Up over the back of the warm gravelly sand, crunching dry kelp underfoot. Through the soft beds of samphire that carpeted the gaps between the boulders; between the pinsharp tussocks and onto a thin soil made from their endless demise. I had no place in mind, just an uncertainty about when to begin talking. A rise that had a depression behind it: we would go up there and sit and face the sea. I led us that way, and when we topped the rise I looked down into the small bowl in the land and shuddered in horror.

A great pile of bones lay there, long, heavy and thick. Bleaching in the sun, skin stretched taut in places over them. I could see the divided bones of forelimbs, hips and the balls of long bones, and snaking columns of vertebrae. And skulls. A ripple of shock went through me until I saw to my relief that they were long and pointed and not human. But each and every one of them had been caved in. The shatters made straight lines where the iron had struck. Seals, in their hundreds, wrapped around each other, broken apart, scattered and piled. The older ones were bleached white. Newer ones were fawn, and some trailed the dry curls of tendons. Some were small, like the bones of children. I sighed and choked and tried to look away and could not: a large skeleton that contained, within its pelvis, itself in perfect miniature.

Heavy crows cawed from the mound, gleaming black against the bones. Previous generations of the birds would have been sustained by this slaughter: the descendants stayed on and they guarded the skeleton city with baleful eyes. The doctor would delve here if he’d come, taking samples and making admiring sounds. But I could only grieve, and I did not know for what.

We picked our way around it, and I clutched my father’s arm more tightly than usual for fear he would fall into the grave. He must have smelt it—the stench was overwhelming—but he did not inquire. The ground sloped upwards and I stopped us at a smooth wide boulder in the sun, with the stink downwind of us. When we sat, I felt the warmth radiating into my thighs and I was a small girl again, lying on sandstone somewhere in Sydney, feeling that same slow warmth rise through me under endless sun.

‘I need to know what happened,’ I began. ‘I need to know.’ I did not know what else to say.

‘The fire?’ He seemed resigned.

‘Yes. All of it.’

He turned his face so that the reflected light off the sea lit him, and his lank hair drifted slightly in the breeze. He was tanned deeply by the sun: I hadn’t noticed it happening. He waited so long that I thought he might not speak at all. Then he began.