‘Good luck, my son. Kalí tychi! ’ she tells him, and points. ‘There. Go.’

‘Thank you!’ he calls after her, but she doesn’t even raise her hand as she walks away, much smaller than she seemed, back into the shadows. He turns to see where she has pointed, and sees the humped shape of the Bren carrier. The wind has picked up, shushing through the branches, freezing cold. Dry twigs clattering against each other. Dry words.

And something else. There is a broken branch in front of him and he picks it up and, leaning his full weight on it, limps onto the grass. There is no mound of earth any more, just a patch of freshly turned earth among the litter of war: an oil drum, discarded ammunition boxes. A gust of wind blows a flurry of paper across the grass. His head is pounding and flashes of purple and orange light are flickering at the corner of his vision, but as he gets closer, he sees that there is a person on their knees at the edge of the bare soil. He can hear his own breath, and a voice that he knows is just a memory, but it is beautiful. Someone buried her, after all. He feels a surge of gratitude, but it is so painful that he almost falls. He has to press his eyes again to clear them. When he takes his fingers away, the square forms again, slowly, first in negatives of black and silver, then in slabs of colour, oil paint squeezed and smeared roughly over canvas. The block of flats, the trees, shapes scraped into the paint. Tom stumbles on. He can smell the earth now. What can I sing? he thinks. I can’t sing. I’ve lost all the words. Someone, though, is singing for him. ‘Thank you,’ he whispers. The branch sinks into the loose earth and he stumbles, dropping to his good knee. ‘Thank you,’ he says again, and the singer looks up.

She is a woman, almost young, shivering feverishly in an old black dress many sizes too large for her, her bare arms clasped across her chest. Ribbons of dried blood eclipse one side of her face. Her cheeks are hollow and the shadows under her eyes are like smudged soot. Her hair, honey-coloured, yellow ochre, falls in heavy tangles to her shoulders. Her long neck, in which a blue vein is pushing through almost-translucent skin, is hardly touched by the collar of the dress. Her mouth is open, and her song comes to him like wind over a field of long grass.

She looks up and sees a gaunt man in a filthy camouflage smock, his black hair thick with dust, his skin scabbed and stretched tightly across his bones, a thick scar across his forehead, one ear clotted with blood. His long fingers are rubbing at his eyes, but when he takes them away, she knows him.

‘Zoë?’ he whispers.