Adrian watched her from under the shield of his arm. She was wearing shapeless, faded jeans and a mustard-coloured sweatshirt that had once belonged to him, with frayed sleeves. Her hair was spiky where she’d run her fingers through it. Nowadays she wore baggy, functional clothes and never stopped moving – look at her now, picking things off the floor, wiping the smudges from the mirror. She was always in a hurry, always vigilant, never at rest; she walked on her high-arched feet as if she was about to break into a run; her eyes flickered when she spoke to him, glancing at the things she had to do. When he’d first met her, she had worn thin skirts through which you could see the shape of her slender legs and bright tops and had had long golden hair, tumbling gloriously down her back. But she’d cut it all off ten months ago, standing in the middle of the kitchen and scissoring off the locks, letting them fall in flickering ribbons on the tiles, and now her face looked strangely exposed and childlike. In the summer, her freckles even spread onto her lips: he remembered the first time he had taken her face between his hands and kissed her on that wide freckled mouth and felt her smile as he kissed her. All those years ago. She had freckles on her back as well, and on her thighs among the gold down and on the backs of her rough hands and sprinkling her wrists and even a few on her knees. He looked at her, her stubborn, hunched shoulders and the way she frowned out at the saturated monochrome sky and bit the side of her nails.

‘I’ll get up in a minute,’ he mumbled thickly. His tongue was leather.

But he lay there for several minutes longer, trying not to think about last night, which anyway seemed to him this morning as unreal and unlikely as a dream that you can’t quite recall yet which lies so heavily in the mind.

Three