London. Berlin. Rome. I couldn’t keep up really. I had trouble remembering when he was gone, and when he wasn’t gone but was at the office. Really, I had trouble telling the difference. He dropped packets of candy from where he’d been on the kitchen counter for E. That’s how we could tell he’d been away. How we could tell that he was back. The candy packets in the kitchen, with all their beautiful colours and amazing names. Jolly Jellies! Blumen-Zauber. Bombottini. We ate them all, E and me, all the packets. We ate every last thing he brought home and licked the sugar, le sucre, lo zucchero, den Zucker from our fingers, de nos doigts, dalle nostre dita, von unseren Fingern, like baby monsters.

It wasn’t as if we weren’t very busy, E and B and me. How could we not have been? There was so much to do. I signed up for a fidelity card at the dry cleaners down the street and bought a special zip-up bag with a built-in hanger for transporting M’s suits back and forth. I deliberated as to the various ways that I should request his jackets, pants and shirts be handled, wrote carefully down sentences that could be repeated to the brisk lady at the shop. But of course I stumbled instantly in front of her when I tried to read the script, tripping up over all the intricate sounds required to say, I would like. And we would end with me only silently nodding, silently thank-you smiling, and her sniffing and handing me a receipt.

M was always away one way or another. He was always gone. The apartment door was shut behind him each morning when we woke and that was good and fine really. He was getting on with things and we were left inside to our own devices. How wonderful I told E, how wonderfully lucky we are to be free like this, free to do exactly as we please.

We slept all the time, E and me and B, and sometimes we didn’t sleep at all. Time was inconvenient, unpredictable. Sometimes it rushed me along and sometimes the minutes wrapped themselves around me, pressing, expecting to be entertained like children, needing something, needing to be fed, as if the hours were animals opening their mouths, the endless parade of minutes lodging like tiny bones in a thousand soft throats. The light never changed. I studied the coins M left on the bedside table like artefacts, his water glasses, the wet towels he left on the floor. I slipped my hand inside all of his pockets before I took his clothes to the cleaners. Perhaps he thought of me too, perhaps we were each of us ghosts to each other. Boo, I could whisper maybe in his ear while he slept. Here I am.

Every morning I sat by the water pump in the little park, watching E splash, arranging the blanket over B so it would shade him. I spent what felt like, what really could have been, years washing the sand off E’s feet. She on the blanket with B, me running back and forth to the pump for handfuls of water, searching between her toes. I’m a crab! I’d say, walking sideways, holding my arms up in the air. We polished the tools too and rubbed the handles clean.