On the other side of the thin wall there are low voices, the creak of a bed. She needs to pee. She moves her crying son into the middle of the bed and goes out towards the landing, where she hovers. To her right is the other bedroom, where Sam sleeps. Nothing wakes him. Downstairs is the narrow hallway, filled with piles of boxes, the lumped, heaped things she has not attended to since the move.

She could leave, leave this house, pull on her jeans and boots and walk away from here, away from this wailing creature that she cannot satisfy, from this husband wrapped in the interstellar blankness of his sleep. From herself. She would not be the first woman to do so. In the bedroom her son’s cries grow louder—a small animal, afraid.

She hurries to the bathroom and pees quickly, then stumbles back to the bedroom where Tom is howling. She lies beside him, pulls him back onto her breast. Of course she will not leave—it is the last, the very last thing she would do—but her heart is beating strangely and her breath is ragged and perhaps she will have no choice, perhaps she will die—die like her mother before her, and leave her son to be brought up by his father and his family in this sterile house in the far reaches of Kent.

Tom flutters finally on her breast, slackens, and sleeps. But she is wide awake now. She sits up in bed and pulls back the curtains. Through the window she can see the parking lot, where the cars sit in their neat, obedient rows, then the dark shape of the river, and beyond that the orange lights from the loop road, where the traffic is already building, trucks moving out to the coast, or returning from the Channel ports, cars on their way to London, the great greased machine of it lumbering towards the light. She feels her heart, the adrenaline swill of her blood. The moon comes out from behind clouds, illuminating the room, the messed up bed, her tiny son beside her, abandoned now to sleep, his arms flung wide. She wants to protect him. How can she protect him from all the things that might fall upon his unguarded head? She reaches out and touches his hair, and as she does so sees the picture tattooed on her wrist, silver in the moonlight. She brings back her hand, traces the image slowly with her opposite fingertip—a filigree spider, a filigree web—a relic, now, from a different life.

She wants to see someone. To speak to someone. Someone from another lifetime. Someone who made her feel safe.