The Achillion truck, parked in front, burned too. A westerly blew on the cafe. Three policemen walked Valia and Lucky to the end of the street, where they sat down in the park and she smoked each cigarette they offered to her as a form of comfort. Another scalding fire truck siren passed behind them. Valia kept asking if anyone had seen her sister, kept describing Penelope: the same height as me, hair to her shoulders, brown eyes, face like mine but longer. Maybe Penny was wandering around somewhere, confused, she thought. Penelope would have inhaled smoke and she might have passed out in someone’s front yard.

At dawn one of the cops said: ‘Where’s Achilles?’

Lucky said: ‘He moved to Brisbane.’

The same policeman said: ‘Do you know how the fire started?’

Lucky shook his head. He said he’d put out the stove. The wiring was checked a week ago. He’d been the last to bed. They’d all been asleep for hours.

Valia sat in the back seat of the police car as it cruised past the remains of the Achillion. The sight of the ruined cafe did not fully enter Valia’s mind, did not seem quite real. How did this happen, and then that? How could Penny be gone? Firemen threw buckets of water over a heap of what used to be the window displays. Valia held the door handle tightly as they drew away from the site—perhaps the grip gave courage. It hit her like blindness: she and Lucky were leaving the ashes of the Achillion. Penelope was not.

8.

Two mounds of garbage and the iron stove, still standing, were all that remained of the cafe. Achilles had left Brisbane on a train yesterday, after Lucky informed him of the fire. Asproyerakas wore his shirtsleeves rolled up, and rolled up some more, to the point where these resembled tubes around his arm. He swore at whoever had taken away the cafe’s bricks. Some of the bricks he might have reused. The pale gouge of the bulldozer’s blade marked a path through the site. Piles of refuse here and there.

Achilles walked down to where the verandah had been. Stood there for a while. He couldn’t bear to linger where Penny’s room used to be. At the back of the block it looked as though the olive tree had uprooted itself and run away, leaving a hole in the ground like a sunken star. Out in the back lane Achilles trod footprints of black mud. The answer was this: build everything exactly as before. Or perhaps: end his life. How long could he walk around thinking about what Penelope felt, what she saw in the last moments of her life? Would this have happened if he’d been there? Could he have put out the fire? Yes, Achilles thought, or perished.