Rika smiled wanly. ‘Thanks for coming.’ Her hair was in two fat, untidy plaits.

‘What’s happened?’ Martha asked.

She told them about Gina, and Alex’s letter. Martha wasn’t surprised, Pete had also had one from him.

‘I should go up,’ Rika said, and the tears spilled over.

Martha put out her arms and this time Rika let herself be comforted.

‘Why does nothing ever stay the same?’ she said, when she sat back on her heels, the tears spent. ‘Something seems to be one way, quite certain, then it turns into another.’ She took the photo of her mother from Wana and held it in her lap. ‘She was there, with me, just as she was, and then she was ill and nothing could bring her back. Not to how she was. At the end she turned away when I came in. Can you imagine that? Your own mother couldn’t look at you.’

‘She was protecting you,’ Wana said. ‘Grasshopper girl.’

‘And now it’s happening again.’

‘No one’s dying,’ Martha said.

‘Everything’s shifting, and I can’t get back.’

She got up and went to the desk, searching around in one of the drawers. Then she went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Wana and Martha looked at each other. ‘Something’s got her,’ Martha said.

‘Got both of them. Look.’

Aaron, treading carefully, was coming up the steps onto the veranda.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘In the bathroom.’ There was no sound. No running water. No flushing toilet.

Martha put on a kettle, a reflex learned as a girl. Any sign of crisis, make a pot of tea.

‘Don’t say anything.’ Rika was in the doorway. She was holding the plaits in one hand like limp animals, and in the other she had a pair of scissors. She’d cut unevenly, up on one side. Her hair was thick and it sprang out, giving her face an entirely different look, as if she’d leaped forward five years, from a girl into the skin of a woman.

Aaron took the plaits, held them in his hands.

‘Are you okay?’

She nodded. ‘You?’

He nodded. She knew that it was true, and also not. Same as her.

They sat on the floor, in the middle of the room, facing each other. Aaron picked up the photograph on the mat between them. ‘Your mother?’ he said. ‘She’s lovely.’

‘She died.’

‘I know.’ His voice was quiet as they sat there, beneath the fan, looking at each other. Wana and Martha, like chaperoning ghosts, were at the table behind them with the pot of tea, in which they were showing no interest. ‘What happened?’ Aaron asked.

‘Cancer,’ Rika said. ‘We had a year in England. My father was working at a museum in Oxford and I was at school. Didn’t I tell you?’

‘Only that. Nothing more.’

‘She caught a chill on the ferry going home and it became pneumonia. They said she’d recover, but by the time she did, they’d found the cancer.’ She put her hand to her chest, the top of her left breast. Over her heart. ‘Here.’