But Kevin wilted. His eccentricities were very apparent under the strangers’ constant supervision. He was inelegant. I slicked back his hair with foul-smelling gel and tucked in his shirt. It didn’t help. All this time, I thought he was just an ordinary loser but it was worse than that. The people disliked him. Anytime he wandered onto the garage forecourt, the people looked away. While he worked, some even turned their chairs to face the opposite direction, like the garage was a stage and Kevin was a character they refused to acknowledge.

*

‘What was it like seeing yourself onscreen?’ he asked one day. ‘Was it scary?’

‘It was incredible,’ I said casually. ‘I mean there was a lot going on in the scenes I was in, a lot of distracting stuff. But I looked great.’

‘I’m sure,’ Kevin said, and he pretended to be suddenly invested in a balloon.

‘It was amazing. I could have been anyone, anyone at all.’

‘That must have been hard,’ he said.

Kevin always missed the point. That was going to be an obstacle for him, going forward.

‘No, Kevin,’ I said. ‘Being anyone was the entire appeal.’ The garage was not real but it was still the most real experience I’d had in years. In the city, my boyfriend was the director, but he was no artist. He didn’t have that sort of intelligence. All he knew was how to fuck people over, drink infinite blue cocktails, and make everything cheap. I had more vision than him. I had a lot of excellent suggestions for set design, but I kept them to myself. Trapped in our smooth apartment, in our terrible bedroom, I trained myself to sleep for only four hours a night. I had to be prepared to jump up and raise my fists to the dead night. It was so pathetic, it didn’t suit him at all.

Usually when he was halfway through hitting me it would occur to him just how obvious he was. Then he would curl up, say sorry, baby, sorry, sorry. Baby this, baby that, baby all the livelong day. It was possible that this person who owned me didn’t even know my name. It was all a dull attempt to get my attention, and the stuff he bought me was dog-ugly. He got it into his head that I was kitsch and he just went with it without my permission. He gave me one pair of costly pants meant for ‘leisure’. I wore them outside – they were okay pants – and this was a big no-no, apparently. ‘They are only for leisure!’ Those kind of rules. It was hard to know who to be minute by minute.

His friends were in the films too and I just put on a wig, let them do whatever they wanted to me, went home, practised falling asleep and then leaping awake. It killed time. After that, there was emptiness. Some wandering around, eating not-good stuff out of bags, doughnuts, Taco Bell. Enough loneliness to make you lose your mind. I got my nails done twice a week – there was a violence to it that I worshipped. The rooms where I was filmed were just like beauty parlours: the same glossies on the coffee tables, the same plastic furniture, nothing words snapping into the air. Girls, lots of them – all of us mutely conspiring, an exclusive club.