During the day, she wandered the campus with Patrick – avoiding her classes, the buildings looming over them, the city, outside the walls, doing whatever it did in its daylight hours – and he filled her in on the comings and goings of the place. She worried, despite all preventative measures being taken, self-control barriers being rightfully installed, her daily exercise regime producing slick, metallic sweat, that she had inherited her mother’s weak and crazy personality. Her mind felt like a long trailer carrying a number of cars; if one car went they would all go, scatter across the motorway, cause carnage. She would miss her sanity when it went.

She wanted to spend her weekends like the other students, underground, undernourished, blacking out, being infinitely surprised by her own youth and beauty, but she didn’t allow herself. In her entire college career, she hadn’t had one bit of fun and was immensely proud of this fact. Fun was forbidden to her. She might enjoy it too much and slip into the endless pursuit of it. At least she was charming, she assured herself. But charm was thin compensation for a life of constant, lurking terror.

Her relationship with Patrick had become queasier and queasier. In September she had fallen pregnant and she’d asked him to steal money from his parents to pay for the abortion.

‘Steal money from your father,’ he said. ‘I’m not a thief.’

‘Why are you this way, Patrick?’ she asked, in genuine bafflement.

The night before she travelled, Patrick, counting out the cash, looked like he might cry. ‘It’s okay if you want to cry,’ he said to Natasha.

‘I don’t,’ she replied. ‘I’m not sure if you know this but I had a very tough childhood and have had to overcome obstacles far greater than this to seal my place in the elite college.’

‘You don’t go to any of your classes.’

‘I have a disorder,’ she said. ‘Anyway you’re only upset because you think you’re supposed to be. You don’t care about me.’

He didn’t correct her. It was as if he couldn’t procure an abortion and lie in the same week. It would have to be one or the other. In the clinic she sat in the waiting room, trying to figure out how she was supposed to feel, wondering who to blame, nurturing her anger. It all happened in a flash. Although she was alone, she didn’t feel alone, she felt like a part of a large pantomime dragon made up of other women, a long line of them, moving and swaying invisibly through the city. When she returned, she and Patrick stayed together. It was around then she stopped attending college full-time and starting using the cotton wool more liberally.

At the weekends, when Patrick went out to clubs, she stayed in his family home and cooked him hearty lasagnes. She bought a special apron. She wanted to look proper, like a girl who would never steal, never have an abortion. The apron was a plastic material; every stain wiped right off. She bought it in the luxury department store. On Saturday nights she watched television in the good living room with his parents, who loved her like an orphan.