On my phone the skulls in my memento mori gazed back at me, their squiggly sutures running from front to back and side to side across their breadth. Their smiles were broad, and only menacing if you chose to interpret them that way.

And the thought struck me: skulls are such amazing armour, but where the armour failed was when it came up against the brain’s own thoughts and emotions. Most serious brain injuries were sustained during traffic accidents or violent trauma – damage caused by human error or cruelty. Emotion or thought either excessive or lacking. It seemed so devastatingly human to me at that moment, that the strange and fallible idiosyncrasies of the human brain were responsible for the downfall of the very bone designed to protect it.

The thought was unsettling. It made me feel caught in a logic loop, like I could circle and circle and never come out. Quickly I swiped the skulls away; and then, already feeling annoyed at myself, I went searching for my favourite images of Nassim. And then there he was, Nassim: his mouth, his eyes, his body . . .

I comforted myself with my hands and the thought of his body and his smell, and when I was finished I felt such a crushing weight of sadness and of my own stupid weakness that the only way to escape it was to ride the tail end of climax into sleep.

And then I dreamed.

I dreamed a small skull, coalescing around a bright point, a face, growing and growing until the tiny brain was squeezed so small that it flamed like a collapsing star and burned out and sat there, cold and black and heavy, a black stone in the palm of my hand, and with a sense of elation and tears of relief, I held the stone to my cheek and then drew my arm back and threw it from the top of the cairn out over the paddock in the direction of Basil’s pointing finger. ‘Do you see the gully there?’ he said, and I did, I saw it, finally, a strange submerged valley – lush, almost tropical, with trees poking out the top, a bright contrast to the surrounding brown earth of the flat paddock. My black stone flew through the air, so far, and then dropped into the rainbow valley. ‘Well that’s good then,’ said Basil. ‘No more lies to Nassim.’ And he turned around and waved at Nassim, who was climbing the cairn behind us, who was coming up the rocks to touch me, enfold me, hold me.

20

The sun was just up when I was woken by the ping of my phone on the floor by the bed. Reception. The text notification from the post office. And then, almost immediately, no reception.

But that didn’t matter. The package had arrived at the post office in town.

I sat up quickly. I was due to take Bette to her doctor’s appointment today – I could easily install her in a cafe somewhere while I went to the post office to pick it up. If she showed too much interest I could say it was study materials.