I dress her in her best frock the day you come round. She stands up as soon you arrive – yes, she recognises you – she used to see you visit this building when she lived on the pavement – yes, she wobbles towards you – and then stands in front of you – and I see her hold out her upturned palm, saying, ‘I haven’t eaten today …’

I return her the next afternoon. ‘Let me take you to your mother,’ I tell her.

I don’t know why I insist upon taking the staircase instead of the lift, holding her hand all the way. Maybe all of my actions have simply been in order to compose these moments when I would send her back – taking the stairs is a way of prolonging them, of milking my own unhappiness.

With each step down, she shakes her head. One step down, one shake of the head. Another step, another shake. She’s trying to say that she doesn’t want to go – that she would rather stay. She doesn’t know what it means to stay, any more than what it means to go, but, both understanding and not, she protests. A silent, unobtrusive ‘no’. She goes down the stairs and, with each shake of her head a ‘no’ …

30

Eventually she came across the wall of death, in one of the bathrooms at the other end of the flat. She’d just happened to venture into the bathroom, all the walls of which were covered in black tiles. The floor and basin table were black granite. The commode and sink were black. Even the fittings. The windowpanes and lampshades too – everything was black. Only the space on the wall above the sink, which should have held a large mirror, was not. There, the bricks were showing. They were a dusty grey, covered in cobwebs, which had spiders in them.

She paused, wondering. She knew that there would be a bedroom on the other side of the wall. She knew that the wall was only four or five inches thick. She knew that the wall was solid. But still she wondered. She stifled the sigh that rose up in her, for she knew that this was the wall of death, on this side of which she lived her fearful life.

Standing before the wall, she felt afraid and wanted to plug the gap in it, but her mōn dissuaded her. ‘You’ve spent all your life running away from death,’ it told her, ‘now, try to understand it.’

In an attempt to understand death, she brought her face close to the gap in the wall and whistled. She whistled. And as she whistled she realised that the sounds were multiplying – from one to two, two to four, four to many more – and rustling out from inside the wall. Rustling. This made her unhappy, so, to try and shake the feeling, she returned to the part of the flat she normally used, leaving the door to that bathroom open.