‘Wow,’ I said.

The nurse must have seen something eager in my eyes, because she said, ‘I’m giving her a new dressing. Do you want to watch?’

‘Um, actually, I’d love to,’ I said. ‘Is that okay?’

‘Sure,’ said the nurse. ‘If that’s fine with you, Bette?’

Bette seemed strangely vague. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Why on earth not?’

The nurse looked up at Bette sharply. ‘You took some pain relief, Bette? Maybe a bit too much?’

Bette didn’t answer and leaned back and closed her eyes.

The woman motioned for me to sit to the right of her, out of the light. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I find this sort of stuff really fascinating. I’m going to study medicine.’ The nurse looked at me and gave a half-smile, which seemed warm enough, if a little reserved. ‘Hoping to, at least,’ I added. ‘99.95 pending.’

The woman nodded and smoothed a sterile sheet under Bette’s arm. Bette kept her eyes shut. The nurse began pulling back the edges of the dressing, but soon stopped; it seemed stuck. She used long tweezers to dab cotton wool into a bowl of water. ‘Saline,’ she said to me, and dabbed it on the dressing until it was soaked.

As I watched, all my panic, all my inertia, drained away. Everything I had been feeling was replaced by pure fascination, a warm humming in my mind as I looked for the different layers of skin being uncovered and wondered at the brilliance of the body’s inflammatory response, the healing beauty of serous exudate . . .

Bette began to quietly snore. I stood and arranged a pillow behind her head. The nurse bent in closer over her work. And as she did so I tried to place her look, to guess at her heritage. There was no accent to go by – part African? Maybe Indian, or Sri Lankan? I was surprised to see someone from a diverse background in such a white-bread rural area.

‘So, what brings you here all by yourself, Anna?’ the woman asked me.

‘Not much, just a visit.’

The woman chuckled and shook her head to herself. ‘“Just a visit.”’ She laughed quietly. ‘Yeah, you and Bette are family alright.’

I had no idea what she was talking about. I frowned and, I guess because of my silence, the nurse lifted her head and looked at me, then gave a surprised look, a remembering-herself look. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I forgot you’ve never met me. You look a lot like your mother. I’m Leonie,’ she said.

‘Leonie?’

There was an expectant look on the woman’s face, and then it wavered. ‘You haven’t heard of me?’

‘Um, no. I’m . . . sorry?’

The woman looked a bit shocked. ‘Your mother really said nothing about me? Or about . . .’

The end of her sentence hung in the air.

‘Um, no,’ I said. And then, feeling the compulsion to explain further: ‘She’s not a big reminiscer, Mum, so I don’t know much about her life here with Grandma and Grandpa. So, all this –’ I waved my hand about airily, indicating the house, the paddock and everyone it might encompass. ‘All this is new to me,’ I said.