Jack sleeps like a dead man. If you were to chalk an outline around his body at night, he would still be lying precisely within its boundaries the following morning. Emmy, on the other hand, is not an easy child to share a bed with. On her stomach, her black hair spread across the pillows, her legs drawn up and bent, she is like a big black frog languidly scooting across the surface of a pond, using me as the rock from which, every few minutes or so, she painfully propels herself to a new position. By the time morning comes my eyes are scratchy with tiredness. Mechanically, I herd the children into the truck and off to school but afterwards I can’t face returning. Twitchy and cabin-feverish, it’s as though all my pioneering aspirations are today distilled down into one primordial urge: to go shopping and buy something I don’t need; to do something urban-like and self-indulgent in an attempt to cut this lingering knot of loneliness down to a manageable size. It’s not another human being I miss, although it would be nice to have a girlfriend to talk to, or even the moon face of Winfred to be annoyed by. It’s this feeling of displacement and not belonging which makes life seem very empty all of a sudden.

Shops in Ague don’t open till ten o’clock so I default to the M&M and while away the time before my coffee arrives watching the industrial choreography of trucks drawing in and out of the petrol pumps and feeling vaguely sorry for myself. It’s later, though, in the washroom, splashing water on my face, that I see, to my horror, there is a much more immediate crisis to be dealt with. Somehow, I’ve managed to persuade myself that fresh air and lack of city smog have steadily been transforming me into a wild and natural beauty, a Barbarella of sorts, glowing with good health and youthful vigour–a fantasy easy to sustain on account of the detestable absence of mirrors in the cabin. Instead the face that looks back at me is positively Darwinian. It’s taken only these few short months to bypass cave woman and mutate straight back to ape. My eyebrows have all but knitted together in a vicious tangle across my forehead. My hair is a snarled sub-tropical growth of outgrown roots and split ends. Only the skin on my face, now that I’ve stopped using sun creams so religiously, has lost its customary translucence and acquired a healthy precancerous glow to it. I am less Jane Fonda and more Cousin IT.

‘Sure, there’s a beauty salon,’ Sharleen from Prestcott’s Hotel says. ‘Other end of town, right by the feed lot.’ She pats her own architectured locks coyly. ‘Be sure an’ ask for Missy.’