I wanted to explain but couldn’t form the thoughts. The things I needed to say felt far away. I looked down. My breasts were almost gone; I could feel my bones ache where the chair pressed in too hard.

‘I think we need to consider the possibility,’ Dr Bellavit continued, softly, ‘that the poisons which affect you originate in the mind.’

I licked my dry lips. And then I blurted it out. ‘She has medicine,’ I said.

Dr Bellavit withdrew her hand. ‘What?’

It was a gamble. I didn’t know if Tilly had anything hidden in her room. But I knew her the way a sister knows her sister. I knew where she used to keep things when we were younger: a roll of money in her retainer case, a bag of pills in the spine of a book.

And my instincts were correct. I lay on my thin mattress and stared at the ceiling while the orderlies searched her room under Dr Bellavit’s supervision.

While I lay there, an incident surfaced in my memory. I must have been ten, eleven years old. My father was drunk. He lurched into the living room, where I was sitting on the sofa watching television. Tilly was curled up next to me, asleep. My father said, ‘You’re not mine, you can’t be. Look at you.’ He pointed at Tilly. ‘That one’s mine,’ he said.

From my window I saw Dr Bellavit toss what she’d found into the incinerator. She didn’t turn back to the house immediately. She stood and watched it burn.

That evening Dr Bellavit arrived at my door with a glass of coconut water, and – my heart soared to see it – a small dome of rice in a white bowl.

This is where time breaks into pieces. I know that I slept and drank coconut water and saw Dr Bellavit, who would whisper encouraging words into my ear. ‘They’ve stopped, haven’t they, the pains?’ she would ask. In some ways she was right. I lived in a small room inside myself, had abandoned the rest. ‘You are almost through. It’s almost over,’ Dr Bellavit would say, and I’d put my head in her lap and sleep.

Only one memory remains distinct. It was night. There was a noise outside my door.

I thought I called, ‘Hello?’, but the distance between what I asked my body to do and what it did had grown so great I could no longer be sure. I opened my eyes, and saw them pass: two orderlies, and between them a stretcher whose occupant was covered by a sheet. Dr Bellavit passed behind, and I saw her turn her head and look at me through the open door. She had the face of a coconut: dark, surprised eyes and an open mouth. I was sure she knew my eyes were open. I was sure I heard her say, ‘Boo!’