We didn’t see Lily for a couple of days. We noticed her absence, but if either of us worried, it wasn’t out loud. There were plenty of other things to be worrying about. Tom was in hospital again. They’d taken him in an ambulance and were talking of keeping him there to manage his pain. Leonie was struggling on her own. She and Rosemary had been trying to contact Eddie’s brother in Europe, but so far they hadn’t found him.

‘He needs to come home now,’ Leonie said, as if he might put everything back the way it was.

When a couple of days became a few, and a few became a week, noticing darkened a little. I imagined Lily on a slippery bathroom floor, impossibly bent and blocking her own exit, begging help from a man who could no longer. So, on a grey and windy Friday afternoon, Rosemary and I took the track across the headland.

The proper house was quiet and still. The door was always closed but the house seemed heavier than usual, like a cake that hadn’t risen. A thin drift of sand blew around it, and cobwebs grew like shadows in its corners.

There was no answer to our knocking on the door or to our calls and shouts. We cupped our hands to better peer through windows either side, hoping for a crack between curtains, but all we could see were three burnt matches, and the crusted currants and crisp-dried wings of insects dead on sills. The plastic on Lily’s shoes had begun to turn the bluey white of cataracts.

We circled the deck like wolves, and around the back saw that someone had done their best to hammer storm shutters on the tall glass sliding panels that faced the ocean. It wasn’t the season for storms. They were banged up raggedly, so it wasn’t hard to pull one off—fingers under an edge not flush and a bracing foot against a frame.

‘I think they’ve gone,’ Rosemary said, her face pressed up tight against the glass, like Aunty Molly at my grandmother’s, but I didn’t think Lily was hiding. I saw it too: the floor swept, counters wiped, and chairs tucked in, a blue cloth hanging neatly from a tap, a single glass upended on the draining board.

But where would they have gone? ‘I’m too old,’ Lily had said. Wasn’t she? Wasn’t Norman? She’d tied the shoes to his feet and guided him to the Lambs’, and longer and longer it had taken them until she’d stopped bringing him altogether. ‘It’s too much,’ she’d told us then, so how could she have taken him anywhere else?

‘I guess she’d had enough,’ Rosemary said, and the look that passed between us stirred my stomach like a spoon.

I don’t know what made us think to try the front door, knowing Lily the way we thought we did: the woman who wrapped her shoes and buried her purse at the bottom of her handbag, locked a car door with her elbow, couldn’t stay long, wouldn’t stay late; but of course, it was unlocked. How else could she have let us in?

The cold hall smelled of lavender and disinfectant and something rotten that made Rosemary pull the collar of her shirt across her nose and mouth.

Did I call her name one last time? Perhaps I did.

There was a door on either side, bedroom to the left. I remembered the flutter of curtains from the long-ago night Norman had wandered off. And I had seen the pipes and drains and water tanks of bath and toilet to the right. Straight ahead, a sickle-shaped glass panel in a wooden door filtered the light we’d let in when we’d torn the shutter off, and that was the door we opened to the sun-baked stench of sweat and urine.

‘Jesus!’ Rosemary choked.

We made to throw that wide corner of glass open and let great gusts of sea air clear the house, but someone had splintered doors and windows with stout nails that locked them to their frames.

We might have left then, shut the house back up and wondered what to do about it later, but for the faintest sound.

I held a hand to quiet Rosemary, who’d just drawn breath to speak.

To our right, and strung across the room, hung a honey-coloured curtain. Threaded on a wire by someone not quite tall enough even on a chair, so that there was a wide space between hooks and ceiling while the too-long fabric puddled on the floor.

Breath came from behind it.

It was Rosemary who lifted the curtain back, one hand pressing flannel to her face. Sunlight seeped in, colouring what hid behind, the rich, sweet caramel of late afternoon. An empty plate, a bucket on its side, the filth within it soaked into the thick edge of a mattress, and on that, skin and bone and barely alive, was Norman.

‘You’re flesh and bone!’ my grandmother used to say. She meant: You’re not eating properly. Your edges aren’t as rounded as I think they should be. You’re not looking after yourself. More specifically: Whoever’s looking after you isn’t doing as good a job as I would. But it wasn’t true in the way it was true for Norman, that afternoon. You could see the shape of his teeth through his cheeks. The whites of his eyes were yellow, there were brown smears of dried blood beneath his nose, and when he opened his mouth his tongue hovered like a bobtail’s.

It was Rosemary who ran to call an ambulance. There was no discussion, no questions as to who should do what. In a moment she was gone, and I was filling the glass at the sink with an urgency the plumbing was unused to.

Norman’s back was sticky against the arm I snaked behind him, and when I tipped the glass to his peeling lips the water caught in his throat so that most of it ran into his ears and pooled in the hollow of his neck.

I told him it would be okay. I told him an ambulance was coming.

His hair was clumped around his head, knotted with bits of scalp like something snatched up out of a drain. A torn sheet was tangled around his legs, and there were things I’d not have noticed if he’d had pyjamas on: bruises on his collarbone and around his wrists and ankles; a puckered scar that crept across his chest, no neat white kisses telling it had seen a nurse or needle. There were dark memories of old scabs on his forearms and, around his groin, fresher wounds the pinky white of uncooked pork, some soft and green.

There were maggots on the mattress.

‘It’s going to be okay, Norman,’ I told him more than once. ‘You’re going to be okay.’ But not for a second did I believe it.