IT WAS THERE, sitting on the ferry, sitting in between Helena and Olga in the darkness, that a particular image came back to me, the assumptions I’d made before I got there, and before they got there too, in late summer, the scenes I’d imagined when Helena told me that they were leaving, when I’d felt so alone, when I pictured her in her house at night, also alone.

They were not the same images. It was impossible to recover those images. They were lost. Instead these were new images, a new version of the weeks that had passed before I got there, a time I hadn’t thought about in a long while. In this version I pictured Olga clearly, where previously I hadn’t been able to see her. I saw her silence. I saw her at the table, facing Helena. I saw her in my chair. I saw her on the roof. I saw Helena’s outbursts: you never want to do anything, you’re so boring. I saw her eat with cautious mouthfuls. I saw her lonely summer holiday, which was no longer a summer holiday but a strange time with no beginning or end, a dreamtime. I saw her hand flit across her forehead to move a strand of hair that was no longer there. I saw her alone in the garden. I saw her alone, interminably alone, impenetrably alone.

I saw my own loneliness in her. I saw myself in her. I grieved the fantasies that left me as we traveled through the dark.