Sitting in front of the pool building were two guys from the local drunkards’ bench. The one was fanning himself with a voucher from the city, the other scratching his skinny neck. They each had a beer in hand, and I could see they’d been in the showers, but also that their hair shone in the sun with a water-repellent sheen. “They never fix the sauna,” one of them said as I locked my bike, “but every time some schoolkid shits the pool, they shut everything down. Last week a little brown turd was swimming around down in the deep end. So they drained everything.” I stood still, leaning over my luggage rack. “They’ve changed the water, darling,” the skinny one said. “And you needn’t worry about us. We never get as far as the pool.”

It was too late to turn back now, and in the long run it was cheapest to buy a ten-visit card, said the girl in the glass 122cage. So that’s what I did, and when I’d done that, I found the changing room full of women and scratched lockers. I can’t start anything I can’t finish. If I don’t finish it I feel weak, and if I feel weak, it just spreads. I rooted around in my wallet, my pockets, the bottom of my bag for a ten-krone coin for the locker.

“Need change?” asked a woman’s voice. She looked like she might have been from India. “I’m not used to using the pool,” I said, and she said, “If you’ve got a twenty,” and she jingled two ten-krone pieces in her palm. We traded, and I didn’t know where to look while she took off her clothes. I started by removing my shoes, then my T-shirt, my skirt, and though I rarely fold my clothes properly otherwise, I creased and smoothed till I stood looking down at myself and thought, there you have me: Flat Grounds.

I found a shower diagonally across from her. An older woman was scrubbing her body as if it were a plank floor. Meanwhile, the Indian woman had her own special system for washing herself: hands, feet, face. There was something ceremonial about it, also when she donned her bathing cap, and two showers down stood a woman with a lady razor. She was trimming her pubes, and she passed the blades across her labia as though the razor were a bow and her pussy a violin. When she turned her backside to me I could see she was called Amy.