“Yeah,” I shift on my feet. “I mean . . . yeah, that’s what I was given.” I feel a bit panicky. There’s not really anything of worth in the suitcase—my laptop is already at the studio—but there’s stuff in there that feels comfortingly familiar in a way a laptop never can. Books I read when I was younger, clothes that I’ve lived most of my adult life in, old sketchbooks, and then there’s my birth certificate too. My mum folded it up small, eight ways, and sewed it in the lining of one of a pair of gloves she’d kept from before she was turned, centuries ago. It’s not valuable. But it is a token of my human birth, proof that I was born completely normal and mortal, before my mum turned me just a few days later. It’s a little secret, now that I’m beginning to look younger than my age: a memento of my short-lived, purely human life that I’ll carry around forever, or that I’d at least planned to before this.

“It’s not there?” I say, my voice high pitched. “That’s the ticket I got. There was a woman who gave it to me and she tore the other end off and took it back there.” I point to the door the guy came through a few seconds ago.

“No,” he says, looking down at the ticket still. “There’s nothing back there with this number.” He looks up. “You want me to look again?”

“Um, yeah,” I say, angrily. I look at my hands on the counter. They’re shaking a bit. I can’t tell if it’s because of this issue with my suitcase, or because of the hunger that I can’t feel anymore but know is there in the background.

“Okay,” the man says. And he shuffles back through the door.

While I wait, I try to remember everything that is in the suitcase as though, if I could just remember it all, I’d at least have a version of it in my head. When he comes back, he is empty-handed. “Sorry, miss,” he says. “It isn’t there. Unfortunately, these things happen from time to time. Must have been a mix-up or something. I’ll give you a form you can fill out to make a claim to the head office and I can give you a refund of,” and he looks down at the ticket again, “yeah . . . twenty-two-pound-fifty right now for the cost of today.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say. “Really?”

The man looks up at me, his eyes small and beady. As he does, his neck presents itself to me. Hello, it seems to say. Nice to meet you.

“Sorry,” the man says.

I look away from him. “Whatever,” I say, and I concentrate on getting my wallet out.

“So . . . you’re taking the refund, right?”