She smelled of coconuts and sweat. There was no deodorant at Harbour, no toothpaste, no shampoo. These, we learned, were some of the rules. Once we had left our bags in the hallway, to be carried upstairs by the silent, white-clad orderlies who roamed the house, Dr Bellavit told us the rest. All of our valuables were to be locked in a safe in her office. There were to be no devices in the house, no medicines, no unauthorised food. No books except for The Expulsion Cure; Tilly’s snake book and my paperbacks were confiscated. No talking unless it was with her. No electric lights – at Harbour, everyone lived by the sun. And no shoes.

‘No shoes?’ said Tilly.

‘You won’t need them.’

Our shoes went into the safe with everything else.

We were given a brief tour of the dining room, common area and kitchen, all of them clean and spartan, with white walls, dark furniture made from coconut wood, and coir mats on the floor. Then we were led up the winding wooden staircase to our rooms. They were next to one another. I wondered, when I saw mine, whether Tilly’s was the same: almost bare, with an inch-thin mattress on wooden slats, a hard pillow, an unvarnished table, a bowl with a pitcher sitting in it. The window had no curtain. I had a view of the incinerator into which the orderlies dumped Harbour’s rubbish. It was always hungry, always belching black smoke.

Each room had an ensuite and in mine I saw a curious thing. Above the bath there was a kind of seat. It was bolted in but had a hole in the middle. It must be for invalids, I thought.

I met Tilly back on the landing, where Dr Bellavit waited for us.

‘Now,’ Dr Bellavit said, smiling. ‘Do you have any questions for me?’

‘Yes,’ said Tilly. ‘Are there death adders here?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Death adders. The snakes?’

‘Oh – yes. Horrid things. We used to see them. But then the toads came,’ she said. ‘And that was that.’

The next morning Dr Bellavit called me in for a private interview.

‘You must tell me everything,’ she said, settling in her coconut-wood chair. ‘There is no shame here. This is not a house of judgement. You must tell me all the details, and leave nothing out.’

A fan swung loosely overhead.

I crossed my ankles. ‘Everything?’

She said the treatment wouldn’t work if I kept secrets. She said that she would touch me, and know; that the secrets would ball my muscles into knots, swell my joints. She said maybe the things I refused to tell were part of my sickness. A sick mind, she said, will manifest in the body.

She took a notepad and a pen and told me to begin at the beginning.