‘I don’t think the computer house has done anything to you, Natasha.’

‘I think I’m being watched.’

Professor Carr leaned forward on the desk, as if preparing to deliver a sermon. ‘Every woman in this country is being watched.’

‘But I specifically feel like I’m being watched.’

They sat in silence.

‘I hear the unemployment building is a lot like hell,’ Natasha said, after a while.

‘You should be grateful that you’re young.’

‘I want youth to be over. I don’t like it.’ She thought of the hours she spent on the stone bench waiting for youth to pass. She often sat for so long, morning to evening, that she heard the six o’clock bell signalling religion. She knew time moved strangely inside the gated community. She was largely indifferent to her fellow students with their loud typing on computers, and the ideas they communicated to each other in trembling voices. They all seemed to follow a strict code and, in the college coffee shop, they outlined their secret philosophies passionately, huddled beneath heavy cardigans. ‘What are you all talking about?’ Natasha wanted to scream. Ideas, ideas, ideas. She had no time for ideas. She wasn’t raised with ideas.

‘I don’t like it,’ Natasha repeated.

‘Natasha, we only have a few months. Let me help you.’

‘But my disorder,’ she said, weakly.

When Professor Carr discovered what a philistine Natasha actually was, he dedicated himself to her general cultural education. He instructed her to come up to his office three times a week. As he listed out books to her, Natasha counted the hairs on the backs of his hands. There were six longer hairs and three shorter ones. Had she read the Americans – Bellow, Roth, Auster? How was her philosophy – Toussaint, Nietzsche, Baudrillard? Had she seen That Obscure Object of Desire? Had she seen Vertigo?

He screened films for her as she lay on the carpeted floor of his office. She positioned her body so he could see down her top. She felt as if she were slowly seducing a priest through a confessional grille. She watched the lint from the carpet rise and fall. Soft carpet was still new to her.

‘Do you understand it’s about the danger of possession and the futility of desire?’ he asked.

She looked at him sadly. ‘All the money he spent on that suit. What a waste.’

Natasha felt altruistic during these trips, like she was throwing pieces of bread to a starving duck. The professor acted innocent, like nothing had happened with a student before, but Natasha wasn’t sure. She felt like he might have gotten away with a lot in his office simply because of the size and shape of it. Despite her doubts, when she first touched him, on her sixth appearance, she giggled – playing the virgin – and he blushed right down to the back of his hands.

*

When Natasha first entered college, at eighteen, a boy called Patrick, stick-thin, raised Catholic, had attached himself to her. He was her first boyfriend. They were a good pairing because she was a strange person pretending to be a normal person, and he was a normal, well-raised person desperately pretending to be strange. She knew when they left college he would get a job in a bank, develop financial ideas. He was the sole link to a life Natasha felt she could never fully be part of. Already she suspected love was over for her. How could you make another person happy? How could they make you happy?