At noon, she joined Kamal in the cave where they always met. She said nothing about her fears. She wanted to drown her sorrow in the texture of his skin. They made love, and for a moment, the world seemed less cruel. Kamal said nothing when he saw her cry. He kissed her, and their kisses tasted of salt water.

In the evening, Giulia returned home. She had a migraine, she said, and went upstairs to shut herself in her room and huddle under her sheets.

That night, her dreams were filled with strange images: her father’s workshop broken up, their house emptied of its contents and sold, her mother drawn and distraught, the workers out on the street, the strands of hair scattered, flung into the sea, a whole stormy, tossing sea of hair … Giulia twisted and turned, she wanted to empty her mind and think of nothing, but the images kept coming, relentless, like an endlessly repeating dream she was powerless to escape, a sinister strain of music playing over and over again, stuck on a hellish loop. She was delivered from her torment, at last, when the dawn came. She rose, and felt as if she hadn’t slept, as if her head was clamped in a vice. Her feet were ice-cold, her ears buzzed.

She stumbled to the bathroom. A hot or cold shower would banish the nightmare, she hoped, and shock her exhausted body awake. She moved towards the bath and stopped.

There was a spider, right there in the bottom of the bath.

A small spider, with a slender body and graceful legs, like stitchwork on lace. It must have climbed up through the pipes and out into the white immensity of the enamelled cast iron bath, trapped there with no way out. At first, the spider would have struggled, tried to climb up the icy white walls, but its lacy legs would have slipped, sending it back down to the bottom. It knew now that it was pointless to struggle, and stayed where it was, awaiting its fate, motionless, hoping for another way out. But which?

And then Giulia began to cry. Not at the sight of the black spider on the white enamel – though she had a horror of spiders and bugs, they provoked instant revulsion, uncontrolled panic. No, it was the certainty that, like the creature in the bath, she was caught in a trap from which there was no escape. And no one was coming to save her.