“Listen for the canaries’ movements. If they die, there’s gas in the room. But don’t worry, you’ll be just fine. I’ll send someone down to look after Thomas. At the start of the shift after next.”

It was Mr. Mosley who said it and why would he lie? But it was dark already when he spoke, and his voice had no body, no presence, sprang from no source. Like God’s, when He spoke on the day He made the world. But that’s blasphemy. No wonder though that the first thing He made was light. The dark is a lonely place. Livia has been here for no more than a thousand breaths. And already she knows it.

Of course, she is not alone. There is Thomas whom she heard being bundled into one of the beds. And Charlie, not five steps away. The wound has reopened, he has announced. Now he is busy at Thomas’s bedside, muttering to himself, trying to stem the bleeding in the dark. She fights with herself not to speak to him, distract him from his work. And so she waits, listens, drowns in the black.

The disorientation is total. She is, to her own senses, only her breath, the gurgling of her stomach. Her outside has dissolved, can be made present only by running her palms down the length of her skin, her face and neck, and (bashfully this) down the front of her dress, all the way to its hem, touching her sides, her knees, her calves, making herself real to herself and preserving her image, assembled through a hundred run-ins with a looking glass.

She bites her lip, and savours the reality of flesh and pain.

Time slips by, moves through the dark in slippered feet. In the absence of sight, other senses become vivid, fill the void with meanings true or false. At times it seems to Livia as though there are other people in the room, creeping around in silence, just inches from her, brushing her clothes, pulling faces in her sightless face. Sounds tug at her, have no origins other than the dark. It might be Thomas moaning, or Charlie’s mutter. Lovers embracing in the cave next door. A miner screaming far away as his hands are burnt by shale gas. The canaries’ brittle talons raking at the cage as they slowly suffocate.