Looking down to the woman before me I saw ceaseless motion. Her head twitched between points and when it turned far enough I could see that her eyes, too, were darting about. She was following movements I could not see: happenings, events, I did not know what, like anyone else watching boxers or shoals of fish or children playing. Her face was reacting with fright, amusement, wonder and sorrow, tiny changes but unmistakable ones. Her free hand rose involuntarily once or twice as if something startled her. But for all my squinting and staring I could see only the beautiful speckled stillness.

She turned, after a long time, and strode directly to me: it was clear she knew I had been behind her all along. She looked into my eyes, as few others can do, and the stars lit her proud cheeks.

‘Got made up there,’ she said to me. She pointed a finger into the heart of the Milky Way. ‘Toowerer made the sun, and them stars made us. An you lot never gonna un-make us.’

Nothing stays fixed in time, and nor indeed did that moment.

I went below, shouldering my misgivings down the stairs. The doctor’s cabin was once again candle-lit, and the strange pump contraption stood on the desk. He welcomed me, poured tea and motioned that I should sit. As I did so, he latched the door behind me, having checked discreetly around it in the direction of my father’s cot.

The glass sphere reflected the candle’s flickering and the glow of the central lamp. From in here, the starlight had retreated to darkness outside; we were dry and warm, afloat on the inkwell sea. He unscrewed a wide lid on top of the sphere and reached across the desk to where a crumpled heap of muslin lay. The cloth was moving. There was a stone placed over it: he removed this and reached in, removing a bird he’d trapped. It was the small one that resembled a finch.

It made a chirruping sound, loud in the confines of the cabin, and twitched its frightened head from side to side. Both sides of the head were a delicate cornflower blue: its neck and folded wings were glossy black. The doctor held it tenderly in his curled hand, then swept it over to the sphere and dropped it inside. When he had done so, he replaced the lid. I could see now that the plumage of the bird’s belly was fluffy and white, and a handful of straight, rigid tail-feathers stood vertically from its rump.

The bird tried flying but the space was too small and it slid about on the downslopes of the sphere, wings beating forlornly. The doctor grasped the valve at the neck of the device, below the sphere, and began to turn it. I did not fully understand what I was watching but the apprehension was growing in me.

‘What are you doing to it?’ I asked.