The helicopter looked pathetically small as it was thrown about the sky like an unbalanced bee and tossed this way and that. Fleur and the twins held their breath in hypnotised terror.

‘Land, Daddy. Land!’ Saffie cried out into the night. Nikki gripped the windowsill as they watched the tail rising, tail-blade whirring frantically as the engine screamed.

‘Holy Mary, mother of God…Please…’ Fleur was crying over and over. She clutched the twins, held them into her, gripped them so tightly she hurt, and her eyes never left the sky.

‘David…David…I’m willing you down…You can do it. I know you can do it…Come on, David…please, darling, get her down…’

Something terrible was gripping Saffie’s stomach in a cramp so painful she wanted to fall to the ground. Nikki was sobbing, still clutching the windowsill. They were only five but they both knew, like their mother, that their father was powerless to do anything to save himself, because he no longer had control of his machine, which was turning upside down and falling out of the sky and spiralling down to the ground so fast that if they’d blinked they would have missed it.

Already, far away, they could hear the sound of sirens. They heard the explosion as the aircraft hit the ground when it was out of sight. They saw the flames leap upwards into a sky cracking with thunder. They could not move, Fleur, Saffie and Nikki. They stood watching the sky where the helicopter had been a moment ago.

A long way away a telephone was ringing and Ah Heng ran in her little backless slippers to answer it. Still, the three figures stood, unable to take their eyes from the empty sky that was growing light now. The rain blew in great gusts sideways, filling the monsoon drains, flushing the snakes out of the dry collected leaves.

Into the dawn, low on the horizon, there suddenly sailed one small pink cloud. Fleur stared and stared at it. She said in a strange thick voice, ‘Twins…look…see? That cloud…Daddy will always be there to look after us. Always.’

Saffie reached behind Fleur for Nikki’s hand. They stared at the cloud in silence, their small bodies trembling, unable to entirely comprehend that their father was so suddenly dead. They did not want a pink cloud. They wanted their big, laughing, silly, whiskery, safe daddy, who called out each and every day, ‘Hey! I’m home! Where are my little peapods?’

Far away on the Chitbee Road they could see the military car containing the padre and the commandant and the military police making its way down the long road to their house.

‘Missie?’ Ah Heng touched Fleur’s arm, took the twins gently from her, holding them to her. ‘You come away from window now. You cold. You come away. I make Missie tea. Army men coming.’

But Fleur could not take her eyes from the cloud that was fading to orange and had only been the reflected colour of the flames.