He bent down, took her by the top of her arm, backed off a little, and punched her. She felt his knuckles split her mouth. He held her up by the wrist. The agony of hanging from her shoulder spread. He punched her again, and that punch was black and distant, brief and soft. She couldn’t see. He dropped her. Her vision cleared. She saw a flash of red as he picked up the plastic box, in and out of focus. She didn’t see it hit her, she heard breaking, tasted metal. Her mouth wasn’t like her mouth, but pulpy, floating. He picked her up by the arm she had fallen on. With one eye she saw his boots, and blood falling on them, glossy and dark, like dripping marbles, one after the other, perfect circles, flattening as they fell.

‘Jesus,’ he said. He didn’t sound angry. ‘We need to move.’

He dragged her along the corridor, down the stairs, and she saw the banisters go by like watching a film.

‘Walk,’ he said.

Her feet couldn’t find the stairs. Her shoulder was out of the socket, like a chicken leg from the joint. He reached the hall, and hoisted her up alongside him, round the waist, as though he were saving her, and dragged her backwards to the kitchen door, clumsily, the tyre iron in his fist across her face. Through her hair, she saw the front door at an angle, and a sliver, bloodied, of daylight and the driveway through the window. Sky. A car. The bonnet of a white car. A white car. She saw it, but before there was time, before any time at all, he pulled her backwards through the fire door, and she saw it close. His breath rasped. Past the empty counters, no knives, no boards, no metal pans, just wiped down surfaces she and Dan had tidied, all going away from her, and her own legs dragging on the ground. The annexe. The fridges.

He whispered, ‘Wait.’

He wrapped his arm round her head and face. She hung in the sweat-muscle vice of his arm. She heard him turn the key, the door. She writhed. She heard the doorbell ring, loud and long. He closed his hand around her neck. Her eyeballs swelled. Her veins, constricted, burned. Then she fell, gently as a leaf, down, drifting, in enormous space. And quietness. She had no sense of herself, no thoughts at all. Then light burst onto her, and pain came back. They were outside. He was dragging her across the ground. The world was like a broken mirror, smell and taste and splintered vision, seeing pain, breathing bubbling blood between her nose and throat.