‘I’m not good enough for you,’ her boyfriend whispered.

‘You are,’ she insisted.

‘I’m not,’ he cried and buried his face in the pillow.

She never told him about the pictures, her side-project which she was able to conduct with remarkable distance from herself. She sent picture after picture after picture. Only her body and face were real, the rest was artificial – the lighting, her make-up, her positions. She raised her prices. On every train journey, dressed in increasingly demure cardigans, she found herself falling more in love with her boyfriend. She didn’t know what time it was anymore: the digits flew by, clock hands spinning day to night, day to night.

Time moved differently inside the college. She followed the invisible rules closely. No vulgarity. No stupidity. No ugliness. She watched German films, the subtitles even more opaque than the French ones. She was using the cotton wool more and more frequently. On train platforms she felt impervious to the weather. She made fairy cakes in her apron, piping the icing carefully.

In his bedroom, looking up at the fake plastic stars affixed to his ceiling, she felt she was no longer a disgusting person but an ordinary person, or perhaps even an extraordinary person. Maybe love could transform you in that way. In the photographs, she arched her back like a cat. The glossy finishes looked like layers of plastic.

One night, after a dream about a dark, empty house, she woke up her boyfriend.

‘What if I die in college and nobody can identify my body?’

‘Lucy,’ he said.

‘I can’t remember what my parents look like.’

‘Call them.’

‘I don’t know their number anymore.’

‘Get the bus and go and see them then.’

‘I will never get another bus in my life,’ she said.

She spent more and more of her time in her boyfriend’s family home, abandoning her own tiny room in a student house. Her room was filling relentlessly with stuff, gifts from the professor and other customers. Soon the sight of the stuff disgusted her; it dimmed a light in her. She looked up at the plastic stars and told her boyfriend about houses she used to go to as a teenager, stairs she used to walk up, entering rooms made of different air. Nothing normal happened in these rooms.

She told him about how she had to leave her past behind, how she couldn’t let it reach her. She had dreams with disagreeable noises. She had dreams with sounds of loud, heavy machinery. She recited lines to keep herself sane. Her boyfriend told her he would protect her, save her. This was love. This was the best the world had to offer.

At night, she wandered her boyfriend’s studio, looking at the glassy eyes of the puppets. They were always awake. They never slept. She moved her mouth in time with theirs, as he planned and organised for his debut show. It was a big project, requiring integrity. He had to create a mood. Lucy drifted around the college, eating expensive salads, experiencing the new planet. During the day, she felt so content and serene, so full of love and potential, she thought it might kill her. The college encouraged her to think but she was too busy learning lines to think.