The winter drags its cold feet over our land, too lazy to move on. AJ’s mum gets too sick to look after Mangojoy so Gramps brings him to live with us for a while. Every night, he rocks little MJ to sleep and says, ‘Hush, little man, you’re all safe.’ Then he slides MJ into bed with me and I wrap him in my blanket and listen to his little fast breaths as he sleeps.

AJ’s mum, Lily, gets sicker. No matter that Foreman gets the doctor out, and Gramps takes the cash money he has hid in our floor and gives it to the doctor for medicine. No matter that Foreman drops off lots of cans of fish, and Mags gives Lily all our eggs, and AJ keeps the potbelly stove stoked hot day and night. We go to sleep each night listening to her coughing and rasping in the shed next door.

Then one quiet night I wake with Mangojoy tight up against me breathing his little sleeping breaths and Gramps rocking in his chair still saying, ‘Hush, little man, you’re all safe.’ He says it over and over, and in the moonlight I see it’s AJ curled up there on my Gramps’s lap. AJ who’s become small and curled up like a baby.

In the morning when Mangojoy stirs, I get up and take him from the shed so the others can sleep. The fire that burned day and night at AJ’s is just a trickle of smoke in the chimney and when I pull open the packing-crate door, Lily lies in the bunk with the blanket up over her face and her feet sticking out the bottom whiter than sun-bleached bones.