Or maybe it will happen differently. She’ll be released from catatonia by some miracle drug, like in that movie Awakenings.

The best would be if no transformation were involved. If she were just acting. If all this was part of a huge art project, something Marina Abramović might have thought up. Three months of silence? How about thirty-eight years?

I try to catch her out. Snoop on her while she’s on the bed droning, watch from the balcony as she sits on the floor of the patio with her pile of hankies and socks beside her, the puppies crawling over the flesh of her legs.

I think of setting the house on fire just to see what she would do.

She is unremittingly dense. We repeat the same actions day after day. Beyond shoving a spoon in her mouth, there is little she can do for herself.

Everything becomes slowed down and elongated. The simplest of activities. Eating. Bathing. Dressing. ‘Hurry, hurry,’ I sometimes shout, losing my patience after two hours of watching her chew. I try adapting to her speed. I bring a book to the table to read in between prodding, but I can’t really get into the story if I have to keep taking my eye away from the page. Finally I take the plate away and say, ‘That’s enough, your stomach is getting too big,’ and she yells, ‘No. Gimme more.’

She has started a new trick. Coming into my bedroom to play with the strings on the blinds. She barges in, walks up to the window that looks out on the sea, grabs hold of the string with the bobble on the end of it and swings it, tip tap tip tap. If the blinds are raised and she cannot reach the string, she just stands there, trying to lift her arms as high as she can. When she tires of stretching, she goes back to her room. Stupid little bitch, I want to say. There’s a stool right there! Move it to the window. Stand on it!

The rains begin at the start of November. Everything smells musky and rich. Green things start shooting out of the ground. Then come the insects – millipedes, mayflies, midges, moths, mosquitoes. The evenings we can’t go for walks Lucia and I sit in the drawing room with jigsaw puzzles, listening to the rain beat down for hours. At night the sea is at our throats even though I’ve bolted the balcony doors and fastened all the windows and shutters.

The dogs move from their hideouts in the garden to the shelter of the front veranda. After a few days of continuous rain we allow them inside. The rubber linings under the doors have been eaten away, so I lay rolled-up towels on the floor by the doors to keep the water out. The electricity goes for hours. The fridge leaks. The whole house stinks of wet dog. Golly is happiest of all, reunited with her clan, except they barely acknowledge her. She puffs herself up like a frigate bird and rolls into the other pups boisterously. Mostly they ignore her, but sometimes she gets pinned to the ground with a set of teeth at her jugular. Lucia comes to her rescue. ‘She’s just a baby, stop it!’