The factory is quiet when I arrive. Water runs off my clothes and hair in streams. I go quietly to my studio and unlock it, and the door closes behind me.

In the dark, I survey the room. Bits of the new life I’d started to build are here and there. The plant from Ben hanging from the hook, puppet Yaga, my painting, the books I bought under the bridge, the books I stole, clothes on the walls, my bed in the corner. I start packing things into my bag. Just some of the things. Most of them, I leave behind—the Beuys book, the book on vegetables I never read, the book on ethics. I open the Sher-Gil book and take out the cutout picture of Three Girls that I’d replaced between the pages earlier, and look at the girls’ faces. Three beautiful faces I feel like I know; perhaps I’ll go and find them, I think; perhaps they’re waiting for me. I put the picture and the book in my bag, and then pick up puppet Yaga.

For the first time, I feel like I truly own her, and it is because, within Gideon’s memories, is the experience of buying art. In among Washoe baskets, Japanese ink drawings, and Chilean arpilleras is puppet Yaga, bought from an auction house in Russia; and among works by Emin and the Chapman brothers and Goya are paintings by my dad—the thick brushstrokes on silk, the angular black marks, the jagged shapes, now mine.

“Hey, Yaga,” I say. Everything about her looks more pronounced: the darkness of her wooden face, the blackness of her clothes and her eyes. “I ate,” I tell her. I put her in my rucksack. Then I leave, to go and pick up my mum, and then to go elsewhere, onward, somewhere.

As I step out of my studio, Ben appears at the foot of the stairs. He’s holding a Pret bag that looks like it’s full of food, and a cardboard container of soup; he carefully places the soup on the floor, and then looks for something in his pockets.

Looking at him now, it feels like the first time I have ever seen him; behind him, the part of his life that he has lived already bobs up and down, filling the stairwell; ahead of him, his future extends out, turning from where he stands and reaching toward me. I can see hints of grief in it, and also other things—his little sister, his dad, the home he grew up in, and his bedroom, which is still decorated as it was when he was a child, with blue walls, and a border of trains along the top—but I also see that it has a definitive end. While I saw the lives of others extend for decades and decades ahead of them, Ben’s cuts off sharply in just a couple of years. What is ahead of him is just the equivalent of a child’s life.