‘I’ll do it later,’ says Cora, ‘after the dusting.’

‘Just so it gets done,’ says Rita.

They’re talking about me as though I can’t hear. To them I’m a household chore, one among many.

I’VE BEEN DISMISSED. I pick up the basket, go through the kitchen door and along the hall towards the grandfather clock. The sitting-room door is closed. Sun comes through the fanlight, falling in colours across the floor: red and blue, purple. I step into it briefly, stretch out my hands; they fill with flowers of light. I go up the stairs, my face, distant and white and distorted, framed in the hall mirror, which bulges outward like an eye under pressure. I follow the dusty-pink runner down the long upstairs hallway, back to the room.

THERE’S SOMEONE STANDING in the hall, near the door to the room where I stay. The hall is dusky, this is a man, his back to me; he’s looking into the room, dark against its light. I can see now, it’s the Commander, he isn’t supposed to be here. He hears me coming, turns, hesitates, walks forward. Towards me. He is violating custom, what do I do now?

I stop, he pauses, I can’t see his face, he’s looking at me, what does he want? But then he moves forward again, steps to the side to avoid touching me, inclines his head, is gone.

Something has been shown to me, but what is it? Like the flag of an unknown country, seen for an instant above a curve of hill, it could mean attack, it could mean parley, it could mean the edge of something, a territory. The signals animals give one another: lowered blue eyelids, ears laid back, raised hackles. A flash of bared teeth, what in hell does he think he’s doing? Nobody else has seen him. I hope. Was he invading? Was he in my room?

I called it mine.

Five

MY ROOM, THEN. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.

I’m waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room. When I go to bed it’s a bedroom. The curtains are still wavering in the small wind, the sun outside is still shining, though not in through the window directly. It has moved west. I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate not this one.

SOMEONE HAS LIVED in this room, before me. Someone like me, or I prefer to believe so.

I discovered it three days after I was moved here.