I lay on my lumpy bed and dreamt up inventive ways of leaving my own body. I looked down at it – slack, star-shaped – and closed my eyes, re-opened them. Still there. It didn’t seem to be going away. I was restless. I made many visits to the rain barrel in the yard. I felt the rain barrel was a measure of time – all the rain collected in my two-year absence. My mother sensed the world might run out of water and this cracked, aluminium barrel was our security, our secret plan. I wanted to say, ‘It’s the twenty-first century,’ but it sounded self-important and foreign in our hostile little house.

I had no interest in redemption. I didn’t believe in it – it was for crackpots, squares – but something about that rain barrel made me want to be reborn. I could see myself sailing through the murk, the dirty leaves framing my face, the blueness of the barrel bringing out my inner Virgin Mary.

It was necessary for me to get out of the house.

*

Kevin arrived on the job exactly one week after me but immediately possessed an understanding of the garage that I lacked. He grasped its quiet romance, its rusty appeal. He knew the order we were meant to do our activities in – it was innate. I might put the mop in the bucket, or I might wring out the mop, and he would say, ‘We are not supposed to do that part yet,’ and he would be right. He worried about my non-linear mind but I felt we worked smoothly, as a perfect, synchronised team.

I liked him far more than was strictly encouraged. I knew Management wanted us to have a more difficult relationship, with maybe a frisson of grim sexual tension, but it didn’t happen. From the beginning we shared a special atmosphere, a private connection that was pure and honest. For instance, he knew immediately whenever I was in the bathroom checking my face to see if I was still up-to-scratch, that all the waiting around hadn’t ruined me. He didn’t hate me for it. We both shared dim dreams of self-assertion, fantasies where we fought and emerged triumphant. We trusted each other. We made confessions. I was probably the sister he wanted to marry.

As an older woman I felt it necessary to encourage his self-esteem. I told him he looked incredible in his uniform, that it did wonders for his lanky nineteen-year-old frame. That was true. He looked like something out of a movie about bandits or serial killers on the run. Except he wasn’t a bandit or a serial killer. He was the gas station attendant who pointed helpfully and said, ‘They have gone that way!’ He enjoyed these comparisons, these tokens.

He admitted – as we swept the garage forecourt, as we kept our eyes peeled for lucky pennies – that in his mind everything was television. There were ways of separating reality from fantasy but he did not know them. This could be a minor problem – like having trouble with directions, confusing north and south. Or it could be a major problem. Once, as we weeded the area around the rude, unnecessary fence, he told me he felt like a character being awkwardly written out of a sitcom.