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She emerged from Darwin Airport in a daze. The air hummed with insects. Everywhere, birds were calling. Her first flight home in nearly three years. Had it existed the whole time—Australia? All this warmth? The early-morning sun was an affront.

“Cor? You look shocking.” Daniel took the handle of her suitcase. “Get in the car quick; I don’t want to pay for parking.”

He told her the story driving with one hand on the steering wheel.

Their mother had gone into chemo like any other day.

She’d got new bloods done. The doctor had checked the scans, then checked them with someone more senior.

The nurses had been whispering and staring.

Mum had realized, once they’d mentioned it, she wasn’t feeling that great.

They’d admitted her to the ward for pain relief and fluids.

After a few days, the surgeon (her personal hero Dr. Ainslie) “went in” to make “a few minor adjustments.”

“What does that mean?” Coralie asked.

“Major stomach surgery,” Dan said. “Her fourth. Dr. Ainslie reckoned it would be a small job. A bit of untangling—that’s what he said. That’s why I didn’t tell you before.”

There was a high-pitched tone in Coralie’s ear. She leaned her head against the window. “So Mum didn’t think anything was wrong. But something was wrong. And now it’s been fixed?”

“Sorry, am I telling the story badly?” Dan’s anxious eyes roamed the wide, empty road lined with palm trees. He got all the luck—lashes that stayed dark until the ends, not fading to blonde like her own.

“No, you’re telling it fine. It’s like I’m hoping I’ll find a loophole. A flaw in the logic that will mean she isn’t sick.”

“Well, she’s sick, all right. It’s a disaster in there.”

“Can’t they just give her a bag? Forget the stomach, go round it.”

“You know she’d rather die.”

“God forbid her insides be visible from the outside.”

Dan gave a tired sigh. “Dr. Ainslie’s trying to persuade her. He says anything’s better than getting a blockage. But she’s running out of time. She’s getting weaker by the day, and the op itself could kill her.”

“So do nothing, which is bad. Or something—which is bad.”

“Yeah.” Dan glanced at her, pleased to be understood. “Two options, both bad. That’s why I sent you the message.”

“You did exactly the right thing.” When she closed her eyes, she could still see the psychedelic airport carpet from her layover in Singapore. The pattern twisted and danced. She tapped her phone to see the time. Nearly 8 a.m.

“What do you want to do first?” Dan said. “She’s got her own room, but we’re not allowed to visit this early.”

“What day is it?”

“Good question.” Dan paused for a while. “It’s Sunday.”

“Can we go to the market? I’m starving.”

He put the indicator on. “I suppose we can.”

“Just tell me one thing,” Coralie said. “Does Mum know I’m coming?”

“She does, yeah.”

“She knows it’s a real emergency?”

“She does.”

···

During the week, Nightcliff’s small shopping precinct was home to a supermarket, a pawn shop, a betting shop, a payday lender, and a massage parlor that might or might not have been a sex one.

But on Sundays, it transformed into a lush oasis with stalls for fresh fruit and vegetables, plants, bits of hippie junk, souvenirs made of or depicting crocodiles, boxes of cut mango with lime and papaya with chili, sugarcane juice (in fact, all kinds of juice), laksas, Vietnamese coffee, and crêpes. Coralie loved it.

“I had a massive crush on someone at the market,” she said as they parked the car.

“Is he bald? I knew it,” Dan said. “Well, he’s still there.

His operation has expanded. Three burners now.

Lots of staff. He just stands in the background, overseeing his empire.

” And there he was, Ben of Ben’s Crêpes, looking perhaps more portly than he had fifteen years earlier, and with some unfortunate mirrored sunglasses. “Are you going to have one, a crêpe?”

“I’m such a mess. My body thinks it’s dinnertime. I’m getting a laksa. This is bad, but what I want most is a beer.”

“You know Darwin. There are no limits.”

They found seats at a communal table. It was the dry season.

The weather would be perfect for months, thirty beautiful degrees a day.

Men with giant beer bellies sauntered past in battered Akubra hats.

Women screeched with laughter like birds, freckled shoulders shaking.

His long limbs cool in tiny football shorts and a singlet, Dan sipped his watermelon juice like an elegant woodland creature.

With her lank airplane hair and heavy winter clothes, Coralie felt haggard and gross.

“It’s been cold in London since Halloween.

It’s crazy to see people’s bodies,” she said. “Help, this beer’s gone to my head.”

“Did you sleep on the plane?”

“Not at all. God.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’m so tired I thought I saw a snake on that man.”

Daniel turned around. “There is a snake on that man. It’s the Nightcliff Snake Man. Don’t you remember him? The Snake Man?”

“Jesus Christ.”

After a bit, she nodded toward the public bathroom. “Remember once I went in there? And there were green tree frogs in the toilet?”

“I don’t,” Dan said. “But I wouldn’t put it past them…frogs.”

···

As they approached the hospital, she could feel herself regressing to a childish state, laughing hysterically at what her brother had said in earnest. “I wouldn’t put it past them…

frogs,” she kept saying. They got out of the car and began to cross the lawn to the big glass front doors.

“I wouldn’t put it past them…frogs.” Suddenly she was on the ground, laughing so much she was crying.

She’d fallen in a shallow hole. “I’m not drunk, I swear. ”

Dan reached out to help her up. “You might be, but don’t worry, I’m not.” As Coralie brushed cut grass off her knees, he put his hand up to shield his eyes. “Hang on—is that Mum?”

On a large concrete terrace there was a lean gray stick in a nightie, waving.

···

Coralie’s family had been based in Darwin from 1999.

Before then, they’d been in Jakarta, where her father was a brigadier in the army.

For both those far-distant tropical postings, the Australian taxpayer subsidized her school fees and paid for her travel home.

She experienced these breaks as an achingly long period of exile from her real life.

It was too hot to leave the house after 8 a.m., and she could be drenched in seconds by fierce monsoonal rain the exact same temperature as blood.

Bush stone-curlews curdled the air with frankly terrifying shrieks.

Overripe mangoes dropped from the trees and stank to high heaven in the blazing sun.

Three days a week she caught the bus to an air-conditioned mall to work at a women’s shoe shop.

The rest of the time, she read books. How fortunate she’d had so much practice as a teen, biding her time in the tropics at one careful remove from reality.

How did people who actually existed in the world cope with the dramatic enfeeblement of their mothers?

In her private room, Judith Bower held the sheet up over her nose. Her sweet brown eyes peeped marsupially over the top. Coralie gave her cool forehead a kiss.

“Flight must have cost you a fortune,” Judith whispered.

“How are you feeling?” Coralie ventured.

“Better than you look.”

···

For the first couple of days, Coralie was so jet-lagged and so shocked by her mother’s condition that she couldn’t tell up from down or what was real and what was not.

There existed a constant low-level fever of expectation around the next operation: if it would happen, when, and how soon afterward their mother could reasonably go home.

They all three spent most of their time waiting for Dr. Ainslie to “pop in.” He did this once a day.

It was painful to observe their waiting mother’s eagerness.

It was a glimpse of what she’d been like as a child.

In the evenings, after a long day in the hospital, brother and sister dined at Asian Gateway or Taj Curry Indian.

Later, Dan went for a long late-night run along Casuarina Beach, and Coralie sat on her mother’s balcony to look out over the dark sea, composing sprawling, mordant emails to Adam about her macabre and otherworldly hospital-based life.

He replied in the same exact vein about the campaign.

Ed Miliband had unveiled a three-meter-tall stone tablet upon which Labour’s key election pledges had been carved.

The idea was that, if Labour won, the stone tablet would be placed in the Downing Street rose garden.

There it would remind Miliband daily of the solemn duty he owed the British people.

In the Telegraph , Boris Johnson called it “some weird Commie slab.” Someone called it “the heaviest suicide note in history.” Everyone else called it the EdStone.

It seemed Coralie’s mother was not the only one dying a slow death.

I wish I was with you, I miss you so much, I love you so much, CYK , Adam’s emails ended.

Consider yourself kissed . That was a blast from the past.

CYK , she wrote back. CYK!

But Adam always sent the final CYK , one more than she’d think to expect, and that made her feel glad and safe.

···

One day, Dr. Ainslie popped in very early, before ten. This was unfortunate, as there was still a lot of the day to get through, and now there’d be nothing to look forward to.

There was a long pause as doctor and patient stared at each other. It was as though Dan and Coralie were not in the room. “Well now, Judith,” Dr. Ainslie said. “Eating?”

“Oh yes, white toast.” A lie—she’d had a mouthful.

“And the nights?”

Their mum had been routinely ill and in distress every night from seven onward. She called it her “witching hour.”

“Still the same.”

“Not worse?”

Hopeful face: “No?”