She was trying to look tough and careless, but she just looked scared. He says he wanted to laugh, and, at the same time, something in her frightened eyes made him want to cry.

Her long narrow eyes darkened with whatever it was they were beginning to see.

He was wearing an old black and red lumber-jacket and old grey corduroy pants. His heavy shoes were scuffed; and he smelled of fatigue.

‘This is where my life is,’ he said, ‘my real life.’ He picked up a small piece of wood, it was about the size of two fists. There was the hope of an eye gouged into it, the suggestion of a nose – the rest was simply a lump of somehow breathing wood.

He is young, very, very young, but also very old; but not old in the way that she had expected him to be. She had expected the age of corruption.