I went and sat beside her on the bed and held her hand. Up close, I could see the deep grooves her thick makeup hadn’t been able to mask, the ropey tendons in her slender neck. Although she was barely sixty, she looked much older. I’d always assumed this was due to the psychological effects of having to raise a child not her own. She’d spent years trying to convince my mother to uproot our family and join her in Australia, but she had been wasting her breath. My parents would never have moved away from Texel. They were like the island, entrenched in their ways, shaped by winds and tides that had blown into existence long before I was born.

‘It’s good you’re going back,’ she said, quietly. ‘It might bring you some closure. You know your parents loved you very much. They didn’t always show it, but they did. They only wanted what was best for you. Your mother always said your favourite time of the day was dusk because that was when she’d take you down to the beach to look for shoes. You were obsessed with shoes! They used to wash up quite regularly, especially after a storm, but somehow you always found left shoes, never right ones. You’d beg her to take you, even when it was still storming outside and she always let you convince her. She was soft-hearted like that.’

I stayed silent. There was no point arguing that, by the time my parents passed away, I was a stubborn sixteen-year-old who had long ago given up relying on them for either comfort or entertainment. I assumed the story about the shoes had come to Marieke via the long-distance phone calls my mother took at the same time each week at our kitchen table. Crouched on the other side of the door, I listened to Marieke espouse the wonderful freedoms of her new life in Australia, enamoured with the vision she painted of summer days and shiny, freckled faces, of the Opera House sails like shards of broken porcelain, gleaming against a Delft-blue harbour. I tried to convince my parents to let me visit but they refused to let me travel alone. Maybe they were afraid that I’d fall in love with the world beyond the island’s borders. My aunt had returned to Texel just once when I was born, staying only long enough to hand over a christening gift before driving back to Schiphol Airport and taking the first available flight back to Australia. She told me years later that people had treated her differently after she left Texel. It made her feel uncomfortable, as if two versions of her existed, sharing the same body, but neither one was whole.

‘Do you remember the lullaby?’ she said now.

‘No,’ I said, flatly.