But Johanna is grateful for this singularity. Maybe, she sometimes thinks, it’s this strangeness that forces her to look elsewhere, to want to escape, to imagine worlds she doesn’t yet know. Had she been lulled by the illusion of normality, she might have perhaps looked like her sister.

She bursts out laughing, here, right now, like a lunatic who gives herself permission to do so. There’s no one to hear her, anyway. Immersed in the scrubland, she paces up and down looking for the rare shade of small pines sticky with sap, throws pebbles in front of her, and feels a little bored. She knows it well: here, boredom is an art form, almost a life art, and her own boredom stinks of anticipation. She doesn’t feel like seeing her school friends or the village gang – she still hates Lucas and Enzo, the little shits she sees through with surprising clarity. Céline isn’t here to add her own boredom to hers, and she misses that. They’ve spent their lives glued together for such a long time, despite their differences.

Jo is looking for ways out. She must be patient, but she has neither the age nor the temperament for patience. What she dreams of is explosions, magnificent events, nuclear wars. She is all pernicious expectation and anxiety. Céline’s pregnancy doesn’t actually change anything, and it’s again about her sister, the centre of attention. But there’s something hatching, buzzing in the thick atmosphere, in the family silences. She can feel it, like that sharp taste when biting into a green grape, on alert.

She breaks up the white stones and crouches to crumble them against other rocks. The light annihilates the slightest shady hole. Jo is envious of the tiniest creatures, the rustling insects. She dreams of setting fire to all this dryness so nothing will be left and the scorched earth will save itself by cracking open. And if the fire spreads as far as the villas and sets them alight, she wouldn’t care if it also destroyed their house. She’ll dance for joy on their mixed ashes.