She’d met Adrian during a weekend they’d both spent in a large house just outside Exeter, to celebrate a birthday of a friend from university, whose boyfriend was a friend of Adrian’s. She’d been light-headed with her mother’s recent death, bereft and dizzy, appallingly relieved at her new freedom, thrillingly alive and burningly wretched. And there he was, a would-be actor full of plans, with a dazzling smile and a silver tongue. They had been conscious of each other at once, from the moment he carried her case up the stairs for her, and there had been a surreptitious thrill to the two days – sitting round the large table with a crowd of other people and looking across at each other, flushing, glancing away; lying on the lawn in the hot sun after lunch, their damp, outstretched limbs just a few inches from each other; dancing together in the early hours and at last he had kissed her, in the garden beside the copper beech tree, with music pulsing out of the open doors. He’d been freedom and family all at once; adventure and safety. He would heal her, hurl her into a new world. In a dark room at the top of the house, quietly so no one would hear, he’d lifted off her dress and touched her skin with the tips of his fingers. He’d whispered in her ear that now he’d found her, he wasn’t going to let her go.

Irene wrapped her own arms round her deserted body, on top of the bloody sheets. She rocked herself and little whimpers broke free of her mouth, fragments of sound like petals of dead ash in the air.

‘Please please please please,’ someone said, she said. ‘Please.’

The sound grew louder until it was beating in waves against the inside of her skull.

Something was banging. She saw through half-closed lids that it was light, the washed grey light of early morning, which would brighten later into hot blue. She turned her back on the day. She let the day turn back into night.

Now the noise was a dribble of sound, higher-pitched and rocky, with the hint of words in there somewhere. She listened to the lament. Oh-oh-oh. That was it. Or no-no-no. Was that her voice, that querulous ladder of sound?

She needed a pee but she couldn’t move. She closed her eyes and waded out once more into her dreams.

Her thick swirling dreams. Sometimes they mocked her with what she no longer had and she woke thinking she was happy and had to rediscover her misery all over again. And sometimes they reminded her of what she had lost, so that there was no escape, even in the great unbounded ocean of sleep.