper painkillers. The saints were something Cath had been into. Saints and angels. But what had Sylvie been trying to do up there in the pear tree with saints and angels? She could not remember the impulse that had compelled her. She still hadn’t managed to open the locket, but she remembered pushing it into the little hole in the tree with her thumb. It was the perfect size.

She got up and opened the door of the cabin and stood in the cool air. It was very quiet outside. The old clock-radio read four-thirty in the morning. The hour when most people killed themselves. Or was that three-thirty? Anyway, the clock was probably wrong. She pulled on yesterday’s clothes. Found her black jacket scrunched at the bottom of her bag. Her watch fell to the ground, but she left it where it was, without bothering to confirm the time. She walked out into the night, past her father’s silent bus, past the pear tree and up towards the little cemetery.

It was colder than she had expected. Her feet crunched loudly on the gravel and the air smelt sweet with distant smoke. Now she could hear the ticking of insects, the sound of things living in bushes, a TV. The moon was almost full, the settlement lights at Tycho faintly visible on the lower rim.

After Cath’s husband Bill died, Cath and Sylvie had driven up to Sydney together because Sylvie was going off the rails. That’s what she’d heard her mum say. But she was only fifteen — of course she was going off the rails. She hadn’t thought about that trip for a long time. They’d stayed in old motels beside the highway and drank champagne every evening — two glasses for Cath and one for Sylvie — of the most expensive sort they could find.

Sylvie opened the gate and walked through the alfalfa, which swished pleasantly in the darkness. Sooner or later, she thought, the fires will come through this place. Fire or scavengers. There would be nothing they could do about it. And what was with that fucking gun he’d given her? The alfalfa ended and she kept going, stepping among the gravestones until she came to the place — more or less — where he used to kneel down and pretend to cry.