Jane would have stayed and talked, she thinks. Jane would not have run away. And she realises that this feeling of panic, this feeling of getting into trouble, is familiar, is left over, from her time in Jane’s orbit.

*

She was in bed and the bed was rolling, a raft on a swollen sea. It was all she could do to cling on. She had been sick: some of it hung in her hair like spray. The sea was green and bioluminescent. She was hundreds of miles from land, miles, even, from the ocean floor. She could hear the thumping of a helicopter far off. They were looking for her but she could not move. Every so often the searchlights washed across her, without stopping – or else it was a wave, bearing in its body thousands of luminous creatures, sweeping them over the raft, leaving her behind.

*

She walks back down the main road towards the town. When she is halfway between the windmill and the house with the fig tree, on a stretch of road with nothing either side but low scrubby grasses and the white dots of shrines, she hears a loud buzzing by the right side of her head. She waves it away, but it comes closer, and then, when she thinks it can get no louder, it enters her ear.

She shrieks, and the shriek sounds far away compared to the drill-bit buzzing inside her. She tips her right ear downwards, hoping the thing will drop out, but it is determined to go deeper, against the pull of gravity. It is small and hard. Some kind of beetle, she thinks, bracing nevertheless for a sharpness, a sting. She wonders if she should flip her head over the other way, if it would climb towards the light, but she cannot stand the prospect, and stays where she is.

There is a long, lonely minute where she dwindles to the radius of her earhole and can think only of tweezers and hospitals and pincers and legs and her loneliness up here, her total loneliness, nobody to look at it, nobody to draw it out.

The creature makes a decision of its own and withdraws as quickly as it came, so quickly she catches only a flash of green iridescence as it whirs off across the dry scrub towards the horizon. The world is explosively large again. She crouches in the dust at the side of the road and sobs with horror and relief.

*

There was a knock and it seemed important to answer it. She staggered upright in her short pyjamas to the door, but nobody was there. The knock came again, from the patio. She drew the curtain back. Kostas and Nikos were outside. They smiled at her, and then their smiles vanished, and then they returned. She was trying to understand why they were there. She felt obscurely flattered. What did they want?