I want to say yes. Part of me wants to yield to the town. I know I could slip back into its embrace, yield myself to the caresses of Elba, forget about Abel, about Tora, about my part in all this. I could raise the girl, perhaps start a family of my own. Begin over.

Though that may not be possible. Elba has reached the age where it would be dangerous for her to give birth. A surrogate family then. Something not perfect, something incomplete, impure. Too far on in history for purity.

And too many questions. Too many things left unfinished for there to be satisfaction in a quiet life.

Some of the fruit is so low I have to duck as I walk under the branches. In places the thick foliage makes it dark. I walk deep into the orchard seeing no one. There is no sound other than my footsteps. I am amazed at the abundance of fruit. Some of it is overripe, as if they have more than enough and could not be bothered to pick it. In my day we harvested what we could and kept watch over it to prevent theft. But there is no one here.

I break through the trees suddenly and find myself in a sun-filled clearing. Trees give way to long green grass, and in the centre, quite incongruous for our settlement, a stone hut, about four by four metres.

Though the surrounds have changed much, somehow I have found my way here easily. All those years ago there were just a few trees. Trees that were sturdier than orange trees. A few of these are still standing, I notice, still standing in a circle around the hut.

I kept this place fenced off. It was a mile from the settlement gates, not quite out of sight. I have been walking over the graves for the last hundred metres. We used to bury them here, here where they died. We started at the hut and buried them in circles, spiralling away from the centre as we had to bury more and more.

We buried them in shallow graves with their faces pointing skywards. That way, some believed, they could rise again to join a better world, a world made possible by their passing. Often several bodies to a grave. We buried them but our burial was not a forgetting, was not meant to be a forgetting. I am angry that the markers seem to have been removed. We were careful to mark the graves with a small pile of stones. But they have not been moved. I scuff the grass with my foot and disturb a pile. Not moved, just buried and forgotten. At least they are still here but they should not be overgrown like this. If there was so much fuss about what we did to these people, why then have they not been remembered? This is not remembrance, leaving the graves to be overgrown by grass and fruit trees. I have a vision of a corpse in the earth. The roots of an orange tree pierce the earth, pierce the bag, pierce the flesh of man. The fruit of the trees that feed the town nourished by the death of our ancestors.

On the other hand, better a fruit orchard and undisturbed peace than dry ground, a baking sun and a few small stones as a monument in a bleak landscape.

I have brought the island stone with me. I remove it from my bag and look around the clearing for somewhere to put it. There is no obvious place. It seems a hollow gesture but I place the stone on the ground before me. It is darker than the others I have disturbed. I straighten up and take a deep breath. I am left feeling flat.

I walk up to the hut. The one window is boarded up though not entirely. Two planks form an x. The door has been nailed shut. I peer in. It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. There is not much to see. At first glance it seems everything has been removed.

But not everything. A white shape lies sprawled across the table inside.

I jerk back. The shape of a head, two lumps at the end for feet, an arm hanging down at one side. It does not move. I know of course it is not a body. But the sight of it brought it back. Real enough. An imagined body standing in place of hundreds before it. It fills the space of the dead.

I kick the door in. I approach the shape slowly, walking through dust. There are dust motes in the air like flies. They shimmer in the shaft of light coming through the doorway. I walk up to it, reach out my hand, touch it. It gives in easily when I touch it. It is one of the bags we stored people in before burial. For a moment I think I will see Tora’s mother when I tear it open, as if she had died yesterday, but all I see inside are more of the bags. They seem to have been arranged to look like a corpse. Why I don’t know. I pull them out one by one. More dust.

There is a scuttling from behind me. I wheel around sharply but see nothing. At the door I squint against the light. I can see no one. ‘Who’s there?’ I shout. No answer. I walk around the hut to the other side but there is nothing and I hear no more sounds. A rabbit, I assume. I re-enter the hut and dismantle the pretend corpse. I find myself sneezing from the dust. The noise startles me again.

I look around the room. Everything has been removed, except for the table and the bags. There was never much call for equipment. A chair, a table, a small platform, a cabinet, some rope, a stove for heating food for the guards, knives, twine, bags. That was it.

The cabinet, which used to contain records, is gone.

I walk to the far wall. I raise my hand to it. I run my fingers over the marks. We made a small mark with a stone on the wall of the hut.

The seventh line we drew crossed the previous six. At the end of fifty-two of these we started a new row. Why we measured the dead in this way, the way we measured time, I cannot recall. Did each death mean another day’s life granted to the settlement? Perhaps. But it is a sign of respect too. A mark, inscribed in stone, will never die.

I step back. The marks reach across the wall and from floor to ceiling. I am surrounded by them. Suffocated.

I know how many of them there are. I do not have to count. There are nine hundred and seventeen scratches on the wall.

I can remember the name behind the first mark, the name behind the last, some in between. I tried on the island to remember more. I lay on my bed each night and went over the names, glancing over at the cave wall. I willed myself to remember more. After a while I’d force myself to stop by listening only to the wind, the waves. I did not think about Bran, about Tora, Abel, about my banishment. Just the names.

Only the names. The faces, mostly blank, nameless, pushed against the rock of my cave, against the wall of days, straining to get through. I shut my eyes to keep them out.

When Tora came to me after I hanged her mother I held her close.

I hugged her and felt my heart leap. But then I looked at my hands on her back. I remembered the blood, the blood of her mother on my hands, hands separated from Tora’s skin by just a thin dress. I let go of her with that hand, held on tighter with the other. I think though, it seemed as if I wanted to let her go. I did not. I wanted to carry on holding her. On and on. She looked hurt. I could not explain. She broke my grip, brushed past me and went to pour herself a glass of water.

For each one of the nine hundred and seventeen I gave to myself the task of pronouncing the c-grade. I took this on myself. For each I pronounced death. Some cried. Some tried to attack me. Most were too feeble. I have been cursed a thousand times.

I close the door and go outside and again walk round the back of the hut. It is overgrown, the trees unpruned. My feet bury themselves in rotting fruit, weeds, dead branches. Like mud. I kick at it. My boots dislodge something hard. I bend down to pick it up. It is a few centimetres long and caked in brown earth. It is not wood, it is much too hard for that. I wipe off some of the earth. I can see the pores now. It is bone, of that I’m sure. From what I do not know. It could be anything: dog, human. I kick away more of the earth and get down to my hands and knees and dig a little deeper. The digging is tough and I can only go a short way down, barely scratching the surface. With better implements I could, I know, uncover whole skeletons. But what would that prove? Without names it proves nothing. But I do find another. I pull it out. It is from the leg of a human. I wrench it out of the earth, stones and leaves scattering as I do. I stand there with it. I stand there with the bone of a man’s leg in my hand and I tilt my head back and my eyes shut against the light.