There are perhaps sixty people out in the street, mostly women. The close town has been halved, rent in two. There should be more than a hundred here, but there is not. The only category that remains is the living, and they are, in the last, unified; the dead are another thing. Inside shaded doorways are forty or so corpses. She can see a few drawn faces, like secrets, poking out. There is a smell of frenzy. The corpses are hidden, but they seep into the living, the false shades amongst them. There are not enough hands to bury them any more. There is no more society, no more family. Society is slack, full of hypocrisy. It is gone. There is only this mob, burgeoning, becoming one.

They are dragging her son down the street.

‘Stop,’ she yells.

She leaves the shade of the doorway and the world is shining. She has lost her daughter; I cannot lose my son.

‘Stop this instant.’

Collectivity is a shimmering apex, an emergent property, always poised on the edge of existence, always ready to storm and enclose some new centre, always ready to become it; and yet at the very moment of its appearance it is already beginning to disperse, the pieces hurtling apart.

‘Your womb is poison and gives poisoned fruits, and you are a bitch,’ a woman says.

She is pushed. Her elbows shudder with the impact of breaking the fall. She looks up and sees Áoife above her wearing a face contorted in hate.

When collectivity exists you question why it doesn’t always. The mob is neutral and there is little solace in it. Individuals, surely, are not real things, Raghnailt knows, just the part you are locked into, the most self-sufficient part of an accidental whole. Yet there are brief moments when collectivity tumbles into wholeness, and it is never lacking. It never needs more than itself; it can always be added onto or reduced, its perfection unaltered. It is short, though, consuming itself in heat, but, for a brief moment, it will dazzle like a second sun.

‘I have my dignity, my years, my family and their name and you will respect it, Áoife,’ Raghnailt says. ‘We are as one. No matter what sickness individually undoes each of us; we are all of God. We are his children.’

‘God hates this town,’ Áoife shouts.

Colca is on his back, his arms held above his head. He has been dragged backwards down half the street. Blood pours from his destroyed shoulders; his back is flayed.

‘Your son is dead,’ Genevieve, a second cousin says. ‘My daughter was in the next house from me. He kept me from her. I cannot hold her to my breast any more. She is dead. My Gestalt is dead. I cannot touch her.’

The words are spoken plainly, without emotion.