I put on an impractical skirt, an old shirt that almost fit, and sat in the kitchen and sipped a brandy until it was so late that being dressed and waiting felt ridiculous. Then I was relieved that he hadn’t come back after all and I changed back into my apartment clothes and crumpled up in some corner or other. After a while of steady breathing I fell into something that was not quite sleeping but resting. Dreaming in a half dreaming sort of way. There was, in my dream or out of it, the something again, the something in the apartment with me, the something that wasn’t M, that was like a cross between a child and a toad. A thing that maybe could laugh a high little laugh and hide in all the corners of the apartment.

In my dream I was running through the rooms of the apartment. E and B were asleep. I was running to the door, the front door that would let me out, but I was never going to make it because I wasn’t fast enough, because I was carrying the plant in my arms, because its thick green tentacles were slowing me down, slithering along the floor, catching on things. I tripped on something, a toy or a bowl of lemons and fell to the ground. The plant turned to sand in my fingers. The clay of the pot. The thick green stalks. It all melted into the same mess, running through my fingers until there was nothing left.

I woke breathing hard, light slipping in through the shutters. It was yet again and always again and more and more another morning and I’d hardly slept at all. I was losing track of things. Also I was angry at my dreaming self and disappointed.

My dream-self was, I supposed, a terrible mother, no kind of mother at all. My dream-self had been running for the door with the plant in her arms. My dream-self had been leaving her children. Who could have said what would happen if she had gotten her fingers on the handle of the door? Or really I knew. I could have said. I would have been gone.

The morning raked across my exhausted face, there were fresh bruises on my knees and shins. Maybe I had been really running, really stumbling, last night when I had or hadn’t been sleeping.

I ran to the bathroom to take a shower. I felt that if I was not, at that moment, able to rip off all my clothes and jump into the shower and wash away all my sweat and terrible mother dreams I would begin to scream and if I began to scream I felt perhaps that I would never stop.

When I was a child I remember loving to play house which meant mostly playing that I had many babies, at least three or four, to look after. I would wipe their mouths with soft little squares of fabric that my mother cut for me from old clothes and I would change their diapers by tying and untying other squares of fabric around their moulded plastic bottoms. The babies were always almost asleep in my games, always equally ready to be put down and left or picked up and cuddled. They were always girls, dressed in pink with names like Diamond, Rainbow, Butterfly, depending on my mood.