As she scrolled through the emails, on the whirring machine next to hers, a small, first year girl moved through photos of another young girl. Through the fast succession of images, Natasha watched as the onscreen girl stood and knelt in different poses. Close-up. Her make-up was slick and robotic, adhering to regulations. Larger view. Full-length shot. Two thumbs hooked under the strings of her vest. Nipples flared towards the camera.

‘Who’s that person?’ Natasha asked, tapping the monitor.

The first year girl focused on her screen as if willing Natasha to disappear. She ran her tongue over her parched lips. ‘Nobody,’ she said, after some consideration. She carefully angled her whole body away.

The last email Natasha opened was a single stage direction: The girl sits alone, waiting, in the clinic.

After much aggravated typing, she located an academic email. She searched for evidence of what she was studying as the hazy sunlight shone on the computer house. She couldn’t organise the words into sentences, she couldn’t read the words, she felt hatred towards the words. All of this transpired within a few short seconds. The hazy light shone on.

*

One night, two months into their rather tedious liaison, while seated in a mid-priced restaurant, the professor told Natasha she reminded him of the music of his era – which he had loved at the time, which he had needed to feel alive at the time – but now whenever he listened back, with intelligence and reason, it was baffling. It was just a lot of empty noise. When he heard that music now, jagged and alienating, he felt one foul swoop of nostalgia before he realised it was all rather silly. He had no idea how he had ever danced to it.

‘You probably just did this,’ she raised her hands in the air and swayed gently.

‘Please put your hands down.’

This was their love. Sadly unrhythmic. Silly.

‘You’re not like the others,’ the professor said, doubtfully.

‘What others?’

Afterwards when they went back to his bachelor apartment, Natasha wanted to watch trash TV. The professor owned a large plasma screen that was perfectly suited to trash viewing. Her incredible self-control didn’t naturally extend to her taste in television. She tried to frame it critically, but it was straight-up, stick-in-your-teeth trash. Natasha had romance visions like anyone her age. She wasn’t a girl who doodled in her notebook and never had been, but she entertained scenarios. In her fantasies, they watched Breast Implants Gone Wrong with feeling and sincerity. Firstly, they would marvel at how fine and normal the breasts were before they underwent any surgical procedures. As they watched the horror unfold, Natasha would cry knowledgeably over what women do to their bodies. Then she would swan around the room, naked, her unremarkable breasts framed in a newly appreciated light.

She didn’t get this opportunity. Instead they watched a film where time was the enemy and ageing was a singular tragedy: a film about a middle-aged man. Natasha lay face down, her head buried in the bedsheets, her hands locked over her ears, while the film was happening. She had an instinct for self-preservation and she knew if she caught sight of a single scene, even for a second, it would reduce her life span by several years. She understood the professor was watching the film, thinking wistfully of his lost youth, and Natasha’s failings as a student, of which there were several hundred, and her failings as a human being, of which there were also several hundred. As the film neared its climax, he placed the thinner of the two bedsheets over his head and cried, taking in huge gulps of air like an inconsolable ghost.