Aunt Caroline doesn’t believe us either. She’s the one who took care of us after our father died. Her body looks like a fridge on top of two twigs. She used to accuse us of inventing our symptoms as an excuse not to study or to work.

‘The only thing making the two of you sick,’ she’d say, ‘is each other.’

When we alighted from the ferry, the driver hauled our bags ashore. He gave me his card – a flimsy thing, homemade, with his name and phone number printed on it.

‘Call me,’ he said, ‘if you decide you’ve had enough.’

Tilly plucked the card from my hand and tried to throw it away. It spun madly in the breeze and blew back towards us, before skittering away along the beach.

The ferry man didn’t move until we were up the beach and swallowed by the grove. I saw our two sets of footprints winding around each other, Tilly’s and mine, and tried to work out whose was whose.

‘Doesn’t look like the picture,’ Tilly said.

‘It’s the wet season.’

But she was right. The colours were murkier. Piles of debris rotted languorously where the grove stopped and became forest. There was the smell of decomposition, too; sweet and sulphuric.

I took a step forward and snapped a stick in two. A foot from Tilly something slithered away, too quickly to see what it was. We exchanged a look.

‘Could have been anything,’ I said.

We stopped for a moment to admire the coconut trees. There were so many. Some were so close to the house they could almost touch it. The house itself both looked like the pictures and didn’t. It was the same stately white weatherboard place with iron lacework and a broad verandah. But it looked scruffy, grimy, like it had just woken up after a bad night.

A coconut fell and landed with a thud.

‘Strange-looking things, aren’t they?’ said Tilly, walking over to pick it up. ‘It’s like they have faces.’

I saw what she meant. It did seem to have two eyes and an open mouth; an animal face, covered in hair.

Tilly held the coconut in front of her own face. ‘Boo!’ she said.

‘Hush,’ I said. There was a figure in the doorway.

The first thing Dr Bellavit did when we entered the house was take each of us into her arms and squeeze. To me, she whispered, ‘You’re going to be okay.’

Dr Bellavit was more solid than I was expecting. Short, intensely tanned, muscular; the balls of her calves were high and prominent, her breasts a single floating apron beneath a white dress. Her eyes were bright against the baked brown of her skin.