‘I know you’re crying under there,’ she said.

The sheet sniffled.

‘Did I ever tell you that when my mother left my father he pulled out his front two teeth with a pliers? I didn’t understand it then but I’m starting to now. Love is very hard.’

‘What was your mother like?’

‘She was like me.’

The sheet nodded.

*

As they reached the three-month mark, that milestone creeping up on them both, draining them of all life and hope, the professor’s expression became more resigned, his great height reduced to a stoop, his suits creased and untidy as if he were choosing to get dressed in the dark to avoid his reflection. In the evenings, when he walked towards Natasha, down the more secretive ramps, it wasn’t the walk of a man who has won the sexual jackpot. It was the frozen gait of someone who wanted to ask: ‘Is this still happening to me? Is it?’

At dinner, that night, squashed into a small corner booth, in a low-priced restaurant, he looked around, frantically, as if pleading for someone to help him. Natasha could see the other diners thinking – that lucky soul. But mostly they could only see the back of his head. Natasha could see the whole thing and it wasn’t a pretty picture. Only the most macabre and disturbed of painters would enjoy creating a scene like this. The front of him, especially his gentle ageing face, was stricken. He was acutely aware that he had made a mistake and his mistake was sitting opposite him, munching cheerfully on vegetables.

‘Eat up,’ Natasha shoved his plate towards him. ‘Enjoy yourself. We’re having a liaison.’

She could be mildly badgering, mildly abusive. It was a result of her control problems. The professor looked like he might cry again.

‘Let me tell you about my childhood.’

‘Natasha, please,’ the professor said, putting down his fork. ‘You have to rise above your circumstances.’

‘I’m not a character in one of your films. It’s not that easy.’

‘You must try.’

‘What if I don’t want to?’

‘Don’t get sentimental about the place you grew up,’ he said. ‘That’s for pedestrian minds.’

‘Excuse me,’ Natasha said and stood up angrily. She walked to the bathroom. In the mirror she watched her face. She felt bilocated. She wasn’t here, but she wasn’t there either. She looked at her reflection like they were in on the same joke. In the cubicle, she shredded some tissue, threw it in the air and watched it fall like wedding confetti. She knew someone would have to clean that up. She had no excuses for why she did the things she did. She was sick of the cleanliness of the college, the neat angles, the smooth walls of the buildings, the gates that slammed shut. She saw the professor’s pristine bedroom as an extension of the college. She was sick of reason and order; she wanted filth and chaos. She thought of the dim basement bar her mother used to bring her to as a child, and how the college was the same really – no better, no more worthy. Everybody with their own solitary pains, their own endless private afflictions, but nobody looking anybody directly in the eye and asking what they were. Let’s turn up the music and pretend we’re having a hell of a time in here. She looked in the mirror again. Her face was just a sack of skin. Her face was totally white, and she considered the possibility that, after a long wait, she was finally falling apart.