"Light (God's eldest daughter) is a principal beauty in building" *

The eldest daughter, which is to say my eldest sister, who had arranged it all, had also been zapped with chemotherapy, though in her most recent case in the hope she may have halted the march of the ghastly disease of the cells. A retired doctor, and old enough to be my mother, she now worked as a volunteer at one of the largest religious buildings in the country, whose head coincidentally - and as a result arguably the second most influential religious leader in the country - swam each morning in the nearby hotel pool. (I told my sister how amazing it would be to meet him for a swim when she told me this.) We were all gathered in the bedroom of two of my other sisters for some champagne. Though I had chosen to drink only tonic water, I let the bubbles explode in my mouth as if champagne, and studied the sides of my two eldest sisters' faces, which is to say the faces of the two with varying degrees of cancer. They were actually talking about when they were children and both enjoyed scholarships to the large girls school eighteen or so miles away from our small family house by the sea. As a result of the scholarships, the state paid a taxi each morning to take them to the nearest bus three miles away. There they would sit together on the bus, they said, staring straight ahead, and often without saying a word. ('She was my best friend,' smiled the younger of the two, the dying one, presently.) Then they giggled, as sisters often do, in fact pretty soon they were all giggling, and we soon forgot about the poignancy of the occasion. I was busy thinking about the fact the eldest sister had lived for many years on another continent, the second-largest and second most-populous, in a place not so very far from where the religious second-in-command, who enjoys swimming in the nearby pool each morning, came from. Some of the other sisters meanwhile flashed more smiles and drank more champagne. It is a strange and no doubt privileged thing to be with five sisters, none of whom you know particularly well when it comes to the everyday features of their lives, but all of whom you can feel like a kind of soft, familial electricity in your bones. It is of course equally strange to be the only male, even if I was already the only male in the family as long ago as just before my voice broke. Anyway, the following morning, while my sisters all slept, rocked but not uninspired by the magnitude and uniqueness of the night before, I dived in the pool and awaited the religious leader. He never came.
(* Thomas Fuller 1608-1661)