“So, this is it!” Ben says. I hold the door as he wheels his bike in. As he does, our bodies momentarily touch. Ben blushes. He clears his throat. “Essentially the same as yours. Apart from the hook.” He points up to the ceiling from where, in my studio, the plant he got me hangs. Here, though, the ceiling isn’t visible. There’s silver foil taped across it. It sags in the middle. “Oh, yeah, that’s up there to keep the heat in. There’s no heating in the building and the electricity isn’t cheap, so . . .” I can see us, reflected wonkily in the foil. My face on a crease is twisted and demonic. Ben’s face is stretched out so his nose and the distance between his eyes are very wide; he looks like a fish. I imagine my reflection moving closer to Ben’s. It travels across the sagging middle section of the foil, across all the creases and crevices, and, once it reaches Ben’s reflection, doesn’t stop but instead joins together with his fish face and then engulfs it completely. I take a deep breath in.

“That’s imaginative,” I say. I turn my attention away from the ceiling. “Does it work?”

“Phone charger’s there,” Ben says.

“Thanks.” I plug my phone in and start creating an account on FedEx.

“Yeah, it works. I mean . . . in theory, it should be doing something.” Ben’s still looking up at the ceiling. “Yeah, I suppose I don’t really know if it works.” He pauses. “You can sit on that crate if you want.”

I sit down. Ben’s studio is extremely cluttered. There’s a structure built out of pine that acts like a sort of mezzanine covered in floor cushions. There are books on time, clockmaking, and gilding covering the table and some of the floor; there’s rubbish everywhere, items of clothing here and there—socks balled up, T-shirts, pants—old plastic bags, half-eaten food, and, then, clock hands; they’re all over the place, strung up on the walls like pendulums, in among the clutter, on top of various materials I assume Ben is using as plinths: bricks, breeze blocks, crates, boxes, and what looks like piles of mud. I had forgotten that Ben is an artist, as well as the studio manager. I look at his plump fingers, fumbling with the cord of the blind on one of the windows.

“You should see to your cuts,” I say, when he has closed each of the blinds. My stomach rumbles.

“Hungry again?” Ben says.