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have to share a bedroom with my sister."

Elsa gasped. "Poor you. Is she nice?"

"No. She pinches me and calls me names. I hate her."

Elsa frowned. "Then you must stay here with me" she decided. "I'll be your sister."

*

Elsa discarded her pink dresses and ribbons when she was fourteen. She wafted through the gardens dressed in black lace and velvet, her hair woven with tiny silver spider webs. She would talk of death and grief, of pain and lost love until I felt my head would spin with it. I still wanted to race with the twins beneath the trees and play marbles with Big Bob. Elsa scorned these pursuits.

"The child in you will die soon enough" she told me. "It cannot be helped."

Sometimes storms would draw in, rushing along the coast and engulfing our lands with wind and rain. When this happened I huddled with the twins beneath their oversized bed, multi-coloured and hung with doughy cookies. They had built themselves a house high in the trees. The windows were lopsided and none of the clown colours matched, but it was warm and dry and always smelt of cinnamon. If the wind howled around the door frame or the rain slapped the windows particularly hard, they each clutched at me and shivered, dark and quick as monkeys.

"It won't hurt you" I would tell them. "It's just rain. Be quiet and I'll tell you a story."

Then they'd settle down and wait out the storm, sleepily sucking on their thumbs even though they should have given the habit up long ago.

*

The years rolled on, each feeling shorter than the last. Interests came and went, passions rose and fell. The storms subsided and Elsa began wearing brightly coloured silks and sequinned head scarves.

Before I knew it, I was twenty. I was too timid to go to university and too incorporeal to ever fit in at work. I was an office junior at a small legal firm and I felt choked with boredom. The men plied me with smutty remarks while the women laughed at me behind my back. Every night I rushed home to see Elsa and the twins and Big Bob. Every night I willed the bus to go faster or for home to be nearer.

By that time the world had changed again. Now the sky glowed purple and orange, flanked by three enormous moons. We had constructed lounges and verandas for ourselves, filled with cushions and candlelight and overhung with spicy smelling jasmine. I liked to sit and watch the violet sea lap against the coast, a glass of wine in my hand and a long haired cat on my lap. Sometimes Big Bob sat with me.

"Don't you ever worry?" he asked me one

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