After eating, Carly dozed again. Waking to the sound of Marie crying.

‘I don’t feel very well.’ She splayed her hands over her stretched stomach.

‘You’ll be okay.’ Carly yawned, soothing her sister’s hot forehead with her fingertips, her tangled fringe damp.

Although her skin was slick she was shivering. Carly covered her with the blanket and wished she had a bottle of water. Suddenly, violently, Marie began to vomit, coating the blanket, the mattress, herself. She retched again and again.

‘It’s okay.’ Carly looked around for something to mop up the mess with but anything absorbent they had already used for their makeshift toilet in the corner. ‘It’s probably the same bug that kept you off school with stomach ache.’

‘I don’t think it’s that.’ Marie shook her head.

‘Well, perhaps you ate your food too quickly. It’ll pass.’

‘Maybe it was poisoned,’ Leah whispered.

‘It wasn’t poisoned,’ Carly said.

‘How do you know? Marie’s the only one who ate sausage.’

‘It definitely wasn’t poisoned.’ Carly tried to keep the doubt and the worry out of her voice. She glanced frantically at the clown. The graffiti on the wall.

You’re going to die.

‘Carly…’ Marie didn’t often cry.

‘Shh. The food was fine. It could be anything making you ill. The shock of eating so much, your tummy isn’t used to it.’ Carly felt her own stomach cramping as they’d eaten. ‘Eating with dirty fingers.’

‘It’s the germs.’ Leah looked around fearfully. ‘You said the germs would make us ill. You said the germs could kill us.’ She frantically wiped her hands over her skirt as though dislodging an army of invisible insects.

‘It’s fine. Marie is fine, just a little sick. Tell Leah a random fact, Marie.’ Marie retained snippets of useless information, recalling them the way she did at home would make her feel better and cheer Leah up, Carly was sure. She waited for Marie to speak.

Kangaroos can’t walk backwards.

You fart on average fourteen times a day.

Hippopotamus milk is pink.

But she didn’t. Carly searched through her memory banks for something she could share.

‘Hey! Did you know that fingernails grow quicker when you’re cold?’ Sometimes Carly painted the twins’ nails a frosted pink.

‘Then I guess our nails will get really, really long here.’ Leah drew her knees up to her chest. ‘If no one finds us our nails might fill the room.’

Carly knew she’d picked the wrong fact. ‘But they’d be good for picking your nose!’ She waited for one of the twins to say something gruesome about accidentally spearing your brain and pulling it out through your nostrils, but they didn’t.

Carly fell into silence, using the blanket to clean up as best she could but the mattress was a mess.

Everything was a mess.

It was difficult to gauge the time. Outside, the rain hammered down. The sky was a dark grey. There was a sense of foreboding in the air.

‘Are you feeling any better?’ Carly pressed the back of her hand against Marie’s forehead, the way her mother did to her when she was ill. She wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling for – how hot was too hot? Mum always said it was as good an indicator for a fever as putting the thin tube of mercury under your tongue. ‘Because Mum is literally in the title, ther-mom-meter,’ she would laugh. Carly wished she were here. She’d know what to do.