Mrs Bannerman told them, ‘You can have a look but only if you take it away,’ because she still had boarders in those days and it was dangerous, so they came back with trailers and scooped out what they wanted, but didn’t fill the crater in and pretty soon it was full of junk again. Anyway, we picked our way around the crater, with Mark saying, ‘Hey, Aunt Beth, are you around?’ There was no answer but then we got to this spot behind the passionfruit vines and there was this woman standing there.

You should have seen what she was wearing! She looked like a wizard, or a witch or something, because she had a heavy burgundy robe made of some kind of velvet – maybe velour – and bits of it had worn away, leaving all these shiny patches and it looked heavy and hot and the hem of the thing was filthy.

She had a pile of dead hair, the same colour as the dress, all bunched up and pinned in a bun on the top of her head, and her face was lined like an elephant’s. She was brown like the wood of a tree and she must have been able to see us, we were standing right in front of her, but she didn’t say hello or anything, she just stood under that passionfruit vine, grinning.

Mark said, ‘Hey, Aunt Beth,’ and walked over to her and clicked his fingers in her face, and she barely even responded. Since I’d been in Caloola and knew a few things, I was thinking, ‘Uh oh, there’s nobody home,’ because there was nothing behind those eyes.

Mark kept saying, ‘Hey, Aunt Beth, this is Snow.’ But Aunt Beth didn’t say ‘Hello’ or ‘How are you?’ or ‘Welcome’ or even ‘Snow, did you say Snow?’ which is what everyone says when they first get introduced to me. And I was about to say, ‘Well, hi,’ but then Aunt Beth looked at me and said, ‘I can do all my exercises from physical culture!’

That made no sense obviously, but next thing I knew Mrs Bannerman got down on the ground and lay in the dirt and started cycling her legs above her head, like she was doing the bicycle.

Mark was saying, ‘Don’t do that, Aunt Beth.’ But it was as though she couldn’t hear him, because she stayed on the small of her back, in the dirt, cycling. And then she rolled over onto her side and scrambled to her feet and said, ‘Star jumps!’ And she started doing star jumps. Then she said, ‘And leg kicks!’ She had her hands on her hips and was high-kicking – not easy in that robe she had on – and then she said, ‘And now marching!’ She started marching up and down, like she was in some kind of band, and Mark kept saying, ‘Will you stop, Aunt Beth?’ But it was like she couldn’t stop. She was saying, ‘Fit as a fiddle!’ And her arms were pumping, and the dead hair bun on her head was bouncing, and I’ll be honest, she was as demented as any person I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a few.