Gideon has positioned the pieces all along the verandah. Just for tonight, he’d said. I don’t know how best to store them. You can tell me where you want them tomorrow.

The moon floats out from the haze, and she can see them in silhouette. They’re lined up like dancers, beautiful. There are some things.

Gideon’s right. Kathryn’s art is exquisite. She goes from one to the next, admiring the lines of her mother’s goddesses, until it dawns on her that they are not goddesses, not these, not the musical figures with flowing hair that Kathryn was known for. These are from that new series her mother had been working on, was working on when she died. She remembers what Kathryn called them. The Swimmers.

A feeling of claustrophobia grips her. A squeezing of breath. Crouching down, she traces the limbs, the stretching, reaching limbs of a swimmer-child, arms extending upwards, reaching up through water, reaching up for air. A tremor.

It feels … it feels like desperation. The swimmer is not swimming, the swimmer is drowning.

Perhaps it’s true … No … There are some things … This can’t be. Her grandmother’s words, her terrible story, must be changing the shape of the figures in the dark.

Laura runs her fingertips over the face of the next swimmer and finds it encaged, shielded by arms bent at the elbow, defensively. Desperate too, this one, but not a swimmer. She swings around wildly.

A clanging noise, metallic, hollow, as she trips and knocks one against another in her haste to get up, get away, flee from the figures. None of them are swimmers, none of them.

They are Steven. Her mother’s rendering of her brother drowning as she watched. Drowning in sand.

Should never be told.

29

Avril

Cooper is more alert. He’s following the orbit of white around his bed, Dr Nguyen and two interns. Eyes focused, concentrating, and then he looks across at her. Oh god. It’s Coop. The real Coop. Come back to her, just as she knew he would. A softening of the iris, so intensely blue, an elongation of white. Silent greeting after long absence:

Hey babe.

Hey y’self.

OK, then, says Dr Nguyen, and Avril realises she’s talking to her. We’re all set. The trach has to stay, I’m afraid, until we can get that inflammation down a bit more, but we’ll change it to a double tube this week. And then, hopefully, Cooper will be able to talk—in brief spurts, anyway.

She explains the way it works, that it requires Coop being able to cover the opening with his bandaged hand to allow air to flow over the vocal cords; that the swelling has receded, the inhalation burns healed, just enough to make speech possible.

When? Avril asks.

When will we do the procedure? In the next day or so.

And will he be able to speak straight away?