‘OK?’ asks the museum assistant, Mikke, a bony young man with his hair slicked over to one side and a walkie-talkie crackling responsibly on his belt. He has already told her he will be there the whole time, and if she wants letting out, she only has to call his name. He has to say this for insurance reasons, just as he has to make her sign a waiver that will never be used.

‘I’m gonna fasten the straps now, OK?’

‘Then what do I do?’

‘Whatever you like.’

‘Do I talk to people?’

‘If you like. Or go into your head. It’s up to you.’

Not for a long time, she realises, once it begins, not for a very long time has she sat unoccupied like this – not working, not talking, not cooking or cleaning or reading, just sitting here. Occasionally people enter the room and circle around her, but she can’t really see them; she can track their voices, but only if they are talking loudly enough, and even then, what they say is in Dutch. It isn’t what she’d imagined – she’d imagined lying in the main exhibition hall, in daylight, laughing with other visitors who stopped to ask her what on earth she was doing. But maybe this is better. More eerie; more artistic.

She cannot see any part of the chair that supports her, or anything of the surrounding room except the doorway’s square of light. It’s like she’s floating in the air. Her posture, it comes to her, is like the posture of someone being abducted by aliens in an old science fiction film, the body pulled upwards by the navel in a beam of light. But it isn’t a beam of light that keeps her in position. It isn’t the restraints, either. The chair is almost two centuries old, and she is afraid to damage it, so she lies very still. She doesn’t even try to pull against the straps, to see how strong they are; she just stirs her body very slightly, now and then, to feel their pressure in place.

Shufflings and murmurings as a larger group enters the room. There’s something expectant in the hush, and Claire is not surprised when a face rises above her, the silhouette of a face – an older woman’s, her comb of pale hair backlit by the lights, and with something on her head, some strange contraption, a kind of silver disc.

‘Miss Jansen,’ the woman says, in an unidentifiable accent. ‘What state are we in today?’

She is wearing a white jacket or coat, and carrying a clipboard that has the museum’s logo on the back. Another volunteer, then. Or maybe an actor. Are there actors in the Living Museum?

‘Afternoon rounds, Miss Jansen. Wakey-wakey. Is there anything you’d like to discuss?’

‘I don’t know,’ Claire says, cautiously. The people in the room are quiet, presumably watching. ‘What sort of thing?’

‘Well. Yesterday you were telling me about your mother. Isn’t that right?’