THE WATER FILLS the bathtub slowly, over a number of hours. As it does so, the body of the man begins to float, rising with the level of the liquid, the small amount of fat and the air in his body keeping him on the surface for now. Falling from the tap, the water is clear. As the thin stream enters the tub, it mixes with the man’s blood so that the color of the bathwater varies from pale rose at his feet, to plumes of bright red near his head, where pulse pressure shoots the blood from the wound in regular bursts. It takes a long time, but when the bath is full, the solution finds its way to the overflow, and from there it trickles through the many meters of pipework to the sewers deep below the block of flats.

In the bathtub, as well as the man and the water and the blood, there is a towel. The towel is drawn toward the overflow until, at last, a combination of the man’s legs and the bunching of the thick fabric blocks the hole completely. No one is there to turn off the tap; the bath keeps filling, and keeps filling, so that soon, like a bloody version of the magic porridge pot it goes over, flooding the bathroom, searching out the edges of the vinyl, breaking through, soaking into the floorboards, pooling in the cavity under the floor. There’s a layer of sealant there and a layer of soundproofing, but the water finds the lowest point. It accumulates, becomes heavier, weakens the plasterboard. It only needs a tiny gap, a pinprick, to break through.

In the flat below, Mrs. Stefanidis is preparing to eat her lunch, a small cheese sandwich on white bread. She feels rather than hears something drop, disrupting the air close to her face, but when she places her hands on the tabletop and feels around, there appears to be nothing amiss. After a momentary frown, her fingers find the plate and raise the sandwich to her lips, the macular degeneration that has reduced her vision to a sliver of peripheral preventing her from noticing the spreading pink circle that has wetted the middle of the bread, the droplet of blood and bathwater that landed there, that came from the ceiling above. As she opens her mouth, another fat sphere drops and bursts, this time on her hand, and she puts the sandwich down.