The potter gives me a giant vessel. Pocked and the colour of red-gum trunks in late spring, it’s heavy like a four-year-old child. I take it home on the train in one of those tough reusable supermarket bags, straining at the handles. I cut off branches of hop bush, their seeds like pendants rusted at the tips, and place them in the vessel. Slender leaves reach out like a million small fingers. It takes a dozen jugfuls of water to fill it. I count them.

The next day he sends me a text with a paragraph taken from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. We never send messages. When I read it, it’s her voice, remote and impassive, that I hear. A woman’s voice, which has had too much taken from it: