If Caleb faced trial, Stephen could be destroyed. Had he ever been sufficiently involved in his son’s life? Exhausted, I thought of the virgin births of myth. Mary, for instance. And Gaia, who bore two sons on her own. Then I thought of children who killed their fathers. Kronus’s wife trained their youngest child to kill him. Art history and myth provided many answers. The Caleb I thought I knew might be as illusory as the bunyip, or long lost and extinct like marsupial tigers and lesser bilbies whose bones had returned to dust in the soil beneath our house’s big white footprint.

I sighed. My scalp itched. That shower.

Moments later I pushed suds into my scalp. When had I washed it last? Two days ago? Water circled my toes, grey with ash. Two days was a lifetime. Many lifetimes. Over a dozen. Maybe a dozen lives were over.

Not because of Caleb.

I stayed in the shower until the water ran clear. Despite the hour, I needed to rest. I collapsed into my bed. Brock Shepherd on the radio would have to wait.

Of all the places in the world, my exhausted dream took me to a long-ago museum visit, where Little Caleb was intrigued by the skull of an ancient, extinct giant marsupial. ‘A bunyip?’ he asked.

He had such an imagination! ‘It could be!’ I said.

I woke. In my notebook, between new snatches of lyrics and tunes, I drew the skull we’d seen on that long-ago day, putting flesh on it, and a body and claws and feathers. I wasn’t an artist like Caleb, my picture was more doodle than sketch, but it was the doodle of our own bunyip, whose creek-side home was now a pile of rubble topped with a misshapen tin roof.

Could a memory of the skull and feathers be the inspiration behind Caleb’s chunky necklace? He’d worn it on the day of the fire, striding through the dry grass, then through the ash and charcoal. I loved watching him. My son. Soon I’d go back to hospital, even if it was only so I could watch him sleep. Damaged, but not broken. I imagined him moving across the creek bed, his mind on some mysterious purpose that was not fire – that could never be arson – because he could not be responsible for this.

My phone buzzed while I thought about getting out of bed. An email from Marco, asking why I hadn’t responded to his discovery of the Latona statue, and if I had time to Skype.

Did I want to talk to him? He always preferred objects to words. ‘Texts are always political,’ he often said, ‘but objects are real.’ Early archaeologists had tried not to look at texts, but focused on what they could discover about the past with their own eyes and hands.

There was no point telling him what was happening. He couldn’t come here to dig up the truth, and he couldn’t tolerate the pace of a criminal investigation. It would seem frantic to Marco, who once spent three weeks putting together a single vase.