My boyfriend was king of a small and ineffectual country. He gestured to the scenery as if he had positioned it. If he questioned the morals of a character, in the next episode they would prove themselves to be loose, unworthy. When he pointed to the sky and said, ‘Sure looks like snow!’ snow fell immediately and coated the ground he stood on.

One afternoon, because of the painfulness of the show, I hid in the hall cupboard. I wanted to experience what it felt like to be closed away so I just climbed right in. It wasn’t so bad in the cupboard. It was definitely the best place for me. The comedian had fired our permanent maid for what he claimed was ‘sinister tampering with the track’ so we had irregular replacements – trains of twenty-something women who trooped in and immediately out, distressed by the apartment.

We lived in immovable filth. It wasn’t immovable exactly – we kicked it around – but we never completely rid ourselves of it. That day, the day of the cupboard hiding, the latest maid found me, swinging the door open and then shrugging her shoulders as if to say, ‘Here we go, another rich wacko.’ I didn’t correct her. I didn’t tell her I was poor with a decent personality, a fine personality, which I displayed to almost nobody. Her conviction that I was a wacko seemed to give her strength.

Before I came to the city, I’d never seen a maid. It wasn’t something I grew up with. I imagined them all as fusty and evangelical, but this one was overweight, elderly and looked like she didn’t give two true hoots about tidiness. I disliked the idea of her going through our things, hoisting out bags of our private rubbish, touching the spines of the empty books that lined the shelves.

I’m not a slow person but it took me several minutes of close monitoring to understand the connection between the maid and the street psychic. I recognised her faraway stare of other worldliness and her thick, veined ankles.

‘You’re not a maid,’ I said, my hand thrusting in and out of a bag of Cheetos, ‘you’re a psychic.’

She just looked at me.

‘Is it hard living a double life?’

I wanted her to say something supernatural like: ‘You tell me,’ or ‘We all live double lives.’

There was a heavy sort of silence. ‘Please rate me on the website,’ she said, finally. That night, on the website, I picked the five-star option and gold stars flooded the screen one by one.

When my boyfriend returned I was seated in my usual place at the window, studying the opposite people, their dark and impossible lives.

‘Did you have windows in that place?’ he asked me cautiously.

‘Not as clean,’ I replied, smacking two fingers on the lower pane of glass. ‘Smaller.’