When Anna Waterman fell through the summerhouse floor and into the Aleph, it was just before dawn on a damp September morning in London. What time it was for the Aleph would be less easy to record.

The space she fell through was a confusing colour, like darkness on a windy night. It was too wide to be a tunnel, too confined to be anything else. Its boundary conditions allowed her to topple; they didn’t allow her to touch the sides. The sky quickly contracted to an almost invisible point above her. For a time, the cat was some company. It fell with a comical expression on its face, then seemed to drift in towards her, kneading the air with its front paws and purring loudly, after which they lost sight of one another. ‘James, you nuisance,’ Anna said.

Up above, something settled, as if the summerhouse, properly on fire this time, had begun to collapse. Rattling down towards her came a shower of objects coloured deep wine and amber or fanned by their speed to the fierce yellow of Barbie hair. These hot dolls, burning coals and melted pill-bottles seemed to be falling much faster than Anna; as they passed they matched her velocity for a moment, so that she felt she could have reached out and touched them; then they accelerated away and were quickly lost to sight.

In life, she knew, you might: Fall ill. Fall pregnant. Fall from grace.

God knows she had done all three of those. ‘Mine was a prolonged fall,’ she imagined herself explaining, ‘accompanied by much of the detritus I thought I’d left behind.’ She addressed the cat: ‘Name your jouissance.’

As she fell, she was aware of her arms waving slowly and bonelessly. Her legs pedalled. The sensation of falling was, she thought, much the same as that of treading water: the more you struggled the less control you maintained. Your heart rate increased, all the effort went to waste. You felt closer to drowning. It was a mistake to allow that idea in. The most important distinction of childhood is the one between falling asleep and falling as death. Long before she had fallen into anorexia, or read Milton on the fall from dawn to dewy eve, or fallen victim to Michael Kearney, Anna had been afraid to fall asleep. As soon as she recognised that, she began to struggle. There followed predictable moments of panic, flickering and buzzing on all sides, anguished flashes of light, after which she found herself in an echoing space, the nature of which she would have been hard put to describe.