Father Sylvester sighed.

Kate had been grateful when he asked permission to retire to his room. Her anger at his treatment of the Japanese girl palpable in the abruptness of her nod.

Dying wasn’t as easy as Father Sylvester had imagined, but then it had begun earlier and lasted longer than he had made allowance for. And now his patience, like his faith, was exhausted. It was time to close the book. For the recording angel to weigh up his life and make judgement.

Father Sylvester carefully took off his trousers and folded them, leaving them on top of a rock that was slick with white spray from the high foss. He didn’t believe in waste. That was one of the reasons he’d kept himself alive so long. His shirt came off next and Father Sylvester folded that neatly too. He was tempted to leave his Calvins on but he’d come naked into the world and bloody-mindedness said that was the way he should go out.

Drowning had been his first idea. A pocket full of stones and a slow walk into the freezing pool at the foot of the waterfall, the cold binding tight his chest before his lungs had even filled with water. But Father Sylvester’s greatest fear wasn’t death, it was changing his mind. The idea that the stones might not be heavy enough or survival an instinct too strong filled him with doubt. And he despised doubt, not as an intellectual position, that he accepted entirely, but as a weakener of action.

It would have to be by the blade.

Father Sylvester climbed out of his Calvins and stood naked in the darkness. His body was old, not bloated or fat but weak with old injuries only half repaired and swollen around the upper gut where an ulcer ate at his stomach lining. He wouldn’t miss that. Actually, the priest’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile, there wasn’t much he would miss.

Unfolding his trousers to get the blade, Father Sylvester refolded them quickly and stepped away from his pile of clothing. He’d prevaricated enough. What he needed now was a stone as ballast to keep him from slipping or floating as he walked out into the water. Finding one the correct size was difficult but he managed it, holding the glass blade in his right hand and the stone in his left.

The meltwater numbed his ankles as Effectively as a baseball bat and Father Sylvester winced as he knelt and the water reached his genitals, which constricted like three snails with the contact. But he kept on shuffling his way further into the pool, feeling for the rocky bottom as the water closed ever higher round him until only his shoulders were above the darkened surface.

Now came the real test.

The stone went between his knees where he knelt. He’d been planning to hold it in one hand while using his other to drive the blade. But his hands were weak these days and besides his fingers shook so much he was afraid that if he dropped the blade it would be gone forever. So between his knees was where the rock had to go.

Taking the razor-edged glass blade in his right hand, Father Sylvester closed left hand over right and without pausing, rammed the knife point hard into his abdomen, low down on his left hand side. Muscle tore but the water was so cold and his body so numb that Father Sylvester felt almost nothing. But then he expected that, he’d been stabbed in the gut before.

Now came the hard bit. Clenching his teeth, Father Sylvester gripped the blade’s handle and yanked viciously, pain exploding as he cut open his own stomach wall in one sickening pull of the knife. Guts bulged through the sudden slit in his abdominal lining to reveal a tangled sausage-like mess within. And cold water rushed into his body as if someone had just packed his insides in ice.

‘Jesus.’

Father Sylvester cut harder, slicing more muscle and gut and watched in shock as lengths of his ileum and jejunum tumbled out through the rapidly gaping slit and slowly sank, spilling their ruptured contents like floating fish shit where they’d been hacked open by the knife.

Grabbing at his own small intestines, the man severed a slimy white handful and reached inside himself to pull out another length, sawing at the muscle until that too came away in his hands. And then he pushed his fingers back inside his body for more.

He was undoubtedly insane and undoubtedly dying, but that didn’t make killing himself hurt any the less. In the end it was slitting his wrists that finished Father Sylvester. But he didn’t remember doing it, though he felt the blood sluggishly leave his veins. All he remembered, and the only thought he took with him to the edge of death, was that his stomach was frozen.

‘Your name is Joan. You are my sister.’

Mai looked doubtfully at the woman sat on a wooden chair beside her big cast-iron bath. She wanted to say No, I’m Mai. To insist that she’d never been anyone other than Mai, that she’d never had a sister, or mother or father come to that, not that she could remember. But the woman was being kind to her. Very kind. Which wasn’t something Mai knew how to deal with.

Not that she trusted the woman or anything. She didn’t. It was just that Mai was being buried under an accumulation of small kindnesses. And besides she was warm for the first time in days and her face had stopped hurting.

Powder had been brushed on her lips to take away the swelling, unseen assemblers unweaving insoluble fibrin threads as scabs dissolved, her wrists had been dressed and antiseptic skin sprayed onto the raw flesh of her thighs, analgesic deadening the rawness as proteins knitted together a new dermal layer. The woman had made Mai cover her sex while she sprayed on the new skin, and even with the edge of a sheet covering Mai’s groin Kate had been jumpy, almost irritable.

The crossness hadn’t lasted though. After the painkillers and skin came something Louis called thukpa, food, hot noodle soup that Kate spooned into Mai’s mouth herself. It was salt and sweet, not a taste the girl recognised, but she finished the bowl anyway. And would have had more if only Kate had let her.

After that, Mai was taken through to a bathroom on the ground floor next to the vast kitchens. So hot water could be carried through, Mai supposed, and she was almost right. Hot water came gurgling down a sluice from the kitchen and kept splashing into the bath until it was almost full.

The feather thing that weird priest made her wear round her neck rested on a chair by itself, well away from the water, but Mai’s jacket was gone: removed as soon as she took it off, along with the crepe bandages, and carried out of the room at arm’s-length by Kate who returned seconds later with a small pile of folded clothes.

‘Nightdresses,’ Kate said. ‘We’ll find one that fits.’

The girl sat up to look, soap bubbles sliding in a sloppy avalanche from her shoulders and tiny breasts.

‘Do you want to get out?’ Kate asked, her face suddenly stiff.

‘No,’ Mai shook her head.

‘Then get back under the water,’ said Kate, ‘it’s better for you.’

Mai shrugged and sank back in her bath, burying herself beneath the scented bubbles. She’d tried silence and sulking, but neither made a difference. The strange woman still just sat there, occasionally smiling at Mai but mostly looking worried when she didn’t know the girl was watching her.

‘My name is Katherine Mercarderes,’ the woman said finally. There was the briefest hesitation, as if she expected Mai to say something and when the moment passed she smiled sadly, ‘but you can call me Kate. You’ve always called me Kate…’

Always? Mai shrugged and sank even lower, until slowly cooling water rose to her chin and only her face showed above the surface. She liked the bath, with its four cast-iron legs and she liked the big room. Though the house seemed more like a derelict palace than the empty monastery Kate said it was. Plaster peeled from the dusty pink walls and the ceiling overhead seemed to be held up by narrow wooden beams, at least they looked like real wood from where she lay.