This building is fucking freezing. She will apply for actual housing again in the New Year. It’s just a few more days until the council open their offices. No. 10 Luckenbooth has given her something nobody else has these last months: a home. Dot sings as she goes up the stairwell. Notes rise up ahead of her – a lullaby she sings every day – to a derelict building from a broken soul. A cold wind runs up towards her from the bottom of the building. Hairs on her arms rise. It can hear her and it has been waiting – this building has been sending out smoke signals for a long time, has it not?

Just one puff – to wisp ineffectually out at first.

Then another smoke ring curls up from one of its many chimneys.

For how long?

It has been calling out to her since before she was born – that’s what it feels like. As if she could hear it before all the things happened that led her here. She put it all down last time she was at the job centre and they stopped her benefits for the hundredth time because of an error in the system that will take twelve weeks for them to reassess. To detract from their own incompetency and obvious contempt for benefit recipients they demanded that she update her job skills and under Life Experience, she put – astral travel.

– Any vacancies?

– No.

If they make her go for a disability benefits interview, she will tell them she is a key in the cosmos. A being of light. Just another cosmic agent, thanks. They will keep refusing her money. She will come back to this building and shoplift for food and not tell anyone she used to know that her life has come to this.

The trick is to accept things.

It is just how it is right now – the smells, dust, cracks on ceilings and windows.

Going up past the sixth floor.

A light sound of cloven hoofs begins, many floors behind her.

No. 10 Luckenbooth Close pulls close.

It inspects the purity of her want.

Evaluates the depth of her longing.

It’s lonelier than she is.