Maria stopped at the gate and threw away her cigarette. There was a deserted street lined with small houses to the right and a bus stop just beyond them. Normally, she would wait for a bus and go home. But she didn’t want to do that. Maria headed in the opposite direction, towards a field. She fell to the ground in the wet, stubby, yellowing grass and rolled onto her back, squinting at the pink clouds in the setting sun. Hard blades of grass pressed into her back. An insect sluggishly crawled up her sleeve and pierced skin in search of a capillary. Maria crushed it. She reflected irritably on how she would have to take her coat to the dry cleaner’s. It might even be nice to buy a new one, not that she could afford it. And there are Mum’s bills to pay, and Tykhon’s New Year’s present. The Elektra Belle Epoque Chrome . . . too bad he wouldn’t like that for a present.

She turned her head to one side and watched the bleak setting sun through the stalks. The clouds thickened and grew leaden. Twilight was creeping in from the other end of the field. Foreign and silent, it was part of a world to which Maria no longer belonged. When had it all happened? Where had all feeling gone? Was it there, in the church, that she had been shot through with this silence? Or earlier, when the first letter had arrived, scalpel-like exposing reality, her coldness and inability to love? Or was it before that? In that stark white hospital at the start of summer, when somebody’s malign gloved hand had taken away that piece of her?

Maria closed her eyes. When she reopened them, she was far from the field.