The man walking slowly ahead of me is dying and I know if I don’t tell the truth about this fact then everything else risks fragmenting into something that makes all my efforts worthless. I’m not glad but at the same time it makes it possible for me to privately believe that when he dies I might finally be able to shake myself free from this part of my former life forever. Everything that occurred in that strange and disturbing period, even whatever happened to Tuyen and her unborn child, might disappear into the night sky, borne away by the smoke and flames. To be able at last to disavow Madame Binh’s prediction that I would never leave. This is what I tell myself and I think of Hannah, who has started to preside over my heart as well as my house, and I wonder if there is a way I might find to express something that touches on my feelings without the risk of losing her in a moment of mutual embarrassment that can never be rescinded. But there is another thought, too, that maybe the mature judgement on which I have prided myself for so long has, without my fully realising it, started to slide and be governed by the unreliability and unpredictability of impulse. And who could say any more which was right?

Behind a tumble of boulders we find the body of the dog, fly-crusted and with its throat cut. Find it there with tyre tracks, cigarette butts and a disposable lighter. Donovan kneels beside it, his hand on its flank, and half-whispers, ‘Sons of bitches,’ again and again until it becomes part of his breathing as the thin stems of his shoulder blades press against his shirt.

‘I’ll go get a shovel,’ I tell him but he stops me, saying that neither of us has what it takes to dig a grave in this sun-baked earth.

‘Go to the house and get a blanket,’ he orders, ‘and tell Melissa he’s been shot. That it was clean and quick. Make sure she stays inside.’

When I return with the blanket he uses it to completely wrap the body, then hands me his rifle and I follow him as he carries the dog about a hundred yards to the south of the house, his breathing heavier with every slowing step. I know where we have come right away – the circle of rocks, the pile of wood. This is the place where his body will depart the world and I watch him remove some of the wood from the pyre then nestle the dog in it. He tells me to wait and so I stand with the two rifles and try in vain to find somewhere that offers shade.

‘Shoot the first son of a bitch that moves’ was the instruction the last time he placed a gun in my hand, but as I look about me there is no sign of human life until my eyes catch one of the decorated poles as light pools and frazzles in its mosaic squares of blue glass and its feathered arms stir a little, although I feel no trace of a breeze. What are they supposed to be? What half-crazy impulse has seen it and all the others erected in this remote landscape? Then Donovan returns with a can of gasoline and splashes it over the wood. Melissa comes too and the three of us stand silently in front of the pyre until Donovan lights it and we have to step back from the sudden splurge of heat. They stand with their arms round each other’s shoulders and I imagine it is not possible for any of us to be there in that place and that moment without anticipating what is coming down the line. I can’t say how long he has been given but I sense it will be relatively short and that he himself has no will to drag it out.