I cannot walk. I consider standing on one foot, to hop, but it is too difficult when my head is about to explode. Instead, I drag my body across the grass as if I were a serpent, barely noticing as I scrape my legs on fragments of rocks. By the time I reach Alice I am breathing so heavily I cannot discern anything when I put my ear to her chest. After a minute, when I have finally stopped panting, I am certain that she is breathing too.

All my life, I have dreamed of the dead coming back. Matilda in the book. My parents, in the world I go to when I sleep. And now it has happened. I pull her onto my lap. She is my true miracle. My own child, returned to me. I bend over her, putting my lips to her cheek, which is startlingly cool, despite the hot sun. As carefully as I can, I examine her.

Other than her feet, there are no cuts, but when I push up her torn pyjama bottoms I can see that there are several new bruises on her legs, ranging from red to blue, and an older green one too. Her anaemia has been diagnosed, and these livid blotches are identical to the ones that covered me after she was born.

I can’t be sure if she is asleep, or if she has somehow fallen and hit her head on that rock. I can’t see any sign that she has. I remember that the anaemia made it so hard to do anything but sleep, as if I were in a kind of coma I couldn’t wake from, but I’d thought then it was an escape from a life I couldn’t bear to be conscious in. She is so light, as I cradle her in my arms, and terrifyingly pale. But for the bruises, she is nearly as white as the background colour of her pyjamas. I hold her hand in mine. The palm is pale, too, and icy cold like her cheek. Her nail beds and lips have the faintest tint of pink. I reach into my pocket for my phone. As Eliza said, there is no signal.

Again I bend my ear to her chest. She is breathing, but not peacefully. I study her some more. The skin at the base of her neck is inflating and deflating, instead of her stomach, and she is wheezing. I pull up her pyjama top. The skin over her ribs is drawing in when she inhales, making them look prominent to a degree that cannot be right.