And there, near the fossicker’s hut, I spotted Caleb. An awkward dark figure shadowing the white manna gum that shed its bark each year in bundles like an old miner struggling out of his overalls. In earlier years, we’d go down there together. We’d sit on the creek bank. After checking the grass for snakes, I’d help Caleb roll his jeans and we’d splash through dappled water that covered our ankles. Sometimes my mother-in-law, Caleb’s gran, would come, too.

‘He’s so much like Stephen!’ Claire would exclaim, as though my genes contributed nothing.

She would bring fragrant fresh-baked scones wrapped in a red and white checked tea towel, and a little dish with scoops of butter and jam. After eating, I’d encourage Caleb to crouch in the water while I splashed melted butter and jam from his face. He resisted. Perhaps the painted-face goth had always existed, one layer of skin down, waiting to be born.

‘Caleb!’ I called. ‘I’m making breakfast!’

Over the months before the fire, a skinny pale Caleb had been carved out of the outdoorsy, clumsy boy I loved. He had metamorphosed. His earphones routinely buzzed; Kafka’s insect turned electronic. As though he knew what I imagined, he took to reading books about people who had got into strange trouble. Kafka, of course. Bram Stoker. Horror novels in illustrated form, as graphic as possible. He borrowed my black eyeliner and purchased white face powder. Magically, I had to be blind to the cigarettes he puffed.

I called through the flyscreen. ‘Caleb! Do you want coffee?’

He turned. Carefully, with the heavy sole of a black boot, he stubbed out his cigarette. Stubbed it out, carefully. I remember that. I can’t answer for every moment of his time that day. But he did stub the butt out. He was vigilant about embers. He understood the danger. Then he shook out his too-long, black-dyed hair, and stomped through the fallen bark and sun-baked leaves to our house. He burst through the door and slid into a kitchen chair. Its solid legs creaked over slate tiles. Across the breakfast table, black rimmed but pink with the ghosts of tears, his eyes met mine.

‘Mum, you look angry.’

‘I was thinking, you have your father’s eyes.’ Stephen’s eyes, but clear of Stephen’s promises and betrayals.

Caleb slouched; refusing to eat was one way to wound me. Then he spoke. ‘That’s not surprising. We know he’s my father. How many other kids he has is the mystery.’

I chose to ignore that. There was something new and shocking about Caleb’s face. His lower lip was bloody. Two rings punctured its full redness. The piercings could have been designed for attaching to wires, to pull him along. Unlike the pale powder and the eyeliner, the cigarettes, I couldn’t pretend the lip rings didn’t exist. I held his gaze and touched, with an extended fingertip, my own lip.

Caleb scowled. ‘It’s called a snakebite, Mum.’

‘Will a law firm take you on, with a snakebite?’