The car sat gleaming where she’d left it on the gravel, and she was suddenly grateful for its loyalty, though of course it wasn’t hers. It belonged to Harlow’s mother, Ana, but Ana was away, and Sylvie hadn’t asked to borrow it because she wasn’t talking to Harlow. So technically, she supposed, it was stolen. Ana worked in Hong Kong now — she managed an art fund that was indirectly owned by the same Chinese company that was mining the moon — but she and Sylvie got along when they occasionally saw each other, much to Harlow’s annoyance. They shared an interest in old paintings. Sylvie had only driven this car once before, years earlier, with Harlow, when it was brand new.

‘It should be illegal to own a car worth this much,’ Harlow had said.

But there they were, driving it anyway.

And here she was again.

Walking behind it now, Sylvie squatted down to piss, watching the road.

As she finished, she saw a cloud of dust rising, a spot where the horizon blurred. She stood up too quickly, piss dribbling down her thigh. Someone was coming. She got back into the car and started the engine.

Sylvie’s dad, Joe, ran a caravan park for old people. People like him, basically, who had lost their jobs or their families, or whose families couldn’t afford to look after them anymore. Joe liked to say this was his contribution to the resistance. Many of the residents, or so he claimed, were members of organisations that were now illegal. But Sylvie had been out there four years ago, and as far as she could tell, it was just old people sitting around smoking weed and playing computer games.

That last visit hadn’t ended well, for reasons she didn’t remember. She’d stormed off without saying goodbye. Since then, her dad had called her a few times a year, ‘just to say hi’, as he always said. No video, of course. Just his slightly altered voice sounding far away and drunk.

‘So, hi,’ she would say, letting the silence linger between them.

The last time she’d seen him was Christmas Eve, two years ago. That had been his idea. Surprisingly, her mum had agreed. And so they had all sat there, like a real family, with the windows open in her mum’s darkened kitchen in Melbourne, listening to the dull pop of fireworks. Sarah had put up fairy lights and was wearing those Tibetan-yellow leggings Sylvie had bought for her, and which she saved for certain occasions. They ate Indonesian take-away and got drunk on drinks Sylvie invented with whatever she could find in the kitchen and the half-bottle of gin her dad had brought. The mosquitoes feasted on them. Her dad gave her a big, obviously second-hand book about Caravaggio, whose paintings she had liked as a teenager. The whole thing was weird. She had no memory of her parents actually being together — her dad had left when she was four years old — but flickeringly that night, she’d almost been able to imagine it as she watched them pass an ancient vape pen back and forth across the table. It was comical and kind of pathetic. Her parents trying to remember things, but never agreeing about what they were. And then her dad had suddenly stood up to go. ‘Fucking hell, Sarah,’ he’d said, flushed. Something had been happening at a frequency that Sylvie had been oblivious to. Or maybe she was just too drunk. Her dad kissed her on the head, as if she were still a child. ‘Bye, Vee,’ he’d muttered. Then the door slammed. And sometime around midnight, Christmas morning, Sylvie had brushed her mother’s hair away from her face while Sarah vomited into the toilet.