‘It could not.’ I hung up. Though I’d said so little, I regretted speaking. My experience with Sadie Riley taught me that anything could be misconstrued. Alleged arsonist’s mother says deaths were no accident. For instance.

‘It was an accident, miss,’ Harmony Beckwith once said, when she tipped over the classroom aquarium, and 6W’s pet fish drowned in air amongst shards of broken glass. And Rosie hated Caleb despite Sean’s injuries being ruled accidental. (Who was it who said there are no accidents?)

I turned off the television and walked to Caleb’s empty room. Penelope hung on his walls in various forms. He’d wanted to rescue her – and his sketchbook. He’d been in love. Cadmus, Prince of Tye, had been transformed into a snake in mythology, so his lover also became a snake, just to be with him. Caleb should have done anything for Penelope. How could a sketchbook matter as much as it had?

I stared through his window. If only I could see the world from Caleb’s perspective. Sunbeams, on their way to play with water in the creek, darted through gaps in new green leaves. The shriek of cicadas rehearsed the bushfire’s scream. Over the volcanic curves of ancient land, asphodel flowered and suburban houses and gardens multiplied over its surface like a contagious rash. The flames had begun at the edge of the yard Claire once carefully tended. A solitary spark at first. I imagined a fine yellow and orange creature, dancing along the veins of a dry leaf, grabbing hold, ravenously growing and quickly out of control – leaf, branch, tree aflame. The fire that destroyed Ancient Rome also began small, with flames that everyday people tamed in palm-sized oil lamps.

Early colonists had deliberately lit fires to clear the scrub here. They exposed loose soil to generations of hoof impact from sheep and cattle. Fire has always been part of the landscape: thousands of acres of bush surrounded Brunton, and that was where fires burned most fiercely. Much was destroyed, but much remained. Seeds, the chimney. And Caleb, my Caleb, my son, my boy, still existed in the wreck of a human I witnessed in court. I’d always be looking for him, always trying to find the little boy I loved in the man he’d vanished into. I had to go back in time, in my thoughts at least.

I read a poem by William Carlos Williams that I could imagine shaping into a song:

I was cheered

when I came first to know

that there were flowers also

in hell.

But I no longer felt the urge to take my guitar from its case, to discover a melody or chords. Now I needed to go to bed.