‘You’re not serious?’

He looked at me sideways. ‘You’ve lived a bit of a sheltered life, haven’t you?’

‘Have I?’

‘I reckon. Look, get going. And be cool to yourself. I’m going to come and check up on you tomorrow.’

I nearly cried. Someone was looking out for me.

‘Okay.’ I held out my hand, and Basil took it and performed a complicated shake with it.

‘Take care, my sister,’ he said, and strode off into the dusk.

As I rode, the fields that had been green with sprouting canola turned turquoise and grey in the purpling dusk. Within moments I was puffing. Nassim had always teased me because I had never been fit, but this body fatigue was next level. Basil hadn’t been exactly honest: it had seemed flat but as I rode a slight and perpetual incline became apparent. Before long the moon rose and the sky darkened and all the colour drained from the landscape, and it felt as though my legs had been turned to jelly.

I stopped and pulled out my phone. Eight minutes. I had been riding for eight minutes. I wasn’t going to make it.

I looked up and down the road. No cars and nothing but canola on either side. I would have to make it. Come on, Anna, how hard can it be?

I’d need distraction. If I spent my time thinking only about my jelly legs, I would be lost. I’d listen to something on my phone but I had no reception. I scrolled through to see what I had saved, and found a podcast on medical philosophy I had downloaded months ago and not listened to. It was the only thing I had. It would have to do. I plugged myself in, sat back up on the bike, took a deep breath in, pressed play, and began to pedal.

The podcast started off boring, and I remembered why I hadn’t listened to it. I couldn’t see that it was going to be helpful then, for study, and now I couldn’t see that it was going to be helpful for distraction. But rather than get off the bike again, I put my head down and kept going.

It was an interview with a philosopher of medicine, and she had an irritating voice, American and whiny. She started off describing to the interviewer the way that current medical science had been shaped, the way that people used to believe God was responsible for everything a body did and everything a person thought, but then when Descartes said the body was more like a machine that carried around a mind, suddenly it could be tinkered with: bones could be mended, bacterial infections fought with antibiotics rather than just prayer, tumours surgically removed. But more recently, she said, more and more evidence was pointing out the ways in which the brain and the body were one and that in fact separating out mental wellbeing from bodily wellbeing was not especially helpful. The philosopher said that we would do well to remember that the brain was meat, just like the rest of us.