Eoin has let go her shoulder; he is moving.

‘Why do you wear no clothes?’ Áoife shouts.

She leaps on Colca, bites his ear. They are all falling upon him now, a squabble of birds over a sliver of food. Punching him in the chest, transforming his face into blood.

‘No,’ Raghnailt screams. ‘No. Take me; I am the guilty one. He’s my child. It was my fault. He’s mine.’

Someone knocks Raghnailt on the back of the head, jarring her vision. She falls; tries to get up, but there is a knee in her back, pressing her down. Her son is screaming like he has just been born. Then, slowly, the crowd is moving away, she can see its edge, legs above her move like flickers of candlelight. It is leaving her outside of it.

The child was drawing perfect circles on the walls with her rock. Raghnailt can see them now; little enmeshed whale’s eyes on the walls of the houses, planted one inside the other.

‘Give me my son,’ she says. ‘Give him back.’

Her son is crying for her, like the child he once was. His pain has made him an infant again; his voice is young; she would recognise it anywhere. She wants to stroke his hair, sit him on her lap; her breasts are heavy with milk for him. She wants to be young again; to rear him once more; make him perfect, make him tender with love for his wife and his mother. He will speak with his mother gently in the evenings, make his wife laugh. She will make him perfect this time.

Someone is shaking her, but she can’t see who it is.

‘He is not yours any more,’ a woman is saying to her. ‘We cannot even give you his body back.’

She draws her head back. The sun, white, burns her skull. It is an eye, she sees. Concentric rings that are eyes flood her vision. The eyes are full of rainbows. Colca is always calling, but never for her. His mouth is full of blood, his lower jaw hangs open, broken; she can still hear him. They are dragging him out of town.

‘My baby,’ she yells. ‘Give me my baby.’

The woman is stroking her hair. ‘It will be fine,’ the woman above her says, and Raghnailt recognises Áoife’s voice.

‘You will all be dead soon,’ Raghnailt says. ‘All of you will be eaten by the sickness, every last one. This is the last summer.’

She is succumbing to dispersal. Blood trickles down her left ear. She sees everything in double. I am broken, my vision impaired. It has been hot for a long time, and I have lived too long.

‘I hope you are right,’ Áoife says to her, ‘but whatever happens know that none of this is your fault. It never was.’