Late in the afternoon on the third day, something else happens. They are all sitting on the floor, naked. They have been watching an English woman fuck the Japanese man, so that her husband, an English guy, can appreciate the desperate tenacity of his own attachments. The air is soupy, pungent, almost revolting. A fly has gotten in. Everyone is in a bad mood. The fly moves invisibly from person to person, throwing each of them in turn into a spasm of irritation.

A long silence, while Anala stares hard at each person.

K swats at the fly.

‘Now,’ Anala says at last. ‘I’m gonna tell you all what your trip is. Because there are some serious fucking head-cases in this room. Starting with you, Veena.’

‘What the fuck?’ the Swedish woman says.

‘Come on, you can do better than that.’

‘You misogynist fuck,’ she says. ‘You fucking power-tripping pig-shit-eating fucking dick-hole—’

‘Yeah! So much anger. Let it out. That’s great. Devam, why don’t you tell Veena what you think of her?’

Devam moves over to Veena and screams into her face, a long howl, which throws her into a fresh rage. She spits in his face and begins pounding him around the ears. He slaps her. She slaps him back. She claws at him with her fingernails, drawing blood. She is screaming in a mixture of Swedish and English now, something about men, something about their miserable, godforsaken cocks.

Encouraged by this atmosphere, small fights begin to erupt around the room. Anala moves among them, whispering to them, urging them on. They need to get this aggression out, he tells them. It’s poisoning them all.

‘This is what we’re holding, inside us,’ he says. ‘Get to know it.’

He comes over to K and speaks into his face, a hissing sound. The words are lost in the noise of the room.

‘What?’ K says.

‘You’re not into it, man,’ Anala says again. ‘Have you come here just to waste our fucking time? Why don’t you run back to your mommy? Why don’t you run back to your little daddy if you don’t want to get involved.’

The rage is sudden and dark, something volcanic spitting up from deep within him.

‘Not at me, man,’ Anala says, reeling backwards. ‘Give it to him.’ He ducks behind the tall German man.

Caught off guard, K doesn’t know what to do. But then the German man steps forward and shoves him, a jolt that sends him staggering backwards.

‘Verflucht noch mal,’ the German says, lifting his chin in a gesture of arrogant dismissal. ‘Du scheisse, du scheisse.’

Hans. That’s the man’s name. But K is not thinking about him. He is thinking about someone else, another German man called Mr Sugar, who was a friend of his father’s. When he was seven years old, K and his brother were sent to live with Mr Sugar on a farm, far out in the country somewhere.