It was very tall; it was dark and light at the same time. It reminded her of a restaurant she and Marnie used to visit for lunch, built into the shell of an abandoned power station in Wapping. She had a sense of dread. She could see a little, but she didn’t know what any of it was. There were people all round her. They gestured and goggled, trying to push their faces close into hers. Their mouths opened and closed, yet it was Anna who felt like the fish in the tank. They were studying her.

‘How close can I get?’ they asked one another, and: ‘Do we have any idea where she came from?’

‘We don’t have an idea about anything.’

Laughter.

‘She looks as if she’s falling. Caught falling.’

‘I don’t think that’s a helpful assumption, Gaines.’

In fact, Anna felt like someone caught going to the lavatory in the middle of Waterloo station in the rush hour. She had a slightly nauseous sense of James the cat, so close she couldn’t quite bring him into focus. It was embarrassing. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else. There was something the matter with her cheekbones. She felt smeary and unstable at significant sites, in the manner of a Francis Bacon painting. At the same time she felt as if she had been penetrated by something huge in an inappropriate part of her body; or, worse, that she had penetrated it. What made her condition so impossible was the nature of this object.

It was her own life.

. . . Sekhet, Sweet Thing. Minnie. Matty. Mutti. Roses, Radtke, Emily-Misere. Girl Heartbreak! & Imogen. L1 Dominette. I pull one way she pulls the other. That woman will never be part of me. I say fall on your own. Fall on your own you bitch. Not near me. There is a third thing in here with us she says & a fourth and a fifth. It stinks of cat in here, some filthy animal. We’ll never get where we’re going this way. My name is. (Ysabeau, Mirabelle, Rosy Glo. Sweet Thing & Pak 43. Shacklette, Puxie, Temeraire. Stormo!, Te Faaturuma.) I fall into the summerhouse & shout the wrong thing. No one listens . . .

In Saudade City, the Toni Reno case was duly filed ‘unsolved’.

Not long after, Epstein the thin cop found himself on patrol with a uniform called Grills. It was a mild night. Some rain. The traffic on Tupolev was thinner than usual. For the b-girls, on parade in their candy-coloured mambo pumps at the corner of Johnson & Chrome, business was slow. Over at Preter Coeur, the fights were slow. From Placebo Heights to the Funnel, from Retiro Street to Beasley Street, entire entertainment demographics were staying home.