She watched this odd hunt pass and then stood up and raced toward the house. She ran so fast she had to catch herself with both hands when she reached the wall. She was standing in a flowerbed full of stinging nettles, pushing her fingers into the crack between the sash and the frame of a casement window; after prying the window open, she heaved herself up and crawled in over the sill, under a bobbin-lace café curtain. A parlour with wainscoting and painted wooden floor. A sofa and a removals box. A tall cabinet with open doors and emptied shelves. She leaned out through the window. The squirrel was sitting underneath it, looking up at her. She backed up two steps and it came flying in through the window.

She ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, opened a door that was standing ajar and then a closed door. A dark room. She sank to her knees by the bed.

‘Susso,’ she hissed. ‘Wake up!’

Susso turned her head. A white patch covered one of her eyes and the other stared at her in terror.

‘It’s me. It’s Dana.’

She peeked in under the duvet to see if she was dressed, and she was. But she showed no sign of recognising her. Diana stroked her hair, which smelled of shampoo. Her touch made Susso pull her head in under the covers. Diana dug around for her hands, but they proved impossible to catch.

At the sound of an engine outside, she walked over to the window and peered out through a gap between the blankets hung up as makeshift blackout curtains. A man in a pile jacket lumbered by with a rifle in his hand.

She waved the squirrel over, picked it up off the floor and brought it to the bed as though she were a healer and the animal a miracle crystal. She had no idea what it might do; she had probably figured it would jump down and connect with Susso somehow, but it didn’t. Judging from the way it was digging its razor-sharp claws into Diana’s skin, it wanted to stay with her. When she tried to shake it off, it dashed up to sit on her shoulder.

‘You know what. I’m going to leave you here unless you help her.’

Its tail brushed against her cheek when the animal turned around.

‘Dana,’ Susso whispered.

‘Yes. I’m here. Here I am, sweetie.’

‘I can’t see.’

‘You have a patch over your eye.’

‘I’m pathetically blind.’

*

Susso shuffled out of her dark chamber like a ghost out of a crypt; she even waved a hand about in a vain attempt to shield herself from the sunlight. Baggy sweatpants and a T-shirt in an enormous men’s size. A bruise like half a moustache on her top lip. Diana took her by the hand and led her downstairs.