WITH ITS OPEN SPACES, ladders and plasterboard walls, the factory is little more than the skeleton of an apartment. The ceiling – which makes for a silver-grey, gloomy sky – is several metres high. By the kitchen table in the middle of the cube, an iron post runs like a spine from floor to ceiling. Under the ceiling, thick old beams are coated in silverfish and dust. On three of the room’s sides, mezzanines have been built, halfway up each wall. Two of these are small decks framed by particle board walls. They face each other on the north and south sides. On the east wall is an open mezzanine with a railing. It’s big enough to serve as a living room and contains a television, a sofa, and pillows on the floor. A staircase leads here from the kitchen. Carral stores old things under the mezzanine: stiff sheets, a dishwasher, tinned food and old broken wooden chairs. The bathroom is in the west and has a toilet and bathtub, fenced by the same thin particle board walls as the mezzanines. The boards reach just over our heads and next to the bathroom is a ladder that leads up to a small balcony on the roof of the apartment next door.

A mattress in the northern mezzanine, next to the bathroom, is my bed. Across from me, above the entrance, is the mezzanine where Carral sleeps, and under it hangs an old chandelier that jingles when she turns in bed. Standing on the raised platform of my bedroom I can see above the boards and down into the kitchen, across to the open mezzanine and, if I stretch, right down to the toilet seat in the bathroom.

‘Do you know what kind of factory this used to be?’ I asked while I tossed my clothes onto the mezzanine. On the wall above the loft I’d seen big square pieces of metal and imagined they once had huge hooks or wax candles hanging from them. But Carral didn’t reply, and when I came downstairs to get some more clothes from the box on the floor, I saw that she was sat by the kitchen table with a thick book.

‘Did you say something?’ she asked.

‘I was just wondering what they used to make here.’

‘I’m not sure, but it’s been a while since there’s been any kind of industry in this area.’

I nodded and Carral continued:

‘I wonder a lot about what they were thinking when they converted the place.’

‘It doesn’t seem quite finished.’

‘Not finished? I think it looks like a theatre set. I mean, like, plasterboard in the bathroom.’ She laughed and went back to her book.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

‘Oh, just a romance. Kind of stupid. I studied literature a few years ago, and now I only read trash. I’m a hypocrite! Do you need help, by the way?’

‘No, you just read.’