The pages somehow built up. They stayed late. They worked Sundays. Their giggles could be heard in other rooms in the building. The play slowly jerked to life. Lines were written. Ideas were formed. In the beginning their ambition was huge and they talked about setting it in a house with a chandelier, bringing it down in a massive crash at the end of the first act. The chandelier would represent the college. It would symbolise the end of a regime. But they had no money and they had no chandelier. They had no money at all. They had to be economical. They were using the last few cents in Lucy’s account.

‘The chandelier would have been excessive anyway,’ Lucy said. ‘Ostentatious.’

‘We don’t need a chandelier,’ Natasha said, ‘we’re making a new reality.’

‘It would have been nice though.’

‘Satisfying, for sure.’

‘That smash,’ Lucy smacked her hand on the table. ‘Glass everywhere.’

‘Beautiful.’

Neither of them knew how to sew. Lucy learned by watching videos in the computer house, her fingers moving in and out of the material nimbly. All the clothes came out at strange angles. They were immensely weird in a way neither Lucy or Natasha could explain, all oddly improvised: staples where trouser tucks should be, sellotape everywhere.

‘This works better,’ Natasha decided.

On an evening in their third week, the tree stretching out ominously in the dark, Natasha looked up from the delicate arrangement of safety pins she was working on. She hadn’t seen the inside of a lecture theatre in several months. She no longer knew how the chairs were arranged; she was even losing the slight amount of knowledge she had gained in Professor Carr’s office.

‘I am going to the unemployment building,’ she said.

Lucy looked at her intently. ‘You are,’ she said. ‘You’re going to the unemployment building, you will see the rotting walls, you will count the cracks in the ceiling, you will join the long lines, you will sit in a plastic seat with your number to receive a nonexistent amount of income.’

‘Will it be as bad as we’ve all imagined it to be?’

‘You will cry but, for the sake of appearances, you will hide it in your sleeve. You will close your eyes and pretend to be elsewhere.’

‘But I won’t be elsewhere.’

‘No.’

‘Where will I be?’

‘You will be in the unemployment building.’

‘So be it,’ Natasha said, with great strength, as if facing up to a prophecy.

‘I will be alone here without you.’