I went back to my pile of clothes. Carral kept reading. Sometimes she looked up to dunk her biscuit in a tea-cup, and from my mezzanine I could hear her suck tea from the biscuit and turn the page at regular intervals.

The house was raw and porous. It didn’t shut out the world outside like the houses at home, and there was no paint or wallpaper anywhere, just naked boards and rough concrete walls. In the bathroom the walls were soft and damp. Dark mould spotted the corners. Norwegian houses, I explained to Carral, are hermetic, warm wooden tanks filled with colour, and Norwegian sounds are kept discrete by dry, well-insulated walls. In the factory, on the other hand, I only truly felt like I was inside when I slept and slumber put up its heavy impenetrable walls between the conscious world and me. Monday morning I woke very early to the clanking of bottles as the first drunks returned from the Aygros Supermarket around the corner. I stayed in bed and listened to the increasing rush: cars that drove up and up the spiralling ramp in the multistorey a few streets away; sidewalks being hosed down and swept; the trams hooting along on the main road. Maybe it wasn’t the house, but me that was porous, I thought. Maybe I had to grow a thicker skin in this town.

In the living room on the open deck I sat down by the only exterior window. It was still early and up here I could look at the people and the fog and sometimes feel the morning sun on my face. Everywhere else there was just pale light from naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling on long wires. Like seismometers, they swayed at any movement in the house. Not even the big chandelier hanging under Carral’s bed gave much light. It didn’t do much more than reflect the sunlight from the window in its glass splinters and cast a dim glow of light on the kitchen floor. A fine shower of dust drifted to the floor when Carral stood up on the mezzanine.

In the dim light, my hearing became more acute. The open factory brimmed with echoes. Waves of sound could persist and resonate between the walls, filling out the silence until other noises took over. When Carral zipped up her jacket and tied her shoelaces that morning, I could hear faint traces of her earlier activity: vague sonic contours of shower and toothbrush, yawning and chewing. When she left for the big Sachs & Sachs building where she worked, the shattering sound of the front door shutting was thousands of tiny marbles rolling through the house. I turned to the window to see her walk to the tram stop. There was no one else on the road. The broken windows of the building abutting the silos glittered in the sun.