‘Thank you, thank you,’ she says to us once she’s done speaking with her mother. ‘You’re my heroes.’

Once Mark and I are in dry clothes, the children in pyjamas, we three sit on the couch, drink cold beer and eat potato salad and ham. There’s enough barbecue food for a week. We watch lightning crackle across the leaden sky, hear thunder rumble and boom. We flick through magazines, scan Friday’s newspaper for anything interesting we might have missed. The rain has softened, but none of us trusts it to stay that way. Mark urges Lou to stop checking what is left of her house. ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ he reasons. I top up Lou’s glass, grimace in sympathy, then flop back and rest my head on Mark’s shoulder. Jemima and the twins are in the playpen in front of us; Sarah, Daniel and Joe muddle through a sloppy, argumentative game of Go Fish.

Despite the drama, I could fall asleep here on the couch. Last night was punctured by the yipping of our neighbour’s terrier, Jock, and by remembrance of tasks undone, my restless body, children. The twins had alternated their cries for attention as if on a secret schedule. In one of the quiet hours, Sarah climbed into bed beside me – apple-shampoo-scented hair, small toenails scratching my leg – and whispered fearful questions that kept coming as we plodded back to her room: How do people find each other in Heaven? Do ghosts get hungry? And her questions – which I couldn’t answer in a way that satisfied either of us – rolled in my head as I drifted in and out of sleep until the storm woke me at five, followed by the gushing overflow of water from the leaf-clogged gutter onto our window ledge.

I don’t sleep, though, because the phone rings nonstop: Gavin Martin from number sixteen says they’ve made it to his sister’s house; Caroline from twenty-two asks if we’ve seen her cat; Dad tells us to switch off appliances so they don’t short. There are many variations on the question ‘Mark around?’, asked with the assumption he’ll know something they don’t.

It’s true that Mark has been in touch with his news mates, and keeps the TV and radio blaring so he doesn’t miss any details of the escalating horrors: whole suburbs are without electricity; clean drinking water is running out; elderly people are trapped in their homes, alone; a child drowned when the torrent pulled her from her father’s arms. Occasionally we hear upbeat news. On TV we watch two burly men in a dinghy rescue a fretful terrier from a rooftop, and another, who looks like Santa in a blue singlet, hand out cans of beer from his boat with shouts of ‘we’ll be right’.

‘You battening down the hatches?’ Charlie’s voice echoes and lags across the long-distance line. ‘I met a guy who’s sailing from Perth to the Philippines. Says there’s a cyclone headed your way, a real roof-lifter.’