Patrick arrived home on the edge of Sunday evenings, looking strange, dirty, with that shame he carried in his shoulders whenever he had been cheating on her. Whoever he had been sleeping with, Natasha still got an almighty thrill watching him eat those lasagnes. As she layered the ingredients the red of the mince reminded her of her father’s bloody mouth, huge and open, at their kitchen table. To calm herself, she often locked herself in the bathroom and counted the perfumes, emerging extremely fragrant. She didn’t eat any of the lasagnes and if Patrick started telling her about the fun he had at the clubs – what a glorious good time it all was – she just stood up and left the room. Afterwards, they had sex tentatively, lightly, as if neither of them wanted to be involved any more. On one of their last weekends together, Patrick, a psychology student, said that God had appeared to him in a dream and told him the only real addiction Natasha had inherited from her mother was her addiction to pain.

‘Maybe God should have diagnosed me before you got me pregnant,’ she said.

Finally, in the college coffee shop, their relationship was coming to a close. She slid a cold lasagne across the table as a symbol of their time together.

‘I don’t like you anymore,’ she announced.

‘You don’t like anything, Natasha.’

It was true. One day, as a challenge, she set herself the task of writing down everything she didn’t like. She filled an entire copybook with her tiny, hateful handwriting. She included the elite college at least forty-five times. She included the concept of fun ten times. She included Patrick eighteen times.

She shrugged. ‘Goodbye, Patrick.’

Patrick tapped his fingers meditatively across his nose, subsuming this rejection into his grand, personal narrative within a few short seconds, and stood up. He didn’t say goodbye. When he was safely out of sight, Natasha took out the ornate cigarette case in which she kept her cotton wool. She had to be careful she didn’t hear any opinions in the coffee shop. She crammed some in her ears and began to cry. Normally, she didn’t understand her fellow students’ need for melancholy, their high emotional register, shrieking music and complete lack of composure like they were auditioning daily for some drama she wanted nothing to do with. She had to keep her emotions quiet and fixed in place or her whole face would break apart. But this was the end of her first romance and she was determined to enjoy it. She wept loudly, not knowing herself if they were fake or real tears; she attracted a lot of attention from nearby tables. Her father’s false teeth appeared to her that night, their cold porcelain chattering in the silver of her dreams. For once she could hear what they said: ‘Natasha, don’t lose your mind.’

*

Natasha’s days passed as a series of empty diary dates, no classes attended and no closer to discovering what she was studying. Inside the campus, the students stripped themselves of their wool jumpers and cardigans, and lay awake at night worrying about their results. Natasha didn’t lie awake at night. She slept heavily and had wild dreams where she was watched by a thousand eyes, chased down corridors. It felt absurd to continue her service in the college.