Bette held the photo in a shaky hand, looking at it, peering, and then her face closed down.

‘Grandma?’

Bette dropped her hand to her lap, still holding the photograph, and turned to face the window, her gaze hovering somewhere distant out there, away from me, away from the car, away from now.

I drove on, my eyes sliding every now and then to the side to see Bette still sitting, still staring out of the window. Unresponsive. Somewhere else.

But then, all of a sudden, she came out of it, turning her head to me, holding up the photo like something hot. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘In Bromley Cairn. In the room where I’ve been working. It was just on the mantelpiece.’

‘In Bromley Cairn?’ Bette fixed me with a hard stare. Nothing absent there now – her eyes were sharp as sharp. It made me scramble for words a little, trying to remember things, trying to represent the situation as accurately as I could.

‘Yes. It had probably been there all along, maybe it had. I found it last night. Maybe Hessel left it there when he hung my picture.’

‘Hessel hung a picture?’

‘My memento mori –’

‘He came and hung it? And you saw him?’

‘No, but it’s hung, so . . .’ I shrugged.

Bette dropped the photo into her lap, facing up. I looked down into it. Her old shaking fingers hovered over it and then gently traced the curves of the boy’s chin. I waited, but Bette looked off out the window again as the car crept forward, climbing the hill, slipping into the forest and filling with the scent of eucalyptus blossom.

‘I haven’t seen a picture of him at this age for the longest time,’ Bette finally said.

The power under the bonnet began to fade with the incline. I dropped down a gear and the car revved, trying to pull its weight against the gravitational mass of the whole earth, climbing, climbing, climbing. I dropped another gear to keep the car from stalling and other cars started to pass on the right from behind. We crept loudly up to the apex and then, over the peak and with gravity on our side, the car quietened down and slipped evenly along the bitumen between the trees.

‘It’s Danny,’ Bette said.

‘Danny?’

‘I don’t suppose Cathy would have ever told you about Danny.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about a Danny.’

Bette nodded. ‘Cathy loved Danny more than anything, so that makes sense. The more she cares the further away she goes.’

‘And Danny is . . .’

‘My boy,’ Bette said. ‘My beautiful baby boy. Cathy’s baby brother. He was a good kid. A really great kid.’

Bette saying ‘was’ like that gave me a strange sensation, like the road was dropping away from underneath the car.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

Bette answered simply, almost as though she had rehearsed the words so as to not have to think about their terribleness. ‘He had an accident. Just after his fourteenth birthday. He died.’