‘Mind your time,’ my dad phones to warn me an hour before we leave for the airport.  ‘Bloody right-wing rioters – there’s diversions everywhere. Maybe I should drive you and  Luke, I can be there in-’ 

‘It’s fine Dad, you rest up and we’ll see you in ten days. You must be wrecked; you did some amount of dancing yesterday.’ 

He laughs, ‘I’m sore all over – think I’ve pulled a muscle in my shoulder. But sure,  wasn’t it some day?’ 

‘It was.’ Snippets of memory diffuse through me: rain lashing the Rolls roof but  clearing to blue sky by the time Dad and I arrived at the church. Him whispering, ‘It’s not too late to make a run for it,’ when we were halfway up the aisle and red rose petals from my  bouquet were falling prematurely on white organza. 

When the call ends, I snap back to action, google-map the route. Should be okay, the  protests won’t affect us. 

Unplugging my hairdryer, I toss it into the suitcase, flop the top down, use my  bodyweight to fight the zipper.  

Outside our apartment building, Luke flags a taxi, holds my hand on the backseat,  chats to the Ethiopian driver who navigates the detours. The driver says he’s worried about  his car getting hijacked, burnt out, but then says he just has to get on with it. Cased in a clear  plastic keyring, a passport photo sized image of his daughter dangles a few inches below the  rear-view mirror. I watch it sway as we weave through late-afternoon traffic. ‘Trolley?’ Luke asks, heaving our luggage from the boot outside bag-drop.

‘Na, sure look,’ I demonstrate the easy roll of our hard-shell Samsonite Spinners.  Wedding gift from my aunt and uncle.  

I snap a picture of Luke and I as a crew member runs through the safety  demonstration. In an emergency, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. Picture sent to  the family chat. Swipe into airplane mode.  

Another flight, followed by a seaplane, then we arrive into aqua-blue bliss.  Farook brings drinks to our loungers and later at the swim up bar he mixes Iraqi  Punch, shows me how to muddle the limes before adding rum, tells us he’s only working  here to send money back to his wife and three kids in Bangladesh. 

‘How often do you get home?’ Luke asks. 

‘Three times a year,’ Farook says as I take the pink phlox from my glass, roll the stem  between my fingers. ‘What scent do you get?’ he asks, gesturing for me to smell it.  Aniseed? Clove? A hint of vanilla. 

‘My daughter,’ he says, ‘blind from birth, but do you know she can tell you the name  of every flower around by the way it breathes into the wind?’ 

Later, on our private sundeck, Luke reads while I rock gently on the undhoali. A light breeze toys with Luke’s dog-eared pages. I forgot to get the Wi-Fi code from reception, so I lay wondering how it is decided who is born where and into what circumstance. 

Rope creaks. Water laps against the underside of our stilted villa, lulling me into sleep  and into hazy images where a keyring sways and lime segments give up their juice. The WhatsApp call comes in for Luke after dinner. My sister?  

His face greys, rose-red platelets pulse through me.

Brace, brace.  

There’s something in the hardness of bone that tries to prepare your soft tissue for impact.  

Dad’s skin went clammy. There wasn’t much pain. He didn’t make it to hospital and it could have been different if the ambulance hadn’t got held up by riots.