Dr Harmer let me in, muttering that they’d be out of my hair in a minute, as if I’d come to fumigate the place. He was a GP at a surgery on the other side of the ring road. I found him aloof and neglectful of material things, just as I thought a doctor ought to be, and old – much older than my father. Mrs Harmer was Australian. An Australian, on our road! I couldn’t understand why she’d choose to live here, away from all the surfing and the sharks. Personally I intended to move to America as soon as I could.

She showed me the emergency phone number pinned to the corkboard. She said, ‘Now this is very important: make sure Elizabeth takes one of these before she goes to bed,’ holding out a packet of tablets. The printed foil said Warfarin Sodium 0.5 mg. ‘We’ll be back by ten. She can have a hot chocolate if she wants.’ She called up the stairs, ‘Elizabeth? The sitter’s here. We’re going now’ – though she pronounced it goyng. Then she stood for a moment, wringing her big dry hands. It was nothing like the Fishers’ exits, all dressed up and eager to go.

The Harmers didn’t have any interesting books on their shelves. The rooms were huge, but they hadn’t got enough furniture in them, leaving great hairy expanses of carpet to cross on which you could get miserably stranded like a spider. At the top of the staircase was a grandfather clock and a door standing ajar against peach-painted walls.

‘Oh good,’ Elizabeth cried, whirling to greet me, leaping off her bed, ‘you’re here!’

Her voice had a strange twang, a staginess, like when English children play at accents they’ve only heard on TV. ‘Look at this,’ she said, and lifted up her top.

A pink and white scar ran from the dip in her collarbone down to where her ribs butterflied away from each other. The scar tissue was raised, like a welt, and shiny, like a burn, but the wound had obviously been surgical: it was neat and straight, and I could see little spokes coming off it where the stitches had healed.

‘I had three operations,’ she said. ‘I had a splashy valve. They had to go in and look around, and then they had to fix it, and then that didn’t work, so they had to go in again.’

‘Put your top down,’ I said. There was another scar, older, whiter, curving around under – what to call it? Where her left breast was going to be. ‘You don’t just show that to people. It’s private. It’s your private parts.’