From the windows of her bedroom on a 20th floor Mariam could see what they called The Wildlife come and go in rhythm with the hours of a broken clock, figures scratching themselves in waves across the surface of playgrounds and mini-malls, moving in predictable patterns that showed nonetheless little of immediate logic; arriving at midnight to sit on benches doing nothing, stirring mid-morning to yell insults at drone traffic or at swooping birds, or running to chase leaves for no easy reason, and rising all hours to throw bitter stones at wounded pigeons in the dog-shit verges of the roads. Looked at more closely, from the ground, it was a different story of broken stories, hard to gather into words and hard for M to feel much distant from – Mariam watched The Wildlife obsessively, but she always knew she was part of it too.

For neighbours, in the technical sense, Mariam had none, the other units in the building still judged by Earth’s population too undesirable to rent at market price on which they’d been offered for that purpose. It was all supply and no demand; beyond her unwelcome presence in the refurbished block it remained an empty vessel, a hollow morgue of atmosphere, a crystaline structure formed out of stillness and silence.

Mariam’s life there was small, like that of a child bent double in a cupboard under some stairs, refusing to breath deeply in a game of search and destroy. She was scared of the corridors. Frightened of elevators. Petrified of stairs. At night, as the TV played New Hotel Jurassic and Chrysanthemum Eyes with the sound down, closed captions mistranslated the soap scripts into phrases that Mariam read too easily as threats.

‘They get you most all gone when you always alone’ said Kendrick, supposedly, in New Hotel Jurassic.

‘The silent is what gets into you’ said Hazeel, apparently, in Chrysanthemum Eyes.