The other girl opens the door and Hannah steps inside. The room is a mess. It smells of cigarettes, and ashtrays overflow on every surface. There are half-full glasses of water in various places. An empty bottle of wine. The single bed is covered with an Indian throw. There is a collage on the wall—photographs of young people on a far-flung beach, Lissa sitting on a scooter, no helmet in sight, Lissa and a dark-haired young man in a nightclub, both with large pupils, faces crowded into the frame. So far, standard fare. But Hannah’s eye is caught by a different picture, this one propped carelessly against the wall—an oil painting of a fair-haired girl curled into a chair, reading a book.

“Is that you?” she says, kneeling before it.

“Yeah,” says Lissa carelessly. “My mum did it. Years ago.”

“It’s really good.”

Lissa sits on her bed, watching, a little amused, as the dark-haired one takes her hungry inventory of her possessions, then sits at the desk and opens the first of her books. The girl moves precisely. Her pencils are sharp.

These are the things that Lissa thinks she knows about university and Manchester and class: she is the daughter of a socialist. She went to a North London public school. She would rather hang out with a drug dealer than a public schoolboy. There are far too many public schoolboys and -girls in Manchester, but scratch its grimy post-industrial surface and the city waits. That Manchester is, at this point in its history, possibly the greatest city on earth—if like Lissa you are a fan of dance music and of ecstasy.

She is interested in this long-haired girl because she has a Mancunian accent—a rarity at the university. She likes Mancunians. And she likes her serious, slightly cross face. She enjoys hearing her spar with the other kids in the seminar group. Hannah is dry and Lissa likes it. And she is also interested in her, this spring afternoon, because she thinks she might help her to get a good grade.

“OK,” says Hannah. “The abject.”

“Hit me,” says Lissa.

Hannah bends her head and reads, twisting the ends of her hair in her fingertips.

“Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.”

“Immemorial violence,” says Lissa. “What does that mean?”

“Well,” says Hannah, “it’s birth, isn’t it? And infancy—before we enter the symbolic order. Language. All of that.”

“If you say so,” says Lissa. “Tell you what.” She leans over and pulls a small bag of weed from a drawer in her cabinet. She has been given it this morning by her boyfriend.

But . . . Hannah feels a mild panic as she casts her hand over the fanned-out books. “It’s three o’clock. I mean—we’ve got to give a presentation tomorrow, haven’t we?”