A hungover Emerald had come straight from bed and was still wearing her brand-new silk pyjamas, bought in the ship boutique to replace her regular moth-eaten cotton nightie. Amber was still wearing the clothes she’d worn on Christmas Day, an uncharacteristically simple cotton shift and flat sandals.

‘Why haven’t you changed since yesterday?’ Emerald asked.

‘I’ve been driving around all night with a boot full of prawns, trying to work out what to do with the rest of my life.’

Emerald rolled her eyes so far back in her head she could probably see her synapses zinging. ‘Not lying face-down on either of your brothers-in-law would be a start. So, Ruby, what the hell is so urgent that you dragged us both over here at sparrow’s fart?’

I was standing numbly in the doorway. Neither sister had taken into account my ghostly complexion.

Emerald pushed past me and stomped down the hall towards the kitchen, with Amber trailing after her. Emerald then grabbed the nearest utensil from the countertop and swivelled to face us. ‘Don’t mess with me. I’m all out of oestrogen and I have a fondue fork,’ she said, only half-joking. ‘So?’ she asked me. ‘What’s up?’

Blood beat in my ears. ‘Mum’s dead,’ I said tonelessly.

Everything suddenly seemed slow, as though we were all moving through deep water in dive suits. My sisters looked at me for a silent eternity, though the clock on the wall behind them recorded it as eighteen seconds.

‘No!’ Amber choked.

‘Are you sure?’ Emerald demanded. ‘Where is she?’

I led my sisters to the grim scene on the backyard banana lounge. We made a semi-circle around our mother, all of us stupefied by the power of death.

Amber and I instinctively looked to our elder sister for guidance. Emerald was the practical and level-headed sibling; she would know exactly what to do. Emerald’s superior maturity became immediately apparent when she gasped, hysterically, ‘What the fuck do we do now?!’

‘I don’t know!’ Amber’s voice seemed pitched an octave higher than usual. ‘You’re the medical one. Shouldn’t you do CPR or something?’

This galvanised Emerald into professional mode. She immediately felt our mother’s bejewelled wrist.

‘So, is she . . . you know?’ Amber asked, in an annihilated voice.

‘Dead?’ Emerald said. ‘As a dodo. Deader than a weekend in Dapto,’ Emerald said, lapsing, in her woe, into inappropriate black humour.

Shock has a terrible texture to it. The world around you, normally solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin and translucent.

‘Oh, god,’ Amber exclaimed. She was pointing at an orange vial of pills poking out of the pocket of our mother’s dress. She picked them up and read the label. ‘Fentanyl.’

‘Opioids,’ Emerald said. ‘And look.’ She indicated a vodka bottle amid the debris and detritus of yesterday’s uneaten lunch that I didn’t remember being there.