‘Mmm. Too bright,’ she said. ‘What is this obsession you have with order, anyway? I mean, have you ever in your life coloured outside the lines? Just once I’d like to see . . . oh god.’ She catapulted off the bed and raced to the bathroom with both hands covering her mouth.

Eram followed her. In the movies, when somebody pukes in the toilet, they come out delicately wiping their mouth, but otherwise look none the worse for it. In reality, drunk-puking is gross as fuck.

Acidic brown bile, a mixture of tequila and stomach juice and undigested lumps of whatever Gehna had eaten during the day gushed from her mouth and nostrils. She sounded, Eram imagined, like a barnyard animal in labour would. When she sat back against the shower cubicle door, her skin was pale and clammy, her eyes were bloodshot and her mouth hung open. Then she caught the scent of her own vomit and had to repeat the process, retching and retching even after she was empty inside.

Eram leaned over to hold the hair back from her face.

‘What’re you doing?’ Gehna said, trying to swat him away.

‘I don’t know. I saw someone do this in a movie one time.’

‘Well, stoppit. I have short hair. And if you got any of this sick on you, I’d be mortified.’

‘Okay,’ Eram said, choosing not to point out that that ship had already sailed, his jeans being spattered with the stuff. ‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Like death. My head and stomach and throat hurt. I smell like sewage. And if you could just wait until the morning to start in on me about how I’ve absolutely pickled my foetus in tequila, I would greatly appre—’

‘No one’s starting in on anyone, G. You think a shower might make you feel better?’

Gehna narrowed her eyes at Eram, reminding him in that moment of a cat with its hackles up. ‘I think I’m capable of deciding for myself what might make me feel better, thanks very much. And I’ll shower when I damn well feel like it, not when you say so.’

They avoided each other’s gaze. Eram had in the past six months come to know Gehna’s inner landscape as immeasurably more interesting than other people’s or, indeed, his own. Everywhere were signs of warning, but he had pushed further into the dark continent that occupied her. It was a strange and terrifying land; there, the grasping appetites of her quicksand thalamus and there, the fear and anger arcing from her amygdala. He had skirted her chasms of loneliness and cut himself, more than once, by trying to force through the thorny bramble that fenced her reserve.

He also knew that when her stars were out, they burned brighter than any sun. Being near her woke in him the weirdest sense that he had been sleepwalking through the first seventeen years of his life.

‘I think,’ said Gehna, ‘that I’ll take a shower now.’

‘Right, yes, good idea. I’ll just wait outside. Shout if you need anything.’