Nassim laughed unexpectedly, tea shooting up the back of his nose. He spluttered and then laughed a bit more.

‘Oh, you think that’s funny, do you?’ I asked him. ‘Well, excuse me Mum if I don’t want to just be geek-cool and amass capital – I know that’s what matters to you –’

‘Oh Anna, don’t be so –’

‘– but I want to actually do something.’

Cathy let out a large theatrical sigh. ‘As you can see, Nassim, Anna is not especially generous in her assessments of her own poor mother.’

Refill number three. A little slug of wine had bounced out of the glass and made a ring on the bench around the bottom. Nassim didn’t seemed to have noticed. Neither did Cathy, who was opening bills and laying them on the table, performing the task for Nassim, externalising her inner monologue. ‘Bill, bill, bill, oh look, I could have already won fifty thousand dollars . . .’ One of the letters had a handwritten front, not the usual cellophane-pane or bulk printing of bills and info-dumps. Mum wasn’t really looking as she started opening it, she was still so engaged in her Cathy-show, returning to declaiming about me and my studying. ‘Yes, study is really number one with Anna, Nassim. You’ll need to stay out of her way there if you don’t want to get burned. I mean, if she can’t even come on a Kiwi holiday with her poor old mum, and can’t even get on a plane to go and see her poor dying Opa –’

Mum had frozen, looking down at the open letter in her hand.

‘Oh I know it,’ said Nassim, reaching out and taking my hand and smiling at me. ‘She’s quite the swot. But I can assure you, Cathy, that . . .’

But he petered out. Mum wasn’t looking at him, or at me. She was just looking at the letter in her hand. From what I could see, it didn’t seem very long, just a few lines. But it held her as if it were a string of code she had to decipher to save her life.

Eventually she looked up and at me, and then at Nassim sitting there holding my hand. Her eyes tried to focus in a way that I instantly recognised. She was beyond three glasses, for sure. Well beyond.

Her gaze fell on our fingers there, locked together in a weave of light and shade and light and shade.

And then the world turned on its head.

14

When we reached the cairn, Basil said, ‘You weren’t thinking of climbing that thing, were you?’

‘Well,’ I said, and looked around. ‘I really do need to get some reception, and the only thing higher here is the old building, and I don’t know about going in there and trying to get up to that second floor.’

Basil turned and considered the old building. Something about it must have convinced him pretty quickly, because he turned straight back and said, ‘Okay, cairn it is. Let’s go.’