IN THE COMING DAYS I brought more and more things to the apartment: library books and pens, clothes and pillows, tea bags and tinned beans. At the same time the wind was picking up in Aybourne; it dragged seaweed clusters and sand into the town centre, moved benches along the beach walk and bent grass and autumn flowers in the university’s botanical garden to a smooth fur. When I staggered to the tram stop, the silo pipes behind me howled. Shattered windows glared out over the street like the gigantic closed eyes of a sphinx.

The wind doubled my commute into town, and when I finally reached the Earth Sciences building the door to the lecture hall was closed. On the door was a small noticeboard where an old drawing was pinned, a caricature of a professor with thick bushy hair chasing a group of small, terrified students. Below the drawing it said in printed letters:

The world of the living is a hierarchy, where each level in the biological chain feeds off of the level below.

I carefully opened the door and snuck into the auditorium.

Today’s lecture was about reproduction. Dr Spencer Lipman, whose nickname was Spitlip, enunciated every word slowly and clearly, and every time his lips contracted and split apart again to make a p or a b, he shot tiny spit pearls from his mouth. After a while white froth formed at the corner of his lips. I wiped my own mouth and had to look away, forced to look down in the notebook in front of me. In it I had just written,

Fungi have varied methods of reproduction. They produce and spread huge amounts of spores. When conditions are right, the population can double in a very short time.

I couldn’t help but think about the spit-bubbles on Lipman’s mouth, this population of tiny drops spreading like little wet seeds across the auditorium. On my hand a little watery bead blinked.

The same night I found Carral sleeping on the sofa again, silent and soft, barely breathing. She was in the same position as yesterday. Her neck had sunk into her shoulders, her whole body seemed to have collapsed into itself, her head bobbing loosely on top. Her hair lay curled along the banister. Some of her locks twirled around the railings. Outside, the streets glistened with rain, and further off the last remnants of dusk were tipped into the sea, or maybe they were just clouds.