‘Buy a chair, buy a table, settle,’ she insisted, her voice, for a second, distorted by the speaker. I looked around the hotel room, the dull impermanence of it. I thought of my own practically unfurnished apartment. People and the stuff they owned confused me – and it was confusion rather than any point I was trying to assert about my own independence. Stuff tied them to the world in a way I had no inclination for. I guess because I never expected to be here too long.

‘Was I always this way?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer. I repeated myself. She still didn’t answer.

‘I don’t know anymore,’ she said, quietly.

*

When we were children, thirteen and nine, my sister and I spent a summer in our local swimming pool. Our mother was dead by then. Her illness happened mainly at home so when I think of death now I can’t conjure anything except the stretch of brown linoleum leading to my parents’ bedroom. We heard her, through the transparent walls, promise our father she wouldn’t do it to him. But she did.

We never thought it would happen that way. You could call us unprepared. You could call us hopeful. Startled by our new single-parent freedom, my sister and I went to the local swimming pool. The water was cloudy and we charged into it in cheap, faded costumes. A memory of my sister’s triumphant face as she hit the filthy water. She did lengths, her body slashing, appearing and disappearing, and I stood in the shallow end. Or she floated on her back, with no trace of self-consciousness. Over us, like a threat, hung a painted, shimmering sky. In the changing room, as we slipped out of our clothes, my sister spoke about the planet. After our mother passed my sister had become obsessed with other planets. No, not planets. One planet. That I never knew the name of, and nor could its dimensions be found on any of the star constellations charts I searched furiously.

*