‘I’m eight months pregnant, idiot.’ She paused. ‘Please?’

I got up and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I struck up a single match and rasped in the direction of the receiver. I pressed my smoky mouth to the screen, watched the weak blinking of the fire alarm.

‘How’s that?’ I asked.

Somewhere, alone in the house she shared with her husband, she inhaled.

‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘What time is it there?’

‘Three.’

‘So what do you tell people at these things when they ask how you got the idea?’

I rested my head on the bed frame, stubbed out the red light of the cigarette.

‘I tell them I have a rich interior life.’

Water drizzled down on the bed. An alarm sounded. I closed my eyes and wished for the bed to become a blue swimming pool, into which I would lower myself, step by step, and sink.

*

After swimming, my sister and I always waited in the nearby tennis courts for our father. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘is where they are going to land. A clear space so we can see the lights.’

I thought it was childish of her, at thirteen, to still play these games and her childishness, as it would in later years, embarrassed me. In the car on the way home, swimsuits soaking our clothes, our father sat silently. As we drove – streets devoid of their gossipers, lamps angled skyward – the town seemed average. Sometimes, at night, it was capable of convincing you it was a normal place.

When we got home my sister washed my hair clean of chlorine in the kitchen sink, her fingers kneading my skull. Bent over, my shoulders cold against the ceramic, I felt sick as if a secret was going to be unearthed. At home, my sister handled things, but in her new school she was gaining a reputation. She had stopped finishing her sentences and her copybook consisted of blank lines where the words should have been. She vanished for hours on end. When my father asked her about it, she explained she was preparing for them so, when they came, she would be one of them.

One night, she took me from my bed and carried me to the swimming pool. They found us a day later. Two diligent swimmers arriving for 7 AM practice, discovered us in the pool, unconscious but fully clothed, early morning sunlight streaming in. When they heaved my sister’s body out of the water, they realised she was bleeding. We found out later she had miscarried. Three months. I didn’t need to be there to know that, upon this discovery, my father, like an animal, let out a low, intimate sound.