When it is done we head back towards the house and they walk hand in hand while I carry the two rifles. The smell of burning laces the air and I feel it in the back of my throat, know too that it is something that will lodge in my memory. I have stayed longer than I wanted and with each step I start to plan the details of my return journey, try to find some respite from the heat wavering the horizon by thinking of the sea. Of walking on the beach. Of Hannah sitting in the kitchen of my house sometime in the future and, in a welcome reversal of roles, me making her coffee. I try to construct these images as a way of creating a conduit back into the world I have left, a world which, however increasingly lonely I felt, appeared at least to offer the security of the familiar. Of things being in some kind of order where, even if they slipped, it would be the result of my own actions and not through some dangerous and unpredictable sequence of events over which I had no control, something that now seems an inevitable result of entering Donovan’s orbit once more.

We go inside and he produces cold drinks out of a fridge that seems to spend its whole day whining about the strain of keeping its motor running. Melissa excuses herself, obviously upset. Donovan stands at the window staring out and it is as if the incoming light streams through his frailty. I know that after I leave I will never see either of them again. That it is almost time for me to go.

‘What is it with the poles, the totem-like poles?’ I ask.

‘They’re not totem poles,’ he says, turning to face me. ‘They’re something you can understand if you’ll let yourself. They point the way but they’re more than that. So much more. We all need to lift up our eyes from this world, need to look up. And not just with our eyes, Mikey, not just with our eyes. You know the story in the Bible when the children of Israel are in the desert and they get bitten by snakes? And Moses raises up a brass serpent on a pole and anyone who looks up at it in faith is healed, even those with the poison coursing through their body.’

He lifts his arm as if to point to a brass serpent and the light shoots through his spindle thinness.

‘But you have to believe, Mikey, you have to believe to be cured. That’s what we’re doing here in this wilderness, turning our backs on temptation and making something that the suffering can look up at, find the help they need.’

He steps forward a few paces from the window and more light sidles into the room, making a fine filament of dust tremble about him. The same way it did all those years ago when I was boy choosing my books in a small-town library, a place in which I was offered another way and first experienced what I thought was love.