Today, Metamuse – in the guise of this black-wigged her – beckons me into a tent, where she proceeds to heal me. From the outside, it may look like a spa treatment, maybe – a copper bucket of amniotic water, a loofah with which she washes me, intimate questions that are only for me.

Maybe it is an overblown spa treatment, maybe it’s a psychotherapy session, but I emerge stripped, dismantled, reconstructed, reset.

* * *

I need to be critical. I am a critic. Falling is two shows – a bitter, blunt takedown of the Psychomart trend that disorientingly swivels into the thing of intense beauty that is the desert hammam. The two sides are frustratingly unequal – but as I fly back home, once again feeling the ghostly hands on my skin, I know Metamuse played me perfectly. First, they softened me up, letting me slip into my critical complacency, before sucker-punching me with love. Again.

If you manage to attend a viewing of Idiopathy, I don’t know who your guide will be or where Metamuse will lead you or how they’ll treat you, but do yourself a favour and follow if you can.

11 <7 Panther Road>

Petra waited for more, but that was all.

She should just disregard it. He owed her more than that after ghosting her for the last three days. She should just make him wait, see if he could bring himself to write a little more, or, hell, even give her a call. At the very least, she should follow up tomorrow, not come running like a little dog.

But she couldn’t. If he’d said something like, ‘Sorry, I’ve been busy,’ she would have gone home, but it was the very impersonality of the text that swayed her. Sure, he was a rubbish texter, but this was unlike him. Unlike the little she knew of him, at any rate. But still, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she went home and sulkily ignored him and all the while he was in some sort of trouble.

She checked the address on her phone. It wasn’t far. Right here in town – Helena would be pleased – and she headed that way.

Number 7 was a neat and narrow semi in a road of tightly packed similar houses. Probably built a hundred years ago for workers but no longer occupied by them, judging by the cars parked along the road. He’d told her he lived with his grandmother, but the small front yard, bounded by a uniform low gate and little wall made of the same red brick as the house, was tidy and anonymous and offered no secret hints to Vincent’s character or history. If this was even his house, she reminded herself. Maybe it was just a neutral staging post for a break-up chat. If that was the case, he needn’t have bothered. He owed her nothing.

Too much thinking, Petra. Just get on with it.

She took the few steps up to the front door and knocked. The knocker was a version of a lion’s head, more friendly than the scary creature on the studio’s red door. Unlike that one, the ring in this creature’s mouth wasn’t welded down and made a satisfying clack when she rapped the brass baseplate with it.