‘Sure. The owner’s here.’ The waitress stepped behind a curtain and in a moment a man emerged. Fortyish and floppy-haired, with tobacco-yellowed fingers, he looked sceptically at June. What was her name, her age, he wanted to know, her bartending experience? Where did she live? June did her best to answer in her basic Japanese.

He peered at her. ‘You’re not Japanese?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, I am,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Uso. You can’t be. What are you, American? Well, have it your way. There’s no job for you here.’ Throwing a dishcloth over his shoulder, he walked away, muttering under his breath, ‘She must be soft in the head or something.’

June turned to leave, humiliated. She hated him for being what she’d been warned about, the sort of person she could expect to find outside the Family.

The waitress tailed her outside. ‘You really don’t speak Japanese?’

‘Some,’ June said and shrugged. At the centre, they had always spoken English. Everyone did. Her Distance Ed lessons were in English. And her family spoke English among themselves at home, in the cottage; June’s mother was American, and her Japanese father was comfortable in the language, though he spoke it with an accent. She and Naomi switched between mimicking their mother’s way of speaking, with all the expressions she’d hung onto from the counterculture of her youth, and the slang they picked up watching their stash of films on VHS. The only time the two of them went out of the centre’s compound was to go shopping with their mother, to buy whatever they couldn’t make or grow. Milk, chocolates, shampoo, shaving razors, soap.

Even that was only allowed because June’s mother was who she was. Rachel, ever the firm believer, the staunchest member of the Family. She criticised life outside the centre, criticised consumerism, said the world had lost its way in blinkered self-interest. They were better off in the Family. They were setting an example. Growing up as a diplomat’s daughter, she had always sought out causes, and had met June’s father through the peace movement in Kyoto. Together they were active in anti-Vietnam demonstrations, protesting against the war, the use of Japanese islands as staging posts, militarism in general. Then they came into the orbit of some pacifist Christians. Increasingly drawn to a fringe existence, they fell in with members of the Family and helped set up the centre.

All this was history. There was no way to explain it to the waitress. June frowned and hunched her shoulders. A cold wind whipped her hair against her neck.

‘You don’t want to work here anyway,’ the waitress said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Give me your number, I’ll ask around for you.’

Such kindness from a stranger was almost unknown to June. ‘But I don’t have a phone,’ she said.