My life, and what I did with it, became a sort of mystery then. I reorganised my father’s collection, I called Paula and heard the phone ring out and out, I took an aversion to the shower tray. I removed traces of my father from his own home. I needed it so that he wasn’t my father, that I didn’t know him, that I had never even heard of him. I wrote my boss a letter. It was titled: ‘I’m Sorry’. Prompted by this letter he rang me and said he was sorry too and let’s meet, let’s be two sorry people in the same room. I dressed up for it. I took my time. I wanted him to wait and I wanted to be the thing he was waiting for.

In the lobby of the cinema he was nothing like I remembered; angrier, shorter. He looked like a small town I might live in and die. He told me there had been a confrontation with the bin men and he had been fired. His arm was in a cast. During the film, anytime he turned towards me, the cast rubbed off my face. Afterwards, we stood on the street and I thought he was going to kiss me or grab me or do something obvious. Instead, he pulled my hand and placed two of my fingers on his bare neck. ‘Can you feel that lump? Right there?’ I rubbed a small swollen mark from where the shirt of his collar had been closed too tightly. ‘That’s cancer, I think. It’s cancer more than likely.’ I agreed that it probably was cancer, that he had caught it early. He asked me if I wanted a drink and I said no, thank you. It was important to me that I was polite.

When I left him, I felt a happy relief. I thought of night classes, the sea, re-decorating.

Abortion, a Love Story

Some names and places have been changed. This text went to press before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play performed.

NATASHA

When Natasha walked into Professor Carr’s office, she was embarrassed. Her embarrassment didn’t stem from her own absences and tragic results, the reason why she was there, but from the walls and walls of books that imprisoned the professor. A middle-aged man – whose questions in his seminars prompted no answers, and who secretly felt his deep knowledge of his subjects was hindering him in a world becoming superficial – he laid out his plump, hairy hands on the desk in front of Natasha.

Natasha knew this was a man who had spent a long time establishing a reputation, and now he had a reputation and nothing else. She felt deep, incommunicable pity for him.

‘I have a disorder,’ she said, pre-empting him. ‘I can’t explain exactly what my disorder is but it prevents me from absorbing any knowledge into my brain.’

Natasha thought about her disorder a lot – how it had developed, how it was particularly alert to moments of boredom. She wasn’t even fully sure how she ended up in the college, which was separated from the outside world by large and forbidding gates, an oasis in an uncaring city. She remembered reading through the college brochures and picking the place with the oldest, leafiest trees, the highest buildings. This was where she would get most value for money, she decided. As for classes, she attended one here and there, but, now she was in final year, she realised you were supposed to go to many classes, one after another. Education was sequential and the building blocks had to be laid.