I wanted sheets for that room that were so bright and clean that it would make anyone who slept there feel encompassed, touched, free. Like she would wake every morning with the sun on her face. There was a part of me that really believed sheets could do that, could make someone feel that way.

A bed would barely fit inside the little room, but that was all right, it would be like a ship. The way they look when they’re being built, when they’re girded and trussed in the yard. The bed would be like that in the little room. Hulking and wooden, well-outfitted with its prow pointed towards summer. What I’m trying to say is how deeply I imagined it, the room.

The only thing was the soap. I couldn’t see it. There must be soap to sit on the edge of the little sink in a white cup and the soap should be wrapped in a paper that was not white, paper of the most perfect colour. Something that would explain everything, keep the ship afloat, the white of the curtains billowing. Calm seas, white sand, warm sun. I couldn’t see it yet though. I couldn’t see that little part.

I was sitting on the grey rental-company sofa holding B as he fought off sleep, his small hands curling, as if digging himself out of a pit. As night turned into morning, I could feel the heat rising in the room, the sun beginning to boil the metal shutters, but I didn’t get up to open a window. He eventually drifted off making a little sound like a balloon does when it’s losing air and I fell asleep holding him, and woke to E’s eyes, held right up close to mine. Wake up, she said, wake up. Her animals were arranged in a ring around my feet, there were so many little painted plastic eyes looking at me. They’re hungry, E said.

We fed the animals sesame seeds. I made coffee. The smell of the beans tangled with the sweet rot from the flowers. The tram tickets in my bag, all stamped with yesterday’s date and good for an hour of travel in the middle of the night, I swept into a drawer in the kitchen with the other tickets, with all the things I meant to think about later, when there was time.

The heat crept into the apartment. It crept into our mouths and made our tongues too thick to lick our gummy teeth. We floated in pools of our own sweat, drifting as if we were holidaymakers floating down the lazy river on those swarms of plastic tubes. Let’s turn off the lights, I said to E. Let’s keep the shutters closed. Let’s make it dark inside and maybe that will keep away the heat. E liked it I think, so we let the ceilings hang over us like low clouds.

At the store, I attempted to make sense of the different detergents. Bottles to make towels soft, to remove spots of various kinds, to make whites white. Maybe they were for that, I didn’t know really. I couldn’t read any of the words. In the meat aisle E poked the dead, broken-necked chickens, each displayed on his or her own, individual styrofoam tray. Their plucked skin was the most beautiful pearly pink. E wanted to buy them, to cook them or love them for ever I couldn’t tell. Anyway it didn’t matter because I couldn’t touch them, could almost not go near them even, it seemed too brutal, to be on a tray like that, to be pressed and wrapped into it, unable to move. It seemed like something that was happening, it seemed urgent somehow to me then that under all their graceful wrappings it would have been impossible to breathe.