‘Come on, I was just drunk,’ she said, but for a while she looked thoughtful, and the next time she spoke she sounded hesitant. ‘I don’t remember anything from after we sat at the table.’

‘Me neither,’ I said.

In a way, that was true. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened after Carral had gone to bed. I remembered Pym’s body, the taste of his skin, and my head chanting this is it Johanna, it’s happening, but nothing else. My body wasn’t sore, like I’d read it should be after you have sex for the first time. Everything felt like normal between my legs, no pain. I couldn’t find any trace of his body in me, didn’t smell anything unfamiliar when I put my fingers under my trousers lining and smelt them afterwards.

Carral and I spent the rest of the morning on the mezzanine in silence. She seemed calmer and healthier than she’d been in days, dipping pieces of bread into a soft-boiled egg and drinking milk from a large glass. Her skin was dry and smooth again, her nipples as usual hidden behind layers of cotton. No more words were exchanged about the Pym episode, but the previous evening was still stuck between us. I looked up frequently and would catch her watching me, and we’d study each other’s faces for a brief moment before returning to our books.

Afternoon came. Carral read Moon Lips and sucked her index finger. I tried to read Introductory Mycology, but kept just staring at the opening pages. It listed fungi parts, reeling them off almost like a nursery rhyme, and while I read the new words I imagined Pym’s build: Fruit bodies (forearms), hyphae (freckles), mycelium (chest hair), chitin (the firm bulge pushing against me under his jeans), but I couldn’t get any further. When I tried to remember what Pym looked like naked, what his dick looked like, all I could think of was a passage from Moon Lips:

She touched his member for the first time. It was silky-soft and stiff at the same time.

The words had been branded into my mind, surrogates for the memory of Pym I couldn’t access, a memory that might amount to nothing. And around me the brewery smelled of whisky, sour sweat and Pym’s freckled salami skin. The salty taste from the tap water lingered in my throat. It was as if the whole brewery, its walls and pipes, were trying to convince me it had in fact happened when my body wasn’t persuasive.