She makes a sandwich to take to the hospital, banana and honey on grain bread. Tomato would be better. Healthier. But, she thinks wryly, it would taste of tomato.

When she locks the door behind her, she pauses. A breeze is rustling the eucalypts, hundreds of dry leaves shushing. She reaches for a peppermint. Nothing is burning. There is no fire. But the smell of burning is back.

3

Avril

The light, the half-light, the nebulous haze. It would cast an unhealthy glow on even the most perfect skin, and there’s not much of that around here. Masks, caps and gowns, cotton booties and mittens. What does that leave? Eyes, only eyes. The alert, canvassing eyes of the staff. And those of the others, the loved ones, stricken.

Avril splays her fingers inside the gauzy mittens, greenish and pocked in this eerie dim, and counts them down, one to five on each hand. A nervous thing, a ritual. Here, where death hovers so close that you can hear it breathing, feel its pushy presence in the unnaturally warm air, she is almost guilty about being intact among the disfigured bodies, tubes, beeping screens. She counts her fingers again. Her hands are as they should be. Except in what they cannot do. She is allowed to be here, to sit by his bed during the long nights, to speak to him in whispers, but she cannot touch Cooper.

He is a grievous wound. Simply that.

Third-degree burns. Full thickness. Seventy per cent. Complicated by the invisible wound that has put him in a coma, a knock to the head by a piece of roofing timber. At first these terms were shorthand for Not expected to live and All we can do is ease the passing. But Cooper is strong, stronger than that. They call him Miracle Man around here and look at him in awe and admiration. Pity is something they reserve for her, and for Laura.

Avril’s long, strong fingers understand skin. They are used to kneading muscles, manipulating seized joints, soothing, healing—all through the medium of skin. But when there is no skin …

Most has been debrided along with the dead tissue beneath. To look at him, to steel yourself and really look when the bandages have been peeled away, you could not say where the thirty per cent that remains was, unless you knew. You could not imagine there was an inch of Cooper’s body unskinned.

Cold panic grips when she thinks like that. Still, now, calm. Panicking will not help you, Coop, will it. What will help you?

Another riffle of panic.

Ms Mathieson?

Avril, please, just Avril. New, this one. They are always busy, too much to do. She used to offer to help, Laura too, but both of them know better now.

Avril, yes. Why don’t you take a break, a cup of coffee, maybe. You know where the tea room is? We need to change the dressings.