B was tired too. He hated the heat. He cried in his bassinet and pulled at the sweaty baby curls behind his ears. E had lines of salt criss-crossing the back of her shirt like the shadows of prehistoric sea creatures, ammonites I told her.

Mostly I squeezed lemons and spooned sugar into cups. It was OK when we ran out of ice. It’s OK, I told E, it’s better. In the desert they would never think of drinking cold drinks. They really wouldn’t! Look at us, here in this heat, drinking warm lemonade. Look at us!

Once, E reached for her cup too soon, while I was still squeezing and measuring and pouring, lemon and sugar and water, and the sticky sweet juice spilled on the counter, on the floor. That’s OK! I said. That’s OK! Look, we can clean it up, and I was smiling. All we have to do is get this towel wet, and kneel down on the floor and find every little drop. We can do that, I said. We can be so clean and tidy and good. There was so much smiling to do. So much teaching and smiling and not minding. Wiping and drying, sorting, smiling and not mindingabit.

One afternoon I took B over to the sofa to feed him. I let him settle into the crook of my arm and I suppose I fell asleep. Anyway I woke with a start. I woke with B’s sleeping body sliding off my chest, towards the dangerous cushions. My heart leapt. It was as if I was dangling his small body over the edge of a ravine. It really was like that.

I had been told terrible stories of mothers who allowed themselves to fall asleep in this way, with their babies drifting helplessly towards the cushions. If we slept, we mothers, we slept cheek to cheek with disaster. That close, with terror touching us and singing to us in our dreams.

I couldn’t catch my breath. There wasn’t enough air. My face felt tight. I put B down in his crib next to the sofa and ran to the bathroom. My face was a riot of colours, blues streaked down my cheek from the corner of my eye down to my collarbone. Thick red paste was caked around my lips in circles that had been drawn and redrawn again and again. My eyelids were silver, bulging out of my face, like the hard backs of beetles.

E was behind me, smiling. Pretty she said. When I looked down at the sink I saw that my make-up bag was open. Lipstick, brushes, sponges, powders, paints. Expensive liquids of all different colours dripped from the mouths of tiny vials. The sink was stained, the towels were stained, the rental company’s perfect walls.

I smiled back at E out of my cakey mouth. There was lipstick sticking to my tongue and teeth. Pretty, I said. Yes, it’s pretty! Spelled, P-r-e-t-t-y. I spelled the letters with my fingers in the air. We played all afternoon with the shutters drawn. I kept my eyes on B, trying to breathe, trying to see him breathe, feeling the ceiling right on top of us all the time.