At the top of the little beach there was a band of hard, dried kelp that crunched underfoot and then we were in among the tussocks, thigh-deep and prickly. I had to stay so close, at times I was under my father’s arm and hefting his weight over obstacles. Birds flushed ahead of us, and slithering tails whipped out of view between grasses. I had grown up on a land carpeted with leaf litter and shaded overhead by sprawling, formless trees. Here, the riot was below the knees. Above was only the wide vault of the sky, met by the slope of the hills.

My father was groaning as he went, and disinclined to talk. When we had covered a hundred yards, we stood on a rise that revealed the great sweep of ocean to the east and west of the long finger of land, back to the Moonbird and away to Great Island. There were no seals to be seen and no sealers either, consequent on their stunning success at slaughter.

Gulls overhead, him failing beside me. The romantic vision of the wide world had fallen away now: there was nothing out here to discover, nothing to exhilarate. This was not the way I had thought our urgent mission would play out. And what if my father died out here? I looked at my feet: could I bury him in this rocky ground, no tools, no god, no congregation to hear the words? It would be just like him to expire somewhere so inconvenient.

‘I’m looking around us, Father,’ I said when he stumbled to a halt. ‘There is nothing out here. The doctor is up there, up to our left.’ His face followed the change in the direction of my voice. ‘The master’s along that beach to the right, to the south.’ Again, he sensed the orientation. ‘This is a waste of time, I believe. Why don’t we go back?’

He bent over and clutched his knees, teeth gritted. One hand left his knee and rose to shoulder height, extended, and the fingers dabbed softly at the air. His face was tensed with listening, as the fingers explained something to him.

‘Up there,’ he said, with considerable effort. ‘On the ridge line. Is there limestone coming out of the ground?’

‘Yes. How did you know that?’

‘Wind’s coming from that way. Smells different with the air on it. Limestone makes overhangs, is where anybody’d shelter. We need to…huargh!…go and look.’ He had vomited again. At least I would not be called upon to clean it off this particular surface.

But the word he’d used. Look. I thought, for the first time, that he was using it to mean inquire. But who was ‘anybody’?

We pressed on, uphill now towards the reef of limestone he had somehow sensed. He fell more often as the ground inclined, catching his feet in the thick bases of the tussocks. He would tumble forward, cursing, then spike his hands on the needle-tip blades and curse some more, clutching his profanities between teeth gritted against the nausea.