Emmy has started waking in the night. Quite unprompted by me she has taken to dressing like a whore from the Last Chance Saloon. She sleeps with her long hair twisted up into a bun, her frilly nightie nicely setting off the suede thong, purchased for 20 cents from the Ague thrift shop, which she keeps tied high around her throat. I kneel by the small wooden bed and smooth a hand over her forehead. Her flat bosom heaves with sobs.

‘I want Vinny! I want Barbie! I want Anneka! I want Daddy!’ she howls. With a pang I realize that the repulsive plastic Barbie is the only one of these I can produce and I think back to Robert’s call earlier that morning.

‘Our friends think we’re having a trial separation,’ he’d said. Down the line, that fragile wire of communication that still binds us, I could hear him gulping air.

‘Are we?’

‘Are we what?’

‘Having a trial separation? Is this what this is?’

‘Robert—’ I began, but stopped. The truth is there are six non-retractable words which mean the end to a marriage, but when it came to it, they’d stuck in my throat like fishbones. We’d gone to a restaurant and I remembered looking at the other couples sitting in awkward familiarity at their tables for two and wondering how many people were lucky enough to feel a real passion for someone, one that endured. When the grand scheme of marriage becomes mundane with disappointment, wrecked by the sheer ordinariness of life, how many end up settling for less? Settling for so very little. The world was full of couples like me and Robert, moving through life together, the principal dancers in a ballet choreographed by the Joker.

Blindly, I reach under the bed for the doll. A fresh outpouring of grief threatens but Jack comes to the rescue.

‘Barbie’s a lesbian,’ he mutters sleepily and Emmy chuckles.

‘Shut up,’ she says amiably and, mollified, sinks back against the pillows.

Last week Benjamín took Jack down to the puddle of the river where the Temerosa miners used to pan for gold. I watched as he bent down and scooped gravel and silt off the bottom before handing the sieve to Jack. After a tentative bout of shaking, Jack was left staring at nothing more exciting than obsidian, volcanic-looking sand.

‘If I ever find gold,’ Jack said bitterly, ‘I’m going to buy a rocket and fly away from here.’