Beatriz shook her head sadly. She had such expressive eyes, thought Ali; they could communicate every emotion: joy, desire, sorrow, disdain, anger, amusement. Right now, they showed only pity.

‘Busy, busy, busy,’ she said. ‘Always busy, always running somewhere, never time to sit with me and shell the peas.’ Her Portuguese accent was undiminished even after nearly sixty years in Adelaide, but it was always only a question of tuning in, like learning to love a different kind of music.

She bent her head, getting back to the task in hand, and Ali watched her for a few moments, then said, ‘How’s your hip today, Beatriz?’

Beatriz looked up again and said, ‘No better, no worse.’

‘Don’t sit for too long,’ Ali said. ‘Have a walk, keep it moving. Have a dip, be a devil.’

Beatriz threw back her head and laughed, and said, ‘You know how I hate getting myself wet.’

‘It’s very therapeutic,’ Ali said. ‘And there’s a pool out there that nobody seems to use any more.’ She took a glass tumbler from the cupboard and poured water into it from the bottle they kept in the fridge. It was shockingly cold, and Ali felt a stab of pain at her temples, and in her teeth. Beatriz was involved with the peas again, and Ali wandered out of the open back door into the garden, where the irrigation system had turned on and was sprinkling the lawn. A small flock of rainbow lorikeets were dancing in the fine arc of drops, and when Ali kicked off her sandals and joined them on the damp grass, they eyed her beadily, and stood their ground. She walked across the lawn to the swimming pool – a narrowish rectangle of aquamarine, startling against the old stone pathway that surrounded it – hitched up her skirt, and sat down on the very edge, so that her feet and calves were submerged, almost up to the knees. Then she lay down, and let the warmth of the stone and the damp cool of the grass support her, while the water lapped, barely perceptibly, around her legs. She closed her eyes against the too-blue sky, and listened to the squawking chatter of the birds and the thrum of water from the sprinkler, and allowed her thoughts to float loose and free; then a shadow fell across her face and she heard Stella’s voice.

‘Mum, your skirt’s soaked.’

Ali opened her eyes. Stella, impassively beautiful, stared down at her. She was seventeen, and she had Ali’s dark brown hair, Ali’s hazel eyes, Ali’s nose and mouth and chin: but her attitude was all her own.

‘What the hell are you doing anyway? You look so weird.’

Ali closed her eyes again. ‘Cooling down, chilling out,’ she said, and then, after a pause, ‘Don’t pass remarks, Stella.’