‘If only I knew someone who owned a studio. I could make a demo, become famous. I used to know someone who did, but the idiot sold it.’

‘Hey, hey. Not nice.’

He grabbed her arm and started twirling her in a flatfooted jive. She was dizzy from the wine, her feet utterly uncoordinated, but she didn’t care. She danced as if no one was watching, the bottle of wine dangling in her hand like she was a liberated spirit from the sixties.

After a while she was lying back, her head in his lap as he ran his fingers through strands of her hair, looking up past his face to the ceiling, the overpainted bevelling and the cracks, a water stain the size and shape of a human heart. His gentle fingers always moving, teasing out, extending, placing, as if he were drawing her. Part of her wanted to ask him to still his hands, but she was so comfortable on the warm blanket, the soothing bass hum working through the floor and massaging her muscles, aligning her bones, her body melting into the floor…

And she must have fallen asleep because now she was lying on her stomach, and Vincent was gone. So was the blanket, now that she woke to it, and she felt the jagged wood of the floorboards in the skin of her stomach and she was being dragged across the floor by someone, something that wasn’t there, felt its tug at the base of her skull. She scrabbled her hands against the floor to try to gain purchase. The floor of the performance room was much rougher than she’d first thought; thick, septic splinters driving into her palms. And she couldn’t stop herself from being dragged towards the wall, papered in peeling, piss-yellowed vertical-striped paper. There’s no wallpaper in Vincent’s studio, she managed to remind herself as her naked body grazed across the floor, scraping up clods of greasy, organic dander, her whole body grazing and merging with the stuff on the floor, being pulled to the low door in the skirting.

Her face jammed to the skirting now, her head being manhandled through the too-small gap, but slowly enough that she had time to take in the troll-creatures’ half-size boudoir within, stagnant sickly yellow pools of light illuminating the contents, like the front window of an antique shop up a side street in a failed plague-stricken town.

And inside, beyond, the scene she didn’t want to see. Couldn’t unsee.