I woke early, dazed – now what? I know I must have checked my glucose levels despite the cloudy darkness in my eyes. It wasn’t the sugar. I raised my hands to my forehead and lay still, waiting for the noise to return. I’d almost fallen asleep again when I noticed that the fronds brushing against the bars suddenly transformed into a prelude to another dramatic movement. I sat up in bed as if released by a spring and heard it again. Crack, crack, crack – scratches. In a fraction of a second, I reviewed the map of the ceiling: something was scuttling along. A rat, surely. A huge one by the sound of it. The wooden planks thrummed. But the exterminator had said there weren’t any animals up there – there couldn’t be, I thought, since he’d spread the whole surface with that fucking oil it took me three days of my life to clean. It was someone. There was someone on the roof. But who the hell could it be and how could they have got in? A child, a dog, a cat. No, it didn’t make sense; none of my theories did. I got up and tried to follow the noise, just as I’d done the night I saw Becca and Jerry for the first time.

In the hallway, I heard the slip, the sinister rustle of friction, a body crawling over wood. I felt its traction with an indescribable tingling in my armpits and a trickle of sweat down my back. Fright flushed me. I didn’t move. I felt the trawling of cables, vibrations on the roof, the odious skritching of claws on a zinc sheet. It drew a line from my bedroom to a corner of what had been my parents’ room. I hate the other inhabitants of this house, I thought, and there they were: boom! bam! crick, crash… Silence. After a few moments, I heard nothing more. My eyelids felt heavy, my arms slack. What if I just ignored it? I’m already down here, and whatever it is is all the way up there and that’s that, I told myself. If it was a rat, even a whole family of rats, whatever, I’d deal with it in the morning. It’s better that way, I thought.

Now that it’s day, I have no intention of entering the sauna that is the roof at this hour. Instead I look into my Rebecca’s eyes, but she won’t let me. I wish her unimaginable woman-voice would respond from the depths of eternity. After last night’s trip, after this colada, eternity is here and now. I’ve had plenty of news about Jeremiah, for example. I look at him and feel almost as if he’s greeting me from the photo, or from this dish, this spoon, this breadfruit.