The quiet is such a relief that I don’t have time to be scared. Flora is laid out on the bed with her eyes closed. I kneel on the floor and lean over her. Pull the covers higher, right up to her neck, and straighten out the sheets. Her hair is thin and yellowy. Her skin looks grey, like concrete. I think of my mother in the hospital, nearing the end and how Baba wouldn’t let us see her after she was gone. He kept us away from all of it. He could barely speak. He shut himself into the study and wrote letters and waited for his mother to arrive.

I asked Amina what they would do with her body.

‘Wash it,’ she said, ‘and wrap it and bury it.’

‘Wrap it in what?’

‘I don’t know’.

‘Will they pray for her?’

‘Of course.’

‘Which prayers will they say?’

‘I don’t know, Sana. Stop asking questions and leave me alone.’

But I couldn’t stop the questions. They stayed in my head. I wanted to know who would be touching her and what would happen if they did it wrong, and how long she would have to lie in the wet earth until judgement. I wanted someone to tell me which gate of Jannah she would be allowed through when the time came. I imagined her rolled tight with strips of white cloth, like an Egyptian Mummy, and I couldn’t get to sleep at night. In the dark I could hear Baba speaking on the phone downstairs and the sound of Amina’s bed creaking every time she rolled over.

This room is already clean and neat. There’s nothing much for me to do. So I sit down. Flora’s forehead is creased, like she’s searching for an answer, like death has interrupted something. I think about heaven – the way it’s always so white and blinding, in films and on TV. Like the tiles in all the bathrooms here. Like the new paint in the craft room. Ewan doesn’t believe in an afterlife. We should live in the here and now, not hold out for rewards that may or may not be real, he says. It’s like a drug – all of it. It’s just another form of control.

I reach out and touch her – fingertip to fingertip. I dare myself. She is somewhere else. She has to be. I wish her an afterlife full of colour. I wish her fountains and Persian rugs, flower gardens and dresses finished with gold thread. I wish her some tender meat and a better brand of gravy.