I lay surrounded by plasterboard and bricks and felt feverish. When the song faded out, I noticed that the air in the factory had become dense and stuffy. I removed my headphones, stood and climbed down the ladder to the kitchen. The house seemed different, snugger, as if the building had contracted. The kitchen table covered a larger portion of the floor, and the light bulbs swung wide on their cords. Maybe someone had been here, while we slept so deeply, and put a new set of walls up over the old ones, a new plaster layer on the inside of the boards covering our mezzanines. I imagined these things as I walked across the floor to the kitchen counter. My feet trod carefully on the floorboards, as if to avoid bumping into something I couldn’t see, but that was still there. It hit me that this was how Carral walked. Had I begun this recently or had I been doing it a long time? I looked down at my feet. They were soft and white on the floorboards, almost liquid.

Carral came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her hair and another one around her torso. I hadn’t heard a sound from the bathroom. The toilet wasn’t hissing, and the shower head didn’t drip. She must have been there ages. The sound of her steps mingled with the sound of the kettle boiling.

‘Good morning. Is the bath free now?’

She nodded hello, shuffled past me and disappeared up to her mezzanine. When I went into the bathroom it smelled faintly of urine and the liquid in the toilet bowl was the colour of melted butter. Carral hadn’t flushed. When my stream hit the surface it bubbled and as I peed I looked down between my legs and watched the two liquids mixing.

Under the shower head I let the water run so hot it scalded my skin. I imagined I was scrubbing off the manager’s disgusting comments and rubbing out Carral’s sudden presence in my bed. The shower gel foamed on my skin, a frothy cover between me and the night before, between my body and hers. All the while I saw her behind my eyelids: a soft, blurry face on the pillow next to me, silver-white in the darkness. The water rushed from the shower head, and the sound gained a different, softer quality against the soapy froth that covered the bath. It reminded me of the head on a beer. I forced the image of Carral out of my head and pictured the bathtub, the bathroom, the whole house, as a beer glass slowly filling with sweet fermented hops.

‘Is it true that this is an old brewery?’ I asked Carral once I was dressed. She looked so tired, almost blurry, sitting at the kitchen table in an old, thin bathrobe. Moon Lips was in front of her, closed.