Suddenly I was very anxious. Fountain Court loomed ahead, a dismal enough prospect, yet it was my home. I had often cursed the ghastly place, but coming back to the Eagle Building rarely made me feel so groggy, lonely and upset. I forced myself to move, reaching the dank entrance where the porter, Rodan, ought to be snoozing on a stool. He was missing.

There was a climb to my apartment on the second floor. Two flights of steep stone steps among the odours of piss and old meatballs that characterised our tenement daunted me completely.

I had another room, slightly closer. I was the landlord’s daughter, so I could live anywhere I wanted here, rent free. On the first floor, at the end of the Mythembal apartment, I kept a bolthole nobody knew about. In my line of work this was useful because it provided a secret access to my real apartment.

My head was splitting as I struggled one floor up. Something odd was happening to me. Mythembal’s wife, the dark-skinned woman with several multi-coloured children, was out for once. She would not know I had come home.

It was lucky that she lived in an apartment without sanitation and had those small children, because among her meagre possessions she owned a robust chamberpot. I grabbed it from the corridor as I staggered through the dismal series of rooms she occupied; I fell into my own place. The heavy door closed behind me of its own accord.

Barely was I in my room when, without warning, I disgraced myself with an uncontrollable eruption from every part of me that could erupt.

After that I was helpless. I would not have thought the human body could be so wrung out. After several painful episodes, I managed to strip off my tunic. Then I lay on the floor, curled up and occasionally crying, naked and despairing, lost.

I had a big old couch here, but I could not reach it. There was a door to a walkway over the courtyard, where I could have called for help, but getting there was impossible.

In a moment of lucidity, I knew what caused this. The well. The well with the poisoned water. I had not been so stupid as to drink from it, but I did splash that water all over my hot face; I had drunk from a silver goblet that had been in the well water, not washing the cup, as far as I could remember. No, not washing it, because yesterday the apartment had run out of clean water.

For almost a couple of decades, the disease that lurked in the well had been waiting for another victim. Maybe there was unhealthy leakage, a hidden cracked sewer seeping into the groundwater. Then I came along. The family who were here before all died of dysentery. About five of them …

I was in no doubt what was happening now. I had that and I was dying too.