Did you know that she pulls everything on earth towards herself? In that way, a well is like a moon and now I am like a well. Look at my endless capacity. Everyone is welcome.

Or else what? A good question. I’m glad you’re not afraid. I like to think that when I find you, asleep, your face will be relaxed, round and open as the face of the moon.

My mother told me once that the moon is retreating from the earth. Only by a few centimetres each year. But one day the tides won’t be so strong. One day, a girl at the bottom of a well will hardly be able to see the moon at all.

For now, there she is. We reach for her and she reaches for us. But each day her grip lessens. In six hundred million years, she will have almost let us go.

Break Character

The Hair

Tom wasn’t supposed to bring the wig home; it was peeled from his scalp like a banana skin every night. Then it was arranged on a faceless polystyrene head that lived in front of his dressing-room mirror.

I guess I shouldn’t really call it a wig. The first time I saw it – the only time he let me come backstage – I said, ‘That’s quite a wig,’ expecting him to laugh. He didn’t. His makeup artist then explained, straight-faced, that theatre people didn’t say wig. They said hair Where’s your hair? As though to claim it was the real thing would turn it into the real thing.

I wondered how The Hair had managed to make it as far as our third-storey apartment. Had he smuggled it out in a pocket? Had he left it attached to his head? That, I thought, was a possibility, given how he’d been lately, silent and brooding, an intense, glazed look in his eye. He wouldn’t want to be separated from The Hair. He would have left it on until the sticky heat, the itch of it, forced him to tear it off.

Now, though, he was sleeping. I looked at the wig, bunched up on the bedside table like a frightened hamster. I reached out, tentative, as though it might flinch away from my hand.

I crept to the hallway and looked into the mirror, tried to scowl the way Tom scowled when eight p.m. struck and it was time to stride onstage as Alexandre Boulet. I’d seen it, just that one time I’d been allowed to see, how he left the dressing room with a sword in his belt and tall boots, glancing at himself in the mirror, his eyes lined, his face powdered, the place smelling of talc and cold cream and costumes that had been sweated in so intensely and with such regularity that the stains never quite came out.