I WOKE UP on the rough floorboards of the mezzanine, having rolled off the mattress. Perhaps the fall woke me. Possibly, I’d lain there some time. I seemed to recall a thump and creak as my body hit the floor, but perhaps these sense impressions were something I’d dreamed up. The sound formed a long, dark and winding stairway of resonance that I fell down. Fragments of the dream I had woken from gleamed around me. The hum from the fridge downstairs sounded like onrushing waves.

When I lay back on the mattress and closed my eyes, my dream seemed clearer to me. I had been looking over the mezzanine wall and down into the kitchen, but it wasn’t a kitchen, it was a foggy, beautiful forest with pine trees and blueberry bushes. Between the trees a group of sweaty male workers had been draining thick, smoking fluid from the tree trunks into wooden barrels. It must have been beer. The smell was heady, and the steam had filled the whole room and made my skin moist and sticky. Suddenly the workers had all turned toward me; they all had Pym’s face. They started to sing. Their voices sounded like the rush of a waterfall. The song stuck to the inside of my throat, as if it really was liquid, as if I was a beer barrel.

‘Jo,’ they sang, ‘Jo, Jo, Jo …’

‘Jo?’ something whispered in the dark.

I must have fallen asleep again. Half of me was wet. The skin down one side was warm and damp.

‘Carral?’ I whispered.

She was behind me on the mattress, this time close to me and naked, and I could feel her crying. I turned around, fumbled in the dark, found her head and stroked her hair. Her scalp was wet.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer. Her upper body undulated with sobs.

First I thought I was soaked in sweat, but when I woke up properly I recognised the sharp, bitter smell of urine. A thin, warm stream trickled against my thigh from Carral’s body.

‘What are you doing?’ I said and sat upright. My top and pants were dripping wet; my duvet warm, wet and heavy.

‘I can’t …’ Carral whispered. I felt the stream on my thigh become more powerful, as if she had given up trying to hold it in. The liquid trickled in between my legs. ‘Can’t … hold it …’

I began to adjust to the light; her contours became clearer. Beads of sweat were glimmering on her forehead, on her throat, neck, hip-bones. Small poppy seeds.

‘I’m sorry I came up here. I was so scared … and so weak.’

‘It’ll be OK. Do you have a fever?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Her voice was a whimper.

‘It’s fine. Let’s go get changed. We’ll have a shower and sleep in the living room.’