‘I’ll tell you the fairy tale of the apple. Eve ate the apple, and then Adam came and did so too. Afterwards the apple was forgotten, and it was assumed that it rolled away in the grass while Adam and Eve were chased out of the garden. But that’s not true, because secretly the apple rolled in between Eve’s legs, scratched open her flesh and burrowed into her crotch. It stayed there with the white bite marks facing out, and after a while the fruit-flesh started to shrivel, and mould threads grew from the edges of the peel. The mould threads became pubic hair and the bite mark became the slit between the labia. Soon all of Eden followed the apple’s example and started to decompose and rot, and since then this has happened in all gardens and everything in nature, and honey mushrooms came into existence, and rot and parasites and beetles arose. But the apple was first, and it never stops rotting, it just gets blacker. The apple has no end, just like this fairy tale.’

While the girl recounted the story, a forest grew around their two bodies, a forest that at once was and wasn’t the brewery. The pine tree crowns burrowed through the roof, a waterfall splintered the stairs from the mezzanine, the floorboards melted into yellow and green heather, and then it started to rain, a mild autumn rain that whipped the girls’ bodies soft and smooth. A deer walked out between the trees with an apple in its mouth. It had Pym’s face.

‘Jo?’ Carral’s voice rang.

I opened my eyes and saw that I was still on the mezzanine. The heather in my dream was grass, the grass that had grown in between the floorboards. Carral was glued to me, and I thought of the girl-bodies in the dream, how they looked like fantasy creatures, and remembered the last sentence that Carral had written in Pym’s book:

From his ashes a four-breasted creatures arises.

Carral whispered, ‘Do you remember the tough girl I told you about? The one I lay next to naked?’

‘I told you that story,’ I said.

‘What? No, I remember it happening. I can’t have been more than seven, and I was at Emma’s house, Emma with the plaits. She had bunk beds. We were in the top bunk, naked.’

‘That’s right, we were in the top bunk, I remember, but that’s my story.’

Now I was confused.

‘I remember being so scared of pregnancy, even though I knew it was impossible. The rest of the night I wore all my clothes,’ Carral whispered.

‘Yeah, I even buttoned up my coat. How did you know?’ I asked.

‘Let me finish the story,’ she continued. ‘That night I dreamt of a snake hidden under my bed, a snake that could sneak up under my duvet and in between my legs.’