“I know, but this might help.”

Lissa feels Hannah’s eyes on her as she rolls the joint. She takes her time, enjoying her skill, finishing with a flourish before she opens the window and leans out of it, four floors up above Owens Park. “Go on then,” she says, lighting up.

Hannah sighs and reads on.

“On the level of our individual psychosexual development, the abject marks the moment when we separated ourselves from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between me and other, between me and [m]other.”

Lissa thinks of Sarah, driving her up here last September, her mother’s old Renault 5 packed high with her stuff. She took her out to lunch at a restaurant in town. Now, darling, she said over the pudding, you are on the pill, aren’t you? Then she gave her twenty pounds, a rather beautiful portrait of her aged eight sitting in the flowered attic chair, a large packet of Drum tobacco, a brisk kiss on the cheek, and drove off back down the motorway to London. A separation which hardly seemed to bother Sarah at all.

“. . . as in true theater,” Hannah reads on, “without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands . . .”

“Wait—does it really say that?”

Yeah. Hannah looks up and smiles. It is the first time Lissa has seen her smile. She has a lovely smile. Interesting. All the better for not being easily won.

“This shit. This shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.”

“Wow,” says Lissa.

“Yeah,” says Hannah.

Lissa blows out smoke on the evening air. There is the sound of traffic on Wilmslow Road below, the hazy, blurred sounds of the tower block; Portishead, “Glory Box,” drifting out of someone’s nearby room.

“So . . .” says Hannah. “The presentation?”

“Oh. Yeah. OK. How about,” Lissa says, “how about, for starters, we name all the sorts of abject we can come up with?”

“Why?” says Hannah. She is not a fan of thinking around things. She has a linear mind.

“Well, why not? Go on”—Lissa waves the joint at Hannah—“How many can you name?”

Hannah scrunches her nose. “Well, there’s piss, obviously—urine. Shit. There’s blood; two types of blood. Vein blood. Menstrual blood.”

“I’ll bet there must be more types of blood than that.”

“There probably are.”

“That’ll do for starters. Vomit. Snot. Earwax.”

“We need to write these down.” Hannah snatches up her pencil and starts scribbling.

“How many is that?” says Lissa.

“Seven so far.”

“What about eye gunk?”

“Definitely eye gunk. What’s the right term for eye gunk?”

“I don’t know. Here, don’t you want some of this?”