At night, when the children were asleep, I thought about Nell. The banging on the window didn’t come again but I wondered, had it been her out there? Running away from something? Had she seen us jumping out of that window? Had she been looking for a window to jump into? Had she had her children with her? The baby? The boy? Had she left her shoes as a sign? Or had she been lifted up out of them? I could think about these things at night, in the dark, when I was waiting for the children to need me, biting at my nails and my fingers. Something about it just let my mind run and run but in the end all I could think about were the dusty eyes in the dark that came out when I closed the shutters, and how they, the eyes, looked so much like my own. What I’m trying to say is that sometimes there isn’t anywhere to skip to, only long hours that stretch like oil, glistening and sliding over the tops of all the stretching shadows.

There were so many flies now in the apartment that we all took to wearing long sleeves so we couldn’t feel their legs on our skin. B was sleeping so much. He was like a bear in winter I suppose. Such a good baby, sleeping and sleeping and sleeping in my arms. He was so light I almost never had to put him down, and we could dance for hours like two feathers, floating up and up, impervious to gravity and time.

We hid under the ruined sofa cushions. I stuffed my clothes with the feathers and the foam and made a scarecrow person. I made one too for E and a tiny little lumpy one for B. So that we could each have a scarecrow version of ourselves to sit next to and talk to. What’s three plus three? I asked E, pointing at the scarecrow family and then pointing at ourselves. What’s two plus four? I asked, sitting E down among the scarecrow people. See? Do you see how it stays the same no matter where you go?

There were so many things to do. Once E woke up with her hair braided into two gorgeous plaits, one on each side of her head. The braids glinted in her half-dark room like oil lamps, and we admired her hair in the bathroom together. How beautiful we are, I whispered to her. Look at us. But I wondered a bit, if I let myself, who had done the braiding.

I imagined rust growing on the outside of the metal shutters. We played with the light switches, flicking them fast on and off and on and off until they began burning out one by one. We loved the way they snapped and fizzed, the lights, when they burned out, the way the light flickered and grew huge and hectic just before it was gone. In the end we were left with only the candles and we set these up around the apartment, at the table, we ate at all hours by their light.