‘I know,’ said Tilly. ‘But I thought – well, just in case there’s an emergency.’

She unzipped her handbag, then unzipped one of its secret compartments. Inside was a blister pack of painkillers, hospital-strength, some kind of morphine. We had a supplier. The pills were out of date but usually this meant nothing. I took two. I knew not to take any more. Once I took six and slept for twenty-two hours. Tilly had to keep checking my pulse. If it had slowed too much, she said, she would have taken me to emergency. But then there might have been trouble.

We never liked dealing with our supplier. He seemed greasy. The pores around his wide nose gaped, and he bounced his leg incessantly when he sat, his belly spreading over the tops of his thighs.

Unfortunately, dealing with him was necessary. No doctor would give us the prescriptions we needed, even though we told them again and again how unwell we were. We both had digestive disorders. There was pain, sometimes dull, sometimes acute; there was an unpleasant fullness, where our guts felt solid as brick and nothing moved. Often we’d examine one another in the mornings and see how our gums and tongues lacked colour, how the blood vessels were swollen in our eyes. There were days when we could hardly leave our beds. We’d leave the curtains drawn and run the same Google searches we’d been running for years:

bad digestion new therapies

digestive issues solution

chronic pain alternative practitioners

digestive health and wellbeing retreats

It was on one such day that I found Dr Bellavit.

‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘Harbour: A Place for Healing. It’s up north. On an island.’

‘I hate the tropics.’

‘Says she’s cured a man of cancer.’

‘They all say that.’

‘Rheumatoid arthritis. Diabetes. This guy was cured of gout. Dr Bellavit is a miracle worker, he says. And it’s all natural; it’s based on a diet.’

This got Tilly’s attention. ‘How long would we stay for?’

‘It doesn’t say.’

The images showed a coconut grove, tall palms bending in a field of vivid grass, surrounded by a luxuriant tangle of rainforest. A colonial-era house – renovated, three storeys, and glaringly white – stood in the middle. The grove gave way to a white sand beach. I could imagine us there, Tilly and me, lying silent in the sun, sand sloughing off our dead skin, salt thickening our hair. We would float in the water while longer, slimmer versions of our bodies appeared as shadows along the seabed.

I emailed an enquiry, and in return was posted two application forms and a copy of Dr Bellavit’s book: The Expulsion Cure.