—then almost immediately dragged herself through layers of silent chaos to consciousness, to find James the cat staring into her face, purring coarsely with something between pleasure and possessiveness. She was naked. At some point she had woken without remembering it, closed the house up, taken herself to bed. ‘Get off, James—’ rolling away from him and off the queen size box-spring, desperate for something to drink— ‘We aren’t even the same species.’ Though she was not directly aware of it, her dream continued.

She lay on her side on a black glass floor in her Versace gown and long black gloves, upper body raised on one elbow. She was not turning from a woman into an animal or from an animal into a woman. If she was not in transit, neither was she in any sense ‘caught’ between those two states: she was busily occupying them both at once. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else: she felt smeary and blurred at significant sites of paradox or conflict, in the manner of a Francis Bacon. Waking up never interrupted this hard, thankless work of superposition (‘Someone has to do it, darling,’ she imagined saying to Marnie) or much diminished her sense of it. It was all the worse for being unconscious, implicit, ongoing. It was all the worse because it felt like a commentary on her life, welling up from some internal source she preferred not to acknowledge. Halfway out of the room, she went back and hugged the cat. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said to him. ‘James, if you want my advice, never be a failed suicide. You won’t hear the bloody last of it, even from yourself.’

James allowed her to carry him downstairs. He dashed into the night the moment she opened the kitchen door, only to return excitedly a few minutes later with a neon kidney in his mouth. Perhaps two inches by one and a half, with plump, eye-catching curves, it had a saturated pale blue colour and a transparent rind that seemed both resistant and pliable. James crouched on the worktop and sheared into it with his back teeth, breathing heavily through the same side of his mouth. ‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Anna said, turning away in case she saw it burst. ‘I’m closing the door.’ But a long soft flash of lightning caught her in the doorway, throwing her into silhouette and projecting her shadow against the opposite wall. There was no thunder. A wave of moist heat rolled into the kitchen. It was transformational weather, weather suited to another country: a thick low cloudbase, smells of static water pocked with rain. The cat looked up, then down again.

‘Hello?’ Anna whispered. ‘Hello?’ She peeped out into the garden. It stretched away, elongated, too narrow, rippling with heat. Quiet yet catastrophic changes of light revealed, a long way off, the summerhouse.