‘In the bar. Pym walked me home,’ she answered and poured water in a mug, dropped a tea bag in it with a splash. ‘He says hi by the way. He’s wondering if you’ll be reading his book anytime soon.’

‘Did you read it?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. But I don’t remember it so well now.’ She fussed over the screw top on a milk carton for a while, twisting it on and off a few times. Then she shrugged.

‘No, I can’t remember why, but I think you should read it.’

‘I’ll read it soon,’ I said and felt a burning in the roof of my mouth when Carral gulped her first sip of the scalding hot milky tea. She touched her mouth, just as I did. ‘Bloody hot!’ I heard behind me as I walked to the bathroom door.

In the bathroom I rinsed my mouth out before filling the sink with cold water, and rigorously washing my face. Then I stood and looked at myself in the mirror, poking a finger in my mouth. The roof of my mouth felt normal and cold. But the mirror shook in front of me, and all around me everything was moving; thin rings were forming on the water surface in the sink. The honey fungus rocked by the bath’s rim. The grass tufts between the floorboards swayed gently. I turned off the tap and listened. There was a thump that sounded like it came from inside the concrete. When I put my ear to the wall, I heard a soft knocking sound, through the cistern rush.

‘Can you hear that knocking?’ I called out to Carral in the kitchen.

‘Yeah, I think it’s Pym. He mentioned he’d be working a bit today.’

I sat down on the toilet seat with my hand against the wall and felt the beating in there, like a tiny heart that grew inside the wall.

The knocking continued through the night with the storm. When I got up to pee in the half-light, I wondered if Pym, assuming he was the one who knocked, could hear us as we heard him, if he could hear me pee, if he could hear the difference between my sharp fast stream and Carral’s slow dripping trickle.

The next morning when I woke up it was light and the knocking had stopped. I heard the wind’s howl and in the distance ferocious waves broke against the pier. The news told of electricity pylons on the main line that had been blown down, and that power was to be unreliable all day long. Lightbulbs flickered over the kitchen table, the fridge stopped its humming and started again, the TV flickered. The tin ceiling wasn’t sealed properly and when the wind caught it silverfish and beetles would tumble down the steel beams.