A painstaking adaptation.

Avigail – like Wang Shu – is a die-hard pragmatist.

Fucking dreamers and idealists can all go hang.

Avigail fought tooth and nail to be here. Here. In this God-awful shithole, with these idiotic fucking morons. RIGHT NOW.

‘She didn’t actually break in,’ Avigail reiterates.

Avigail is irritated with Charles for mentioning the burglary, twice.

Charles is looking at Avigail with a frown.

She?!

Why would Avigail possibly imagine that the potential thief could’ve been female?

And why is she called A-vi-gail instead of A-bi-gail?

‘Perhaps she got disturbed,’ he mutters. Slight roll of the eyes.

Avigail really has some nerve trying to appropriate his burglary narrative like that.

She?

Seriously?

She?!

In therapeutic circles that would be called … uh …

What would they call that?

‘Perhaps a seagull?’ Ying Yue murmurs these words quietly while gazing down, self-effacingly, at the scuffed, tiled floor. Then she removes her hand from the lovely, brown saddle – which has been worn deliciously smooth by the endless friction of Charles’s dead mother’s thighs – and performs a little – and quite funny – mime of something crashing into her head.

‘Perhaps disturbed by a seagull?’ she reiterates with a husky laugh. ‘The burglar?’

Already Ying Yue feels like her volume button has been turned down to virtually inaudible.

Who turned the button down?

She glances around her, blinking.

Did Ying Yue turn the button down?

(Ying Yue often refers to herself in the third person.)

She blinks, then smiles.

Oh, look!

Ying Yue is a tiny pinch of sand!

On a giant, sandy beach!

Let’s build sandcastles!

They are all still standing by the front door. It feels like they have been standing there, huddled together, in a pack, for ever.

‘Sorry? Did … is that a mime of … did you just mime a seagull shitting on your head, Ying Yue?’ Avigail finally pipes up, confused.

Ying Yue has a way of talking – a way of looking down and swallowing her words – that makes it hard to follow what she says.

‘I apologise for using the word “shit”,’ Avigail adds, as an afterthought (although, even in so doing, she uses it for a second time).

‘Shit. Yes. No! Shit! Heaven forbid!’ Charles echoes, drolly.

He immediately imagines a T-shirt that reads: I sincerely apologise for using the word

Charles patently still has some growing up to do.

As she speaks, Avigail is inspecting Ying Yue’s head. Ying Yue’s head seems fine. Although her hair is slightly greasy. Ying Yue points – with a clumsy, submissive gesture – towards Wang Shu.

‘Oh. Okay. Did a seagull …?’

Ying Yue draws breath. ‘An oyster shell. It fell down from the sky. Psssseeeeeuuuuuu! Dropped by a bird. It clipped Wang Shu’s head. There is some blood. A little blood. But Wang Shu is fine. Wang Shu is good.’

‘Seriously?’ Avigail scratches her own head. ‘This was … You mean outside? Just this minute? An oyster shell? Over on Trevor Street? But why didn’t I … why didn’t you just say something?’