She pulls on a woollen jumper that has been discarded on the floor by the couch. The apartments on either side, above and below, are empty. Unheated, they don’t act as very good insulation, and in the mornings it takes the apartment time to warm up.

When she was thirteen, her science teacher told the class that if you had enough cups of hot coffee you could heat a room. That the steam they gave off would be enough to keep you warm. At the time she wondered why the teacher didn’t simply use hot water as an example; she had been too young to know the great significance of coffee in adults’ lives. Even now she never can tell what is good coffee and what is not. She just agrees with whomever she is drinking with.

She takes a cup of coffee now and wraps her hands around it. It is too hot to sip. She puts it on the floor then pours a second cup. She puts this one by her feet as well. She is careful not to spill. They have seven cups in the apartment — it should be enough. She places the percolator back on the range and feels the steam from the two cups on the floor kiss at her ankles. She wonders how many it would take to warm the apartment and where the cups could be stored during summer. She is glad she drinks her coffee black now. If she had to add milk, it would cool them down considerably. Though maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the milk would act as an insulating layer, keeping the heat of the coffee in. Who can say?

She places a third and a fourth cup of coffee on the floor, but notices the first two cups are looking cool. She crouches down and puts her hand over them; she cannot discern any heat. She feels like a paramedic looking for signs of life. If she had a small mirror she would hold it to the cup, as to a dying person’s mouth to see if there is any breath to steam up the mirror. No mist; the coffee has passed. She tips it down the sink and pours from the pot again. It might well be a fruitless task, but she will persevere. There is a pub near her old house in Melbourne called The Perseverance. Right across the road from The Labor in Vain. She remembers long afternoons spent on The Labor’s rooftop garden, dodging the sun from beneath canvas umbrellas and hoping against reason that Monday would fail to roll around. She wonders whether she shall ever go back there.

After two hours and twenty minutes of trying many combinations (half filling all the mugs, arranging a newly filled mug by an older mug, and so on and so forth), she gives up. She is a little warmer than before, probably from all of the bending and crouching. And at least she is closer to the end of the day. She could spend her whole life doing this; she could measure out her life in coffee spoons. Her hands pouring the coffee down the sink are so pale: the freckles have faded; she is losing her detail. When she stands on tiptoe to put the percolator back on the shelf, her feet wobble with the effort. She clenches her knees, tries to keep steady, but her muscles waver and let go. Perhaps her body will just give up — so little is required of it here.

She continues with her exploration of the apartment. She has taken it upon herself to investigate every single thing in the space, to look in every cupboard, open every jar. She has completed the circuit twice now and while so far she has found nothing unusual, she continues unperturbed. The explanation will be hiding somewhere. Beneath the kitchen sink, she finds a bag of tealight candles from IKEA. Holding the bag’s slack weight in her hand, she contemplates how, at the beginning of the year, she was holding an identical item. The two bags would have come from the same factory, one ending up in her house in Melbourne, the other stowed beneath Andi’s sink. If only she could be sealed up in a bag and delivered without ceremony back into her own life. It seems unfair that these inanimate objects can travel the world while she is so confined.

She rips open the bag and takes a handful of candles. She puts them in a row along the bookshelf, another along the windowsill. As she lights each one, the flames rise up towards the ceiling. She thinks of her old house. It featured similar high ceilings, except the walls were broken about a foot from the top by picture rails, and she had spent many rainy weekends trawling op shops for prints to hang from them.

The walls of Andi’s apartment are bare. When she asked him why, he laughed. ‘I’ve got you to look at. Anything else would be a distraction.’

His open admiration of her is unnerving. But it also brings her comfort: it means she is safe, he does not want to hurt her. His arrival home each day seems to afford him great relief, which she comes to share. His reluctance to leave each morning is painful to witness. His Lost Boy eyes make her feel guilty for putting him through this. She has to wait until he is busy, tiptoe down the hallway to the front door and attempt to open it, reminding herself that she is the one in danger, that he holds all of the cards. Yet every time she touches the door, panic sets in, eased only by consoling herself with how much Andi needs her and that surely he will not hurt her.

She watches, mesmerised, as the flames flicker, cheered by movement that is not her own. She lays out more candles, creates dashed lines of fire through the apartment, relieving the dark of the winter afternoon. The candles look cheesy, like strewing rose petals all over a marital bed, but there is no doubt that they are beautiful. Andi will like them; she hopes he returns soon. She stretches her arms to the ceiling, watching her shadow grow taller, her hands waving like foliage. In the candlelight her belly button is a bruise of shadow across her stomach. In the window glass she sees her charcoal snowman eyes.

He leaves his father in the kitchen drying each utensil and piece of crockery with a tea towel, scorning Andi’s suggestion to just place them in the rack. It has been snowing all evening, and despite having run out of things to say, he does not yet want to face the icy trek to the station and home. Clare is speaking to him again, but things are still not right. Sometimes he asks her a question, and she stares at him blankly — his words don’t always register. Late at night she crawls into his bed and curls there, not touching him. He finds he cannot sleep without her there, stays alert until she leaves her nest of blankets on the couch; sometimes daylight is already nudging at the window. In the morning he lets his arm rest across her back, so awake he feels he will never need to sleep again. He comes to his father’s to escape his own anxiety, until the pervasive loneliness pushes him back home.

On the pretext of looking for some cherished childhood treasure, Andi heads to the spare room, a city of cardboard-box towers that wait for attention, unlabelled and unpacked.

It is only after he has opened a few of the boxes that he realises: they are his mother’s belongings. He had always thought the room was full of his childhood possessions and the excess of his father’s library. Seeing all of the boxes there makes him furious. His mother didn’t want these things — why does his father keep them? And if she was so willing to be rid of her husband and her son, why didn’t she just fold them up, squeeze them into one of the cardboard receptacles, and tape down the flaps?

He picks at the tape of another box, and it comes away with barely a whisper. Inside are paperback books — their pages yellowed — and records, which he pulls out, flicking through each one. The Puhdys. Karat. City. Silly. The names haul him straight back to his childhood. They were bands that seemed to disappear as soon as the Wall came down, or hung around as overnight has-beens. And despite his anger, he laughs to think of his own mother once listening to these records. He pictures her playing air guitar in the kitchen, letting loose, her black hair flying about her face. He will take the records home to show Clare; she will have never heard anything like it.

Looking through another box he comes across a camera. Its clunky body is surprisingly light, the button making a satisfying click when he presses it down. Somewhere in the boxes will be its spawn, the albums full of Polaroids, stuck down and captioned. His father would dutifully bring the camera out at every birthday and Christmas, Andi’s smile frozen throughout the years. The only time his father appeared was in the occasional shot taken at an awkward arm’s length on one of their hikes, his father’s mouth caught in the top of the frame, level with Andi’s curly hair.

Without telling his father, Andi takes the camera back with him to his apartment. Now every day before leaving for work he takes a Polaroid of Clare, which he stows in his work diary. He stands close enough to her so that the frame is filled with her face; he is amazed by how different she looks each day. He finds himself glancing at the photograph throughout the day, flipping through his diary in class, using her image to mark the page of the book he does not read on the train. He has come to rely on the Polaroids more than he presumed he would, liking how he can stare into her grey eyes and she cannot look away, cannot blink. He inspects every one of her features, guesses at the way they pull together to give her each of her expressions. He wonders who else has hoarded photographs of her and whether they realise what they have given up. There is so much to find out, always more to discover.

He knows that what he is doing is wrong. And he knows that she is displeased. No, more than that. She does not respect him. But she does not understand him either, and this gives him hope because one day she will — people can learn. He is doing this out of love. The joy he feels when he comes home to her is so immense as to be terrifying. He can no longer remember what it was like to be alone in his apartment, cannot recall any reasons he would like to be so. Everything in his life is tied up with Clare. Each day he tries to show her who he really is, and he knows that one day, not too far away, she will see him properly.

Clare feels like she is not existing. But the toothpaste tube is getting flatter, the bin in the kitchen slowly filling up, her hair is getting longer, and all of these things remind her that she is. It comforts her to think that at some point someone will come looking for her. It frightens her to wonder how long this might take and who it might be. She supposes it will be her mother. Clare had been carefree with her correspondence home while travelling. At the time it felt blithe, but now it seems foolish. She has sent only two postcards to her mother since leaving Australia, one just days before she arrived in Berlin. She imagines her mother receiving each one, absent-mindedly reading the back and attaching the card to the fridge, where it gets covered by takeaway menus and bills. It will be months before her mother realises she has not heard from Clare, longer before she thinks to do anything about it. If her father was still alive he would come to look for her — that’s what fathers do.

‘My mother will be looking for me, Andi.’ She watches him for a reaction, but he gives nothing away. If she was describing the situation to someone else, she would suggest that his body stiffened at her words, but this is conjecture.

‘She’ll be wondering why I haven’t been in contact with her.’

‘No, she won’t.’

‘Yes, she will. She will be expecting to have heard from me by now.’

‘She has heard from you.’ He does not look at her. ‘You emailed her.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ she retorts, but even as she says it she feels like she must be lying. He is so certain, and her voice is whiny. Don’t be so pathetic, she tells herself. Don’t be so useless.

‘Yes, you did. I sent her an email on your behalf.’

‘How did you get her address?’

‘It was in your phone.’

Dismay engulfs her. He has thought about this more than she gives him credit for. She thought she had him figured out. She had made the decision to keep quiet, to not aggravate the situation, to let him come to the realisation that she is not going to flee. But even as she enacted this plan (it doesn’t even deserve the name, she is aware of that) she knew it was naive, for she cannot escape. Having searched every aspect of the apartment, having worked at the door lock with every implement she can find, and having scrutinised every step of Andi’s routine, she knows that there is no way out — not within her control. She has been marking the passing days by turning down corners of Anna Karenina. It is a long book. Yet she still harbours hope that something will happen, that her mother will arrive to fetch her. Mothers do not leave their young unattended. But this knowledge worries her more than it comforts her.

‘But won’t Mum think it was strange that you emailed her? She doesn’t know you.’

In the prison of the apartment, the familial moniker sounds rude, like swearing in a church. And that one intimate word, ‘Mum’, brings it all crashing back for Clare. This is actually happening to her.

‘I set up a new email account for you, and I emailed from that.’

She takes a slow breath. She holds it in her lungs and releases it as quietly as possible. And then she takes another. She tries to ignore the saliva pooling in her mouth, the way her shoulders attempt to hunch together as if to protect her heart. She will not feel the fear her body is trying to feed her. She breathes again.

He is not going to let her go. This is not an accident. He has thought of everything. No one is coming to save her.

‘You emailed her?’

He nods. ‘I wanted your mother to know that you are okay.’

Okay. But is she? The only thing about this situation that felt okay was that she would eventually be leaving. But now she knows — she knows — that this is bigger than just her and him. He has thought of everything.

‘But I’m not okay.’

He crosses the room to stand in front of her. She watches his nostrils enlarge; his chest rises as he draws in a large breath, taking in her careful silence and keeping the air from her. Her heart begins its drum roll, and she clenches her teeth, tries not to let any more words escape.

‘I thought you would be grateful, Clare. I did it for you.’

‘This has nothing to do with me.’ The words are out before she can check them, and they leap into a scream. ‘This is your own sick fantasy, you fuck! I’m just a prop, a doll.’

His open hand smacks across her left cheek, and her head drops in surprise. Before she has even lifted her hand to her face, he slaps her again, his other hand coming down across her right cheek and throwing her off balance. She stumbles backwards against a chair and reaches for it blindly. But it evades her, and she falls to the floor, the chair’s wooden legs kicking at her own.

‘Don’t you ever speak like that.’

Her teeth are overly large in her mouth, her eyelids swim pink currents across her eyes, and she waits for something else, something much worse. He lifts the chair from beside her, her foot coming free and dropping to the floor.

‘It’s all about you.’ He puts the chair back on the floor; its feet whine in protest as he pushes it into the table.

‘What about your mother?’ She will not let this one go. ‘Your father? What do they think of you?’ The words fight for space in her mouth, and pain sprouts from her body. She is on her hands and knees on the floor but she will not retreat. How bad can he make this? She wants to taunt him until he snaps; she wants for this to be over. ‘Do they know you’re not okay? Do they know what kind of person you’ve become?’

‘You know nothing about my mother.’

‘That’s because you never say anything! Who are you, Andi? Where the hell have you come from?’ She stands now, tries to ignore the heat engulfing her face. ‘Don’t you have any family? Any friends? Isn’t there something you should be doing other than this?’ She gestures at herself, drops her hands to her sides.

‘No.’ He shakes his head at her. ‘There’s nothing as important as this.’

And she knows then that it will never end. This is all there is.

He catches a glimpse of his reflection in a mirrored column. His skin appears green-hued under the fluorescent lighting. Tungsten lighting, Clare had explained to him. Or is it the other way around? Does tungsten describe incandescent bulbs? He must ask her again, pay more attention. Either way, the strip lighting makes him appear ghostly.

He stands in front of the department-store directory. Unterwäsche. Underwear. There is nothing listed. People push by him, shaming him with their unfaltering strides, shopping bags demonstrating their morning’s success. Damen. First floor.

On the escalator he stares again at his reflection, trying to imagine how he appears to a stranger. Friendly? Aloof? He cannot tell; he looks like himself. On the top step of the escalator he stumbles, the mirror mocking him with his own surprise. He regains his composure and walks through the ladies’ clothing department until he sees pyjamas, then underwear. Where to begin? He wishes Clare was here to help him. Reaching out, he touches a bra and recoils at the stiffness of the lace.

‘Can I help you?’

The whites of the assistant’s eyes are startling, her smile pasted on.

‘Something for your girlfriend, perhaps?’

‘Yes.’

‘What size is she?’

Surely there can’t be too many to choose from. ‘Medium?’ He shrugs. He doesn’t want to cup his hands — it seems crude. He tries to think of something that would be the same size. Does it matter that one of her breasts is bigger than the other?

‘Is she tall or short?’ asks the assistant.

He holds his hand to his shoulders, looks at it, then lifts it higher. But that’s almost as tall as himself and he knows the top of Clare’s head very well. He lowers his hand. ‘About this?’

The question hangs there. How can he not know? He should have asked her for her size; he had just assumed that he would know the right ones when he saw them. He throws his gaze around the floor, a forest of metal trees waving bras and knickers at him like flags.

‘Maybe you can bring her in here? She can choose something she likes and she can try the different sizes?’

‘Oh no. It’s a surprise.’

The assistant looks pleased. ‘I see. Well, perhaps you choose a set, and if it is the wrong size she can bring it back in.’

‘Yes, I can bring it back.’

Her smile turns quizzical.

He corrects himself. ‘Yes, she can bring it back, that’s right.’

Some of the sets are the colour of flesh; the bras look like breasts hanging in row upon row, their nipples blurred away for propriety’s sake. There are cream breasts, black breasts, ones in tartan, polka dots and stripes. He chooses a set that is pink and orange — it is exactly like a festive flamingo. He wants her to be beautiful again; he wants her to think that she is.

She doesn’t like to get her face wet in the shower. Instead, she ducks her head to the left and to the right. Put your left shoulder in, put your left shoulder out. Put your left shoulder in and shake it all about. She turns her back to the taps and lets the water fall on her head. Keeping her eyes tightly shut, she turns again and cups her hands in the stream. Takes a deep breath and splashes her face. She lathers up with the soap, rubs it about her face then rinses it off, blowing ferociously through her nose to stop inhaling any soapy water. Since she began talking to Andi again, she has been showering three times a day, sometimes more. It is the only place in the apartment where she doesn’t feel trapped, where she feels she is existing of her own volition.

She dries herself quickly standing on the bathmat. The mirror has fogged up, but she does not mind; she does not think she will recognise herself. She pulls on her underwear and reaches for her bra. The elastic has lost its cheerleading snap and instead it curls, set in waves like an old lady’s perm. Tiny matted balls dull the synthetic fabric, and she casts it aside. She puts on one of Andi’s shirts. Anything else seems excessive — she’ll only have to take it off when the day ends or when she showers again. The fog has dispersed, and her reflection catches her staring. She looks sad. But is she? Her reflection smiles at her. She smiles back. It is a simple exchange.

From the living room, the sky gives nothing away. She braces herself against the kitchen bench and lunges, stretching one leg and then the other, her calf muscles pinching at her legs, complaining about their lack of use. She puts on a record, delighting in the amplified crackle of the dust. She listens to the end of one song, the start of the next, and at a particularly spectacular riff she punches the air in exuberance. She laughs aloud, realising that she has become one of those people who express their emotions even when no one else is in the room. As though there might be film cameras about, paparazzi to chart her happiness.

Climbing into her perched position by the window, she makes herself as compact as possible so none of her creeps over the edge. It is not very comfortable, but she fits. It is amazing how much space people insist on for themselves. The need for high ceilings and cat-swinging rooms. She wonders how long she might last in this position and twists around so she can see the clock face. Half past four. Was there anything she meant to do before Andi comes home?

She looks out the window. Nothing has changed in the courtyard below, and for this amongst other reasons, she is beginning to doubt the existence of time. Her watch, an authority on the subject, supports this view; its hands refuse to move, but she is yet to take it off. If she just glances at her wrist, she is reminded of all the other places she has been when needing to know the time, when it actually mattered. She hugs her knees, curls her toes and concentrates on taking up as little space as she can. She is neither small nor large. Not tall or short, fat or thin. She abides by the law of averages. She imagines that in the actual world, the one where everyone else lives, she would take up very little space. She does not go to places and court attention. She is in the thoughts of very few people. This comforts her. Celebrities take up a lot of space. They exist for many other people — it must be hard work. But she exists for just one, and while this can be exhausting in itself, she is glad that she is small and inside and sitting, knees drawn up, on this particular windowsill. That she is taking up no one’s thoughts, she is not weighted down by anybody’s expectations. As long as she does not move from this spot, none of that will change.

‘Hey, Clare! Look what I got!’ He calls out to her from the hallway, the door slamming shut behind him.

She waits to hear the familiar click as he turns the key and the lock slides into place, and she twists round to see Andi hurrying towards her.

‘Look.’ He proffers a bottle of wine.

She accepts it, not sure why he is so excited. It’s a shiraz. Then she realises. An Australian shiraz. ‘Where did you get this?’

It’s a Rosemount — cheap. It makes her think of house parties in Brunswick backyards, people crowded around fires burning in washing-machine drums, lemon trees holding court from the fence line. Sipping shiraz from plastic cups, the smell of burning red gum.

‘I found it at the supermarket. Not the Aldi, the other one. You know the one just over the river?’

She stares at him. Holds his gaze until he looks away, realising what he has said. She has no idea where any supermarkets are. Prick.

‘Anyway, you mentioned you liked shiraz so I thought I would get a couple and maybe we can get a pizza?’ He takes the bottle from her hand and puts it on the table. He leans down to kiss her on the cheek, and the body that is no longer her own allows it. And her impostor thoughts let her feel glad that he is home, the bringer of wine that reminds her of Melbourne and of another time.

He falls onto the couch beside her; his jacket smells like traffic exhaust, and she inhales. She wants to be outside. But she wants to be right here, too.

She pulls away from him and gets up from the couch. ‘I’ll get a bottle opener.’

She didn’t think she would remember the taste so well. It’s heavier than the Chilean wines. Probably not a suitable wine term, but the first adjective that comes to mind. Not fruity, not spicy. Heavy.

‘So how was your day?’ She sounds ridiculous, a bit player on a suburban stage.

‘It was okay, but slow. I had two classes sitting exams so it was a very quiet day.’

‘Fair enough.’ She takes another sip of wine, tries to picture Andi standing in front of a class of teenagers and commanding their attention. She is jealous of those students and the shared nuances of conversation that can only be achieved when people are speaking in their first language. His English is less stilted now than it once was. She would like to think this is because he is more comfortable with her. She suspects it’s because he initially pretended to be less fluent than he was, did not want to seem a threat. Even so, she feels he is considered when speaking to her. Reserved. It makes her uneasy, as though his thoughts are being censored.

‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘What did you do?’

She stands looking into the courtyard, immerses herself in the vista as though she has never seen it before. Nothing ever happens in the courtyard. Nothing ever happens in the apartment. It is the same, day after day after day. But still she stares out the window, as if there is something to see, hoping that something will change. The television tower watches her watching, springing into view whichever direction she looks, dripping with bonhomie like a loyal Dr Seuss character. It used to worry her, this waiting and lack of action, but now that she knows her thoughts are elsewhere and that time is elastic, she has lost any sense of urgency.

‘Clare?’

She does not want to answer his question, to prise apart this world with her truth. But she does not want to lie. So she tells him what she did, the real her, not the one who spends her days moving pot plants and cutting letters from newspaper headlines. What she would do if she was out of this mess.

‘Oh, you know, the usual.’ She turns and faces him, leans against the sill. ‘I went into the city and did some shopping. Stopped by the library then caught up with a friend for coffee. Then we went for a walk through the gardens, even though it was freezing.’ She looks straight into his eyes, dares him to question any of this. ‘And then I figured I still had a few hours left before you came home so I began work on a new photographic series, one that uses time lapse.’

He says nothing, and they stare at each other until time — so elusive to her, so deftly chartered by him — breaks free again and barrels forth.

‘Oh, Clare.’ That expansive, disarming smile.

She understands how true that description is now. His smile makes her put the safety catch back on; she feels the unused bullets drop to her feet.

‘You know this is how it has to be.’ He widens his eyes at her, performing innocence.

She turns back and watches his reflection in the window. It lifts its arm in a toast. It is not smiling, it is not focusing on anything. It walks towards her, catches her eye, her own reflection, and becomes Andi again.

‘Come on, baby. Let’s enjoy the wine.’

And why not? Where would she rather be than with a man who wants her so much he is dedicated to never letting her go? Sometimes it seems like a dream. And since it sounds so ridiculously clichéd, she swats the word ‘nightmare’ away before it lodges itself in her mind.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a tree?’ He can see the listing snow outside — it turns to slush as quickly as it falls. ‘It’s not too late. I could still get one at the market.’ He rubs her feet as they lie in his lap. They are so soft, bear none of the calluses of his own.

‘Nope.’ She looks up at him. ‘I haven’t even got you a present.’

‘You don’t need to get me a present. It’s enough for me that you are here.’ He lifts her foot to his mouth. He wants to kiss her toes, but she gives her leg a shake, and he lets it go. ‘Besides, my present will be fun for both of us.’ He hopes he is right.

‘Did you get your parents anything?’ She puts her cup of coffee down on the floor, stretching out her foot and curling her toes into the palm of his hand until he begins massaging again.

‘Of course I did.’ He had told his father that he was going away for the Christmas break; he wanted to spend the entire time with Clare, without interruptions. Every day, every night. His father had not minded, seemed almost amused that Andi had made a point of telling him. But Clare thought it was selfish, that it was uncaring not to spend Christmas with his family.

‘What did you get?’

‘I bought my father an Amazon gift voucher.’

‘A voucher? For your dad?’ She draws her foot back. ‘You can’t get him a voucher. A present is supposed to show that you thought about the person you’re giving it to. If I had ever given my father a voucher, he’d have been insulted.’ She puts her hands to her temples as though beset by a sudden headache.

He does not say anything. He does not want to talk about her parents.

‘Actually, Dad would not have even known what to do with an Amazon voucher. I don’t think the internet was around when he was alive.’ She scrapes her hair into a ponytail and twists the ends under so it holds together in a knot.

‘Your father isn’t alive?’ The words are out before he can stop them. How come he does not know this?

‘He died when I was nine.’ She looks at him, raises an eyebrow.

He does not know whether to believe her. Why has she never mentioned it before? ‘You never said.’

She shrugs. ‘You never asked.’ She gets up off the couch, picks her coffee cup from the floor. ‘You better not have gotten me a voucher.’

Her teasing smile offers him relief. She is not upset — it is just an oversight. But he feels as though he has made a mistake; he wonders what else he does not know about her.

‘No, not a voucher.’ He follows her to the kitchen. She stands with her back to him washing out her cup. He wants to hold her, to tell her he is sorry about her father; he cannot imagine losing his own. But everything about her screams don’t touch. The only movement is in her elbow as she swirls the cup about. He feels like they might stand here forever.

‘Do you want your present now?’

She rinses out the cup and puts it in the rack. She does not turn around when she speaks. ‘It’s still early. How about we play backgammon for a while?’ She swivels her head slightly, lets her voice fall over her shoulder to him.

He nods. ‘I’ll set it up.’

It’s a game she has taught him. At first he found it disorientating, the board expunged of numbers and letters. But he has grown to love the measured way the markers skip from one spike to the next, like stout gentlemen stepping out in the evening. Clearing some books from the coffee table to lay out the board, he notices the pile of Polaroids.

‘You think you’re still on your winning streak, don’t you?’ She takes a cushion from the couch and drops it on the floor by the coffee table.

‘You bet,’ he replies. ‘Are you saving these for something?’ He picks up the Polaroids, fans them like playing cards. Over a dozen Clares stare at him with one eye, the other obscured by the next photo.

‘Maybe.’ She puts her hand out, demanding them, and he passes them over. ‘You don’t want them, do you?’

‘No.’ He only needs one photo of her when he’s not here — the most recent. He had not thought about what she does with the ones he discards.

‘Do you want to go first?’ She passes him the cup, smirks. ‘You’ll lose anyway.’

They play as the day folds, getting up only to turn on the light, change a record, pour more wine. She wins six times in a row before he gives up.

‘Okay, that’s it. Time for your present.’ He pulls himself up off the floor and heads to the hallway. He takes the key from the safe and unlocks the front door. He picks up her present from where he has left it on the landing and goes back into the apartment, where he puts the present on the floor so he can lock the door again, put the key back in the safe.

‘Close your eyes, I have not wrapped it,’ he says as he returns. He holds it to his chest as he pauses outside the door to the living room. ‘Are you ready?’

When he enters the room, she is standing by the table. She looks like she is about to cry.

‘What’s wrong?’

Her lips are pursed, and she is blinking rapidly. ‘I heard you unlock the door. I thought you were going to let me go.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I thought that was my present.’

He does not know what to say; he had not given it any thought. The landing was just the best place to hide the present, somewhere she would never go.

‘No, this is it.’ He nods at the case in his arms. When she doesn’t say anything, he brings it over to her, puts it on the floor. In her hands he places a set of tiny keys. ‘Merry Christmas.’

They both look at the red suitcase. Its sides are battered, its corners scuffed. She looks at the keys, and then at him. Impatient, he snatches the keys from her hand and bends down, stabbing one into the lock on the case. The first catch releases and he presses the second one then lifts the lid. Inside nestles a piano accordion: its marbled red body embraces the light, its keyboard pearled like the inside of shells.

She lets out a little sound — it could be a guffaw or a gasp, but he doesn’t want to ask.

‘Apparently, it’s quite easy to play, and I got some books, there are some different ones, and you can try and see how you go.’ His words jump on top of each other in his rush to get them out. He stands up, takes a step back.

She crouches down, runs her fingers over the grille, traces the diamond shape printed on the closed bellows. ‘It’s beautiful, Andi.’

He lets go of his breath. She edges closer and lifts the accordion from its case. He reaches down to pass the leather strap over her head, and she bends to let him before standing back up.

He found it in a second-hand market weeks ago and kept circling back to the stall, trying not to show too much interest, lest the woman refuse to haggle. His desperation must have still been obvious though, because he ended up paying more than it was worth. But it was just so beautiful and — in the way its purpose and workings were so visible — captivating.

Clare undoes the leather belt that holds the bellows together, and the accordion sighs open. Tentatively pressing down on the keyboard, she draws the ends apart, a wheezy note leaking out into the apartment.

‘Oh, Andi, it’s so funny. It’s like an animal. It sounds like it’s snoring!’ She presses the bellows together, pulls them apart, the notes mangled but somehow kind.

‘I only wish my snoring was so musical.’ He is so pleased she likes it, so relieved he got it right. His mother used to play the piano accordion. She would squeeze out nursery songs and folk tunes, his father looking on bemused. Andi had always been enchanted by the instrument, but when he tried to play it, his arms would get tired so quickly that his mother would work the bellows, tell him which keys to press to eke out a tune.

Clare cannot manage to draw anything recognisable from it, but she does not seem to care.

‘It’s such a beast, Andi!’ She strides around the room, dragging miscellaneous notes from the instrument and laughing at her own incompetence. ‘But so fun. Thank you!’

And when she reaches up to kiss him, the accordion asserts itself between them, digging into his ribs. It’s just like hugging his mother.

She is used to waiting. When studying photography, she had become adept at setting up lights, redirecting glare. Making one time of day into another. When she began photographing buildings, it was entirely different, because they want to be lit by the sun. And so she would wait: for the sun to appear, to disappear. For clouds to lighten or darken the sky. For the contrast, the heaviness in the air. She would wait for the buildings’ lights to come on as dusk fell, revealing everything within.

And now she waits again, trying to catalogue the minute changes that distinguish one day from the next. With nothing else to spend her time on, she cashes it in. What she would have once given for this time! She disposes of minutes and hours with abandon, and in return she acknowledges two distinct phases: when Andi is at home; and when he is not. There is no motion. Time no longer passes, it just changes from one present to the other. She feels guilty. She had always been taught that time is precious; it is not to be wasted and cannot be hoarded. It is something that everyone must attend to and nobody can escape from. It favours no one, holds no vendettas. And now, all of these truths have ceased to be.

In the beginning (that has a mythical resonance, it makes her feel she is living within a tale), she tried to enforce time. But then, realising that there was no end point and that she did not know what she was counting towards, she stopped. Now she attempts to track the passing of space. She moves objects about the apartment, tries to see if they will take up more or less space if they are upside down or in the opposite corner of the room from where they began. She stacks books into towering ziggurats and waits to see if they will fall.

She becomes intensely aware of movement as she is the only source of it. This makes her uneasy, surrounded by things that will not move without her intervention. She watches the plant for hours, trying to see the moment that it grows, or whether it will acknowledge her in any way. But it does not reach out to embrace her with its leaves; instead it stretches towards the window, as intent on escape as she knows she should be. For company she leaves a record spinning in its final groove, the speakers hissing quietly. She becomes afraid that without time, and without movement, she will freeze. She cannot sit still: her right foot develops an insistent jiggle. It jiggles of its own accord, and she watches it jerking away at the end of her leg and wonders if it is really a part of her.

Is time a dimension or a state? It seems important to clarify these things, now that she knows they can cease to exist. She longs for the World of Science encyclopaedia her father gave her on her tenth birthday. It held so many answers. Time is … Space is … It would give units, definitions, parameters. It would take the questions out of her hands and make them the prerogative of someone more able. Andi is … Clare is … She tries to compose definitions that adequately explain her current situation, but she cannot settle on even the most basic of certainties. Does he love her — is that why he has done this? — or does he hate her? But she dismisses the question as soon as she asks it; the matter of Andi’s love is an illusion, a red herring that steers her away from any useful conclusions about her situation. She cannot ever know the answer, cannot know what occurs in his mind, any more than she can be certain of what happens in her own. She certainly doesn’t love him, but does she hate him? Neither word seems to describe the situation as it is. Every thought is so influenced by the locked door, a definite that she cannot change, that they do not seem like her own. They are constructed thoughts, made by her body to pass the time, to function throughout the day in this small space, but they do not belong to her.

She harbours a growing suspicion that the loss of her own thoughts, her inability to track time, and her vague experiments in the existence of space are all going to have a negative effect on others. Space and time are absolutes that one is not supposed to question, let alone neglect. She is sure her skewing of their existence will have consequences and she wants to be prepared. She supposes that her lost thoughts must be out there somewhere, being had by somebody else. Thoughts on photography and architecture, identity and purpose. All of those thoughts that she once knew so well, that she has carried with her throughout her life, but which have been displaced by current circumstances. She was not made for thoughts of confinement and escape, inadequacy and fear — she was never supposed to be in a place like this.

Is she going mad? She asks the question of her reflection in the mirror, but it does not answer, it just repeats her question like a schoolyard bully. ‘Am I going mad?’ it mimics, and she turns away, goes back to tracking space and making movement. If she is asking the question, she cannot be going mad. She is just suspended. Time stands still when you are in love, that is what the songs say, and her new hijacked thoughts tell her that this is true. As the turntable turns and the ziggurats fall, she waits for Andi to come home.

‘I think you would like my father,’ he says.

His own words surprise him, but as he says them he acknowledges their truth. His father would like Clare — it would be nice if they could meet.

‘You should invite him over,’ she says. She lunges forward and folds towards her feet.

He waits until she is upright before he answers. ‘You know I can’t do that.’ He wishes she wouldn’t make him spell things out. He doesn’t like telling her what they can and cannot do.

She shrugs, twists on the balls of her feet and lunges again. He had bought her a book on yoga positions, and it is open on the windowsill in front of her.

Last night, when he met his father for a drink, he had almost mentioned Clare. He was trying to think of ways to describe her when his father pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and laid it on the table. His mother’s name and a phone number were scrawled in blue ink surrounded by cubes and hatched lines — his father’s familiar scribbles.

‘She wants to see you, Andreas. She asked for your details, but I didn’t give them to her. I told her that you would phone.’

‘You shouldn’t have.’ Thoughts of Clare had fled his mind. He put his beer glass down on the note; condensation soaked the paper and made the ink bleed.

His father tutted in disapproval and retrieved the paper. ‘She’ll be here in summer. You can’t avoid her forever.’

‘Why not?’

His father drained his glass and stood up. ‘Because nothing lasts forever. Why do you have to make things more difficult than they already are?’ He held the piece of paper out to Andi and, when he refused to take it, placed it on the bar. ‘She had her reasons, Andi. She was more sensitive than most. She couldn’t tolerate the way things were.’

‘Everyone else could.’ He could not understand why his father had capitulated so easily.

‘Just because some people — some of us — accepted the way things were, it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. Your mother had principles. She couldn’t take the easy option.’

‘She left!’ Andi was astounded. ‘She didn’t have to deal with it anymore. How was that not easy?’

His father shook his head. ‘You have no idea what it was like. Call her. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’

Andi opened his mouth but had not said the words. He watched his father prepare to leave the bar, all elbows and edges as he put on his coat. He knew all about regret.

‘If things were different you could meet him,’ he tells Clare. ‘It’s just a little difficult right now.’

She does not answer, and he wonders whether she is counting under her breath, making him wait. At times like this, he is affronted by her immediacy, the way everything in the room seems caught up with waiting for her to say or do something.

‘Do you think about me when I’m not here, Clare?’

‘Sometimes.’

The word pops up from between her legs, and he catches it gratefully. ‘Only sometimes?’

She straightens up, lifts her arms. ‘Only sometimes.’

‘What do you think about me?’

This time she does not pause before answering. ‘The usual things. I wonder what you think of me. What you were like as a child. When I will see you next. How we met.’

He nods, pleased with this. Sometimes he feels as though she is his imaginary friend. That she appeared from some other realm and lurched into his life. They know none of the same people, nothing of each other’s worlds before they met; they know each other only through the stories they tell. And she could be lying to him, she could be making it all up. He would never lie to her. But he has no one to check her identity with — she could be anyone.

‘I think of you all the time,’ he says.

She does not answer, sits herself on the floor. He can see a faint flush of bruise across her lower back, almost like a tan, and he knows it is from doing sit-ups on the wooden floor. It is as though she is becoming an overly mature fruit, too sweet and about to turn. It excites him that he is the only person who will see her body change like this.

‘I know you do.’ She nods as she says this.

He does think about her all the time. He worries that she will not be there when he returns, though every time she is, it reminds him of what a huge mistake he has made, one he can never rectify. By the time he reaches the bottom of the stairs each morning, he is worried about whether he remembers her correctly.

‘What about your mother?’ She balances on one foot, trembling with the effort, the other leg stretched in front of her. ‘If things were different could I meet her, too?’

‘I don’t think you would like her,’ he says. He cannot quite imagine how that meeting would go.

‘Why not?’

He tries to explain the way things are. ‘She’s not very nice.’

‘What do you mean?’ Clare has stopped her stretches.

‘Well, for example, when I was five years old she left me at childcare … I loved going there. To me, an only child, it was such an exciting world of friends and games. But one day, my mother was late and I had to wait with the receptionist, who was annoyed at having to stay back. I really needed to go to the toilet and finally I couldn’t hold on anymore and I wet myself. The receptionist didn’t even say anything, she just stared at me.’

Clare sits cross-legged on the floor, listening. ‘What did your mother say?’

‘Nothing. My father came eventually and he went to lift me onto his shoulders to carry me home, but then he realised what had happened. I remember so well that walk back to the apartment. I had to run to keep up with my father and my trousers chafed at my legs. All I could smell was urine and I thought everyone was laughing at me. I was so angry at my mother for leaving me there.’

‘But that was years ago. And I’m sure she didn’t mean for that to happen.’

‘But it still did.’

Clare stands, lifts both arms then bends to touch her toes. ‘She probably had a reason for being late.’ Her voice is muffled against her knees, and when she stands her face is flushed. ‘I’m sure she didn’t just forget you.’

Of course she hadn’t forgotten him. Perhaps it would have been easier if she had.

‘Her grandmother was ill. She had taken a train to Hanover to visit her.’

‘To the West?’ She stops stretching. ‘I didn’t think you could just leave like that.’

The West. It still sounds like a make-believe faraway place, somewhere that no one ever actually got to, and no one ever returned from. Why did he think Clare would be able to understand what it was like back then?

‘Some people could. It wasn’t so hard. It wasn’t how you think, Clare. People went to the West and came back all the time. It wasn’t a prison.’

As soon as the word is out of his mouth he wishes he had not used it. But she doesn’t say anything, just salutes to the window and bows before the television tower.

‘I have two things for you today, Clare.’ He comes in from the hallway, his hands behind his back.

‘Only two?’ She is getting frustrated with his gifts. She has been hoping that he will tire of her. That their relationship will become like any couple’s — that they will grow apart, differences irreconcilable. And he will unlock the door. But his enthusiasm for the situation shows no sign of waning. It has become almost a teasing joke between them. When will you open the door? When you are ready to leave. So now she answers with a note of contrariness and waits to see what will happen.

‘Clare, you’re such a pessimist. Most people would be happy if someone brought home two presents a day.’

‘Most people would be happy if they were not locked in an apartment all day.’

Annoyance crosses his face, but he banishes it, and she is relieved. Some days a comment like that will make him so angry that he will stop speaking to her, pretend she is not even in the room. It is not nice to be invisible to the only person you ever see.

‘We’re not going to keep talking about it. You know it’s better this way.’

She stares at him, daring him to look away, but when he readily does so, her frustration flares. Does he not see her?

‘So, left or right?’

She hesitates. She does not care. ‘Right.’

‘Good choice.’ He hands her a paper bag and she sits at the table to open it. Inside is a book of paper models. Great Buildings of the Communist Era. She flips through the book to see that each building has been rendered flat so they can be punched out of the card and built, a little city of aspirational architecture.

‘Andi, it’s incredible.’ She cannot contain her delight. Some of these buildings she has seen — her favourite television towers amongst them — others she has never heard of.

‘Look at this.’ She points out the Wedding Palace in Tbilisi, Georgia. Its walls curl in on themselves while maintaining a vertical line and somehow it suggests worship, without indicating of which god, or whether any is necessary at all. ‘And this one’s like a concrete game of Jenga.’ She shows him the Roads Ministry stacked on the banks of the Mt’k’vari River.

‘I thought you might like it.’ He smiles at her. ‘It even has the Palast der Republik.’ He takes the book from her and flips through the pages until he finds the one he is looking for and hands it back.

She recognises the building immediately, its tinted windows reflecting nothing, looking more like sheets of copper than glass. She wonders whether it has been completely dismantled by now. It takes her back to the day after she met Andi, the day she had decided it was time to leave Berlin.

‘What was in the other hand?’

He stoops to where he has put the other bag and gives it to her.

It’s heavy for its size — it feels like a grenade. It’s a bizarre association because she has never seen a grenade, let alone held one, but that is the object which comes to mind, and she wishes for a moment that this is what he is giving her: a way out for both of them. Would she? But when she opens the bag, she finds a tin of leatherwood honey and knows that even if she lobbed it through the living-room window, the most damage it would do is broken glass, perhaps a sticky mess in the courtyard below.

‘Where on earth did you get this?’ She rolls the tin in her hand. The paintwork, with its red and yellow lettering, is so familiar to her. She remembers the honey from childhood breakfasts — it has such a distinct taste. ‘They only make it in Tasmania.’

He shrugs. ‘I found somewhere that would order it for me. Can I taste it?’

She feels like her childhood has caught up with her and she does not know what this crossing of timelines might mean. Andi returns from the kitchen with a teaspoon and prises open the lid. The smell is immediately recognisable; she takes the spoon from him and digs it in. The honey has a creamy consistency, almost buttery. It wants to be spread, not drizzled, and as she licks it from the spoon she is transported back far away and long ago.

‘It’s delicious,’ he says, running his tongue over his lips. ‘I’ve never tasted anything like it.’

‘It’s just so particular, it’s —’ She searches for the right word but he cuts her off, his lips pressed against hers.

She should pull away; she knows that she should. She feels as though the Andi she first met has come back, that the door isn’t locked. It’s like that very first night before everything went so horribly wrong.

‘I can’t do this.’ She pushes him away, wanting only to pull him back towards her. Instead she directs her words to the teaspoon in her hand.

‘Do what? What do you mean?’

‘This. I can’t … This is all wrong, I shouldn’t be here.’

‘But where else would you be?’ He puts the tin on the table and takes both of her hands, his eyes imploring. ‘It’s just me, Clare. It’s always been me.’

And because she wants to believe him she kisses him back. Because maybe if she gives him everything he wants, he will set her free. And maybe it will stop her feeling so terrible, as though she is going to cry at any moment. Within minutes they’re on the couch, his hands under her clothes. And she tells herself to stop, that she is doing the wrong thing. She cannot have sex with a man who is keeping her prisoner. But she doesn’t stop; she is just so thankful that something is finally happening to make this day different from all of the others. And as he feeds his hungry hands all over her body, it feels to Clare just like before, which is exactly where she wants to be.

He crouches down, one hand on the floor to keep his balance. Clare has taken each of the Polaroids he has discarded and pinned them to the wall. They trail each other, Monday to Friday, along the skirting board. He is surprised to realise that he can remember taking each one. The one where she is sipping from a yellow mug was a Thursday. He was teaching senior students that day; he remembers looking at her photo as they role-played job interviews. There is one where she is in profile — the coffee pot had started steaming on the stove just as he took the photo, and she had looked to see it wasn’t boiling dry. The thought of all the photos that will follow the ones already here pleases him.

He stands and goes to the safe to retrieve his phone and the key. He does not want to go to work; he never wants to go now that she has come back to him. Her body is something new every day — he cannot get enough of it. He is still surprised every time she lets him near her, every time she draws him in. He takes the Polaroid camera from the shelf. She is still sleeping, but he needs his photo.

Usually he would wake her to stare bleary-eyed into the lens, but this morning he turns on the bedside lamp, lies down next to her in bed with the camera between their two faces, and takes the photo. She does not wake. He stands by the bed, waving the square of film as it develops. The photo is dark, and one eye is lost to the pillow, but it is still unmistakably her. He puts the photo in his pocket and takes hold of the sheet, pulling it to her ankles. She sleeps on her side, one knee bent to her chest, the other leg trailing as though she is skipping. There are red lines down her thigh, and he bends to look more closely. When they had started to sleep together again, there were no lines. He is sure about this: he drank in every part of her, everything he had missed. They have appeared sometime since, straight cuts on both legs, skimming the surface of her skin but deep enough to bleed.

He does not know what to say to her about them. He mentioned them once, and she said they were scratches from her nails — that she gets itchy in her sleep. He did not believe her, but could not figure out what else would have caused them. He is certain they are deliberate. There are five of them, each one a different length. Somehow, he feels responsible even though that is ridiculous: she has done this to herself. He reaches out to touch them but does not. He knows how they feel — like impostors, they do not belong to her skin. Is she trying to make herself unattractive to him? He covers her with the sheet, switches off the lamp.

Clare is not the person she thought she would be. She is not her real self; she has become some other being. Her camera bag in the corner reminds her of what she was like before: in charge and confident. Capturing the world and putting it away. Now she spends her days in an apartment, dressed in a t-shirt that smells of this new self, tired knickers and a pair of woolly socks. There is no reason to wear more, to put clothes on only to take them off again. She turns the heating up and does star jumps to keep warm, huddles beneath blankets on the couch or sits on the floor, back against the radiator, wondering if it is possible to cook her insides.

How long since he locked the door? How long since she gave up on her silence? She endeavours to continue her soft approach. Don’t mention the war, she repeats to herself as she waits in the apartment each day. Don’t mention the door.

She is surprised by the audacity of her own body. It slips through the days, barely seeming to change, but then when she looks at herself in the mirror, she sees she is different. Her finger healed long ago; no hint of bruise remains, though sometimes when she tries to play the accordion, her hand held to attention for too long, she feels a stiffness in its joints. She instructs her body through her yoga exercises, and it complies without argument. The lines on her legs appear and change with each day, the only reminder that she is real, and she waits for Andi to take issue with them.

When she doesn’t think about the walls closing in, she feels as he tells her to — she feels okay. They have had nights of mayhem, sitting up until sunrise, passing joints and drinking wine. Standing tall in the apartment, up on the couch as if it was a soapbox, telling long stories, making speeches about the state of the world. They talk with fondness about the past, about how they met and who they used to be. They do not talk about the future. They talk about music and films and food. At night his warm body is a comforting antidote to the days of loneliness. She thinks about leaving, in the manner of going places, but not about escaping. There is never enough time to think about it all properly before it is tomorrow and the next day and the next, and soon it will be the day that Andi relents. He will reward her fidelity, realise that he has nothing to fear and that he can unlock the door.

When he brings gifts, mostly she feigns appreciation. Often the item is useless: a knitted scarf, a moisturiser mixed with sunscreen. One time he brings home strawberries, but she does not touch them. They rot and sink into each other in their punnet, their fermenting smell evidence of their demise, and eventually Andi throws them in the bin. Everything is back to normal, but for the door, which remains locked.

She composes a polite unsendable letter to her publisher explaining why she will be late with the book.

Dear Daniel,

I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to let you know I have, unfortunately, been delayed in Berlin. A young man I met on a street corner captured my heart (and later the rest of me), and I am afraid I may not be able to keep to our agreed schedule.

I have taken many interesting photographs that I think you will approve of. The concrete-block housing in Warsaw and on the outskirts of Riga were fine examples of modernism stripped bare of illusion, but my imagination has really been fired up by the television towers, those undeniably phallic salutes to the possibilities of communication. While Berlin’s own will be familiar to many, the most beautiful was definitely the Jested tower in the Czech Republic. It shoots right out of the mountain top, as though it might blast off at any moment. There are even glass ‘meteorites’ set into the building’s concrete core, as though the whole thing just crashed to Earth.

Anyway, please excuse my tardiness. I really am very sorry that I won’t be able to meet our agreed deadline. I would like to reschedule for the future, but I’m not sure that would be feasible either.

Best wishes,

Clare

To her mother she composes apologetic emails:

Hi Mum,

How are you? I am well. Well, not really. I suppose I am okay (I would hate for you to worry), but I’ve kind of gotten myself into a situation and I am hoping you can help. You see I met a boy, well, a man really, and things happened (I’m sure you can imagine what), and now I seem to be stuck in his apartment — he won’t let me leave.

I did ask him for some sort of compromise: we have talked about it at length and tried to make it work but we just seem to disagree on fundamental things. I know you think I can be too picky but I promise you this is not one of those times. I should never have gone home with him in the first place and I promise I won’t do anything as stupid again, but if you could send someone to come and get me out I would really appreciate it.

Hopefully I will hear from you soon,

Clare xx

Clare imagines what Andi writes in his emails impersonating her and she tries to think of ways she can hijack these, tell him what to include and use them to alert someone to her situation. But whenever she tries to clarify what exactly her situation is, her thoughts get muddy, petering out amongst the daydreams.

She spends her listless days wishing she knew where she went wrong but knowing that she would do it all again; she cannot imagine a life without him, a life where strawberries were not her favourite fruit. And so she admonishes herself for these daydreams — the unsent emails and the playing out of the moment of her emancipation — because they are a pointless exercise. He has tied up all the ends so completely that until he changes his mind, there is only this particular life.

And there is relief in this. She lets her thoughts travel in this direction, too jaded to chase them back to sense. There is some liberation in this being tucked away, not partaking in the world. Her mind is able to wheel free, not preoccupied with trying to frame the next photograph or look for the least obvious shot.

Some of the lines on her thighs have healed, and she traces their silvery tracks with her fingers. They remind her of raindrops racing down windows, traces of their very selves left behind. She wishes that she was made of glass, that anything could run so easily across her surfaces. To be so fragile, though, would be like leading a life very hung-over. Unsure of the weight of things. She would have to be careful not to land too hard, not to be startled. Yet if she is glass then perhaps her scars are cobwebs, not raindrops. Forgotten threads crisscrossing over her legs, holding her knees to her hips like puppet strings. But she dismisses the thought: she is tired of her mind hiding truths from her. For the scars are not whimsical metaphors or veiled landscapes; they aren’t like anything at all.

‘Lie down on the bed.’

He likes the way her words are clipped and authoritative. It is as though she has cleansed herself of all emotion, left it piled in the back of the wardrobe to be rummaged through when she is after something special. Emotions for all sorts of occasions.

He lies on his back and waits. She takes a sip of wine and puts the glass on the bedside table, and he catches her hand in his own, pulls her to him. She kisses him with her eyes open. They stare at each other, too close to see anything. She lifts one leg over his stomach — she tastes of red wine — and when she pulls away from him, he feels the cool air rush in between them. He tugs her back down, and they fuck as if it is a fight. She claws at him. He groans. He wants to throw her from him and pin her down all at once. The wine makes the whole world seem soft. He does not feel like he will ever come.

And then it is over. The sweat lifts and cools from his body, and he rolls over to look at her. She flinches. He does not know why. He reaches for her, his hand on her thigh, and he can feel the welts that run up her legs. ‘I told you to stop doing that.’

She tries to pull away from him, but he holds firm.

‘You should not do it, Clare. It’s not right.’

The cuts on her legs have been multiplying. She had told him she did it to measure her pain threshold, as though it was a normal thing to do. Why would she want to be bringing more pain onto herself? The situation is difficult enough for both of them as it is.

‘If you do it again, I’m going to have to punish you.’

She snorts air through her nose, dismissing him.

‘I won’t buy you any more tobacco.’

‘Fuck off.’

But she offers the expletive without feeling, and he knows that he has won. She won’t cut herself again. Almost as much as the cutting, he hates that she smokes. It reminds him of his mother, that same smell enveloping her person as if she has come from somewhere more exciting, that there is somewhere else she would rather be. The fragrance clings to Clare’s fingers; it follows him wherever he goes.

‘What is the worst thing I could do to you, Clare?’ He props himself on his elbow, head in his hand. He uses his other hand to untangle her hair. A length of it is trying to creep into her mouth; some strands are ensnared in the intersection where her top and bottom lips meet, and he tugs them free. What a beautiful place to be.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, I would never do it. Whatever it is, I will never do that to you, Clare.’

She moves her head as though to nod, but the action is stunted, swallowed by her pillow.

‘This is perfect,’ he says. She turns away from him, reaches for her wineglass. ‘This. Us,’ he continues, answering her unasked questions.

The room is imbued with Clare. The whole apartment bears the mark of her, deliberate and accidental. Her books discarded on the floor. The Polaroid gallery. The marks on the wall, like river pebbles, that he could not understand until she told him she had been doing handstands, her feet propped against the wall. He pictures her like this, upside down, face red and buckled like a root vegetable, arms shaking.

‘It’s incredible, Clare. Our entire world is here, in this space between you and me.’

He is everything to her. She could not be without him. Out there the world is fractured and multiple, but here it is singular. He feels steady, like he has finally stopped striving for something.

Years before, when he was living in London, he would call his father late at night, and the silences they had always shared would hang between them over the darkened continent.

‘You should travel some more, Andreas,’ his father had said, when Andi told him he would be returning home at the end of the academic year. He could hear the turn of a page, the distracted pause as his father marked his place. ‘There are so many places I would have loved to go at your age.’

‘So go now,’ he retorted, but his father simply laughed, incredulous. His father’s life was amongst his books these days; he travelled in the manner he always had, through stories. It was as though the borders had never been opened, and Andi wanted to reach down the phone line, rip the book from his father’s hand and throw it far enough away that he would have to at least leave his armchair to chase it down. Little chance — he could not even chase his own wife.

But Andi had not wanted to travel either, longing only for the emptiness of Berlin’s streets. He had always thought his city was as bustling as any other, until he went to London to practise his English and soften his accent. There the chain stores volleyed people about as though they were trapped in a pinball machine, bumping them from one high street to the next. Every surface seemed to be covered with a price, the curled elegance of the pound sign semaphoring from every bit of advertising. He was relieved to return to Berlin; the familiarity soothed him.

Berlin was the only place he felt at peace, the only city where he knew there was no chance of a serendipitous encounter with his mother. He could never understand why, when she left, she opted for somewhere entirely new, a world so different from what she knew. But as he could never understand why his father let her leave, her destination was irrelevant.

‘Are you glad you stayed, Clare?’

She finally looks at him, and he passes her a smile.

‘Are you?’

‘Am I glad?’ She asks his question, repeats it. ‘Am I glad?’

He holds his breath, waits even though he knows the answer. She looks so different from when she first arrived. Her hair is longer, and her skin more pale. Her freckles have relented, leaving her face ashen.

‘What else could I have done?’ She arches her eyebrows with this question, and his mouth pops open, expelling his held breath.

‘Anything. You could have … gone somewhere else.’ He suggests this alternative delicately, unsure what mood she is in today.

‘I suppose,’ she agrees. This is a good sign. ‘I could have gone home?’ Her rising intonation incorrectly tacks a question mark to her statement. Like a Get Well Soon helium balloon it lifts the sentence, sets it free.

‘But you didn’t have a home,’ he reminds her, offering ballast. ‘You just had a storage unit.’

‘True.’ As she ponders this, he begins to wonder whether he should have just stayed quiet. It is a conversation performed on pointe, and the strain of getting to the end is causing him anxiety. ‘But I could have gone back to Australia.’

He pictures Australia as an immense sports field ringed with burning trees. In the middle, its sails catching the sun, is the Sydney Opera House, and on its steps stands his mother. She waves at him, takes a bow. She is everywhere that he is not.

‘Well, I’m glad you did not go, Clare. I would have been lonely without you.’

She raises her glass. ‘And I, you.’

‘To remaining,’ he toasts.

‘Remains,’ she returns.

‘Take off your clothes,’ he says.

‘No.’

He seems surprised. She is a little herself. It would be easier to just do what he asks and not think about it. How much does he want it? She wants a measure — what kind of currency are they dealing in here?

‘Clare, come on.’ He laughs. He is laughing at her. He seems incredulous at her reluctance.

She feels a smirk’s ugliness creeping across her face. ‘You have already seen everything my body has to offer.’ She pauses. ‘And you are not the only one.’

She does not know why she says this. She hears her voice coming to her ears as though it is someone else’s. She talks like him now. There is uncertainty in her words; she is speaking English as if it is her second language. She has lost her contractions.

He moves to the bed. He reaches down and strips it of its sheets. As he bundles them up and tosses them to the floor, she cannot help but smile. Line-en. He always calls them line-en, rhyming line with mine. It makes sense yet it is wrong. He is wrong, and this gives her pleasure.

‘Take your clothes off.’

‘No.’

‘I won’t wait.’

She knows that he will. He will wait. He stares at her, but she does not move.

‘Clare.’ He thrusts his bottom lip out, a sulky child.

‘Fuck you, Andi.’

Does she say it? She cannot be sure. Her disembodied voice is like a radio presenter’s. She stands, tries to catch his eye, but he won’t look at her. He lifts his hand, then pauses. He loosely holds his wrist, turning his hand this way and that. Is he going to slap her again? Is that what he is going to do? He holds his own hands, twisting them as though he cannot quite believe they are his. Or perhaps he is admiring them. It is difficult to tell.

Her cheeks feel larger than her whole face. They seem to be the beginning and end of any sense of existence right now. She waits for him to slap her, and when he does not move, she pulls her singlet over her head, drops her underwear to the floor. She steps out of it and stands, naked, waiting. Her cheeks tingle.

As he walks towards her, it is as though every sense she has ever known has returned. Her body picks up the vibrations of his footsteps; she clenches her cunt in anticipation. He lifts his hand, and she flinches. He cups her face in his warm palm and holds it there, inspecting her.

When he lets go of her face, he reaches to the floor and picks up her discarded clothes. She sits on the edge of the bed and waits for him to push her back. He does not. She lies back and waits for him to kneel astride her. He does not. His footsteps walk away. She can hear clothes being bundled up. The buzz of a zip being drawn closed.

‘I’m going to the laundromat.’ He leaves the room.

He had never expected to know obsession. It is something that other people are afflicted by. People who are not so strong, people who drift. Obsession is something to cling to when the ordinary world is not enough. And yet here he is, his mind full of her. The way she walks, the way everything she says sounds like a question. And what it’s like to fuck her. He is surprised by how much time he spends thinking about this. Sometimes he catches himself in the very act, her body moving beneath his own, and he wonders whether it is just an exquisitely vivid daydream. He knows her body so well, the way she arches to reach him, her desperation as she holds him inside her. And he finds himself wondering how to be sure he is not dreaming; he wants to pinch her and see whether she wakes up. When he runs his hands up her inner thighs, feels the welts under his fingers, that’s when he knows she is real.

This obsession has rendered him useless. He is unable to think properly about work and about his day-to-day necessities. It has stripped him of all purpose. He is conscious, every moment of the day, of her waiting. Waiting for him to come home. To come to bed. To sit beside her. He feels like each individual minute is documented by his need for her. And hers for him. Look at her, curled up on the couch, her head resting on the arm. Look at her pale legs, shiny in the light, soft at the edges where her skin blends into the shadows. Look at her, pulling a strand of her hair, twisting it around her finger and letting it fall loose before picking it up again.

The day he first saw her, he was alone, and she was alone in the same place. He thinks of her standing behind him in the bookstore. Walking home, her hand in his, and then drifting about his apartment as he cooked her dinner. And now they will never be alone again, on the same street, in the same store, in an apartment room. Here they are, months later, as familiar with each other as with their own reflections.

He hates that he slapped her, frightened her. He does not want to do it again. He cannot pretend it was accidental: he did it twice and he thought about each one. What makes her think that her mother is any different from his? She isn’t going to come looking.

When he wakes in the night, he is immediately aware of Clare sleeping beside him. What comes next? This situation is not nice. It is not comfortable. When he is out in the world and not with her, he imagines Clare beside him. What would she make of that person’s odd outfit on the train? Would she choose the hard or the soft cheese at the deli? At school he is aware of talking about her too often. ‘When will we meet this mysterious Clare?’ his colleagues ask. What would she think of them? They of her? Her constant presence in the apartment is exhausting. His yearning for her when they are apart is more so.

But he wishes he had not hit her. It felt so fucking good, that’s true, to make her understand, but that is not the person he is. He cannot think about that — it was a mistake. There is no need for her to be afraid of him. He has done everything possible to ensure they both know what to expect each day. That is what is so perfect about the situation: they each know where they stand.

He gets up, and she goes back to sleep. He showers while she lies with her eyes closed, enjoying the warmth of the sheets, the knowledge that she has nothing to do today, no reason to get up. As her body stirs she draws herself from under the covers. Some mornings she joins him in the shower, others she does not. He takes her photograph, leaves. And then begins the waiting. She walks from room to room, trying to catch the sun moving, dangling her feet in its pools, hoping to spot something changing. She takes yesterday’s Polaroid photo and pins it to the wall. She cuts letters from the newspaper and assembles English words. She picks up the piano accordion and pulls and pushes it, emitting noise rather than tunes, mournful wails that match her mood. She plays to the plant and to the television tower. She never plays for Andi.

For weeks the jigsaw, another gift, has stood untouched in a plastic bag by the bookshelf. She does not think she is the kind of person who makes jigsaws. When eventually she decides that perhaps she is, she closes her eyes and draws the box from the bag. Keeping her eyes closed, she opens the box and places the lid face down on the floor, next to the table. She does not want to know what the puzzle is of. She is so starved of intention that she needs an extra incentive to impel her to completion.

She tips the pieces onto the table. Jigsaws are light, all cardboard and air. They are not a popular form of entertainment anymore — they just don’t offer enough. She suspects that jigsaws seem insubstantial in a world where everyone wants value for money; they want weight in their purchases, as though lightness is a flaw. But in people, weight is a flaw. She enjoys cataloguing the contradictory nature of humans. It’s comforting. She lifts her hand, and it stays aloft. She drops it back to the table. Her own hands seem to weigh nothing; neither does her head. She places her elbow on the table and rests her head in her palm, trying to release its weight from her neck and shift it to her hand. But it won’t be separated: it refuses to be heavy.

Pushing her chair back from the table, she regards her legs. She lifts one and lets it drop and then lifts the other. They each hit the floor with a satisfying thump, but still they don’t feel as though they have any heft. She prods a thigh with her finger and when she removes it, the skin reluctantly shifts back. It does not spring; it is as though there is nothing beneath it. She is empty. She goes to the kitchen and takes a knife from the drawer. It feels heavy, as though it might be important, and she thinks of Chekhov’s advice. She wishes there was a gun on the wall, but there is not, just this burden of a knife that she keeps returning to.

She sits herself back in the chair. The jigsaw pieces crowd the edge of the table, and she wants to be rid of them. Knife in hand she scoops the pieces towards herself; they fall from the table edge like lemmings. Some of them land lifeless in the ditch between her legs, others rain to the floor. They weigh nothing; she can hardly tell that they are resting on her and she opens her legs and lets the pieces fall further. As she presses the knife into the skin near her knee, she expects to hear a sigh of air being expelled into the apartment, lifting her fringe as it pushes past. When Andi returns, she imagines he will find her hollowed-out skin draped over the chair like a deflated balloon.

But there is no air, only a bright bead of blood that builds and builds as she pushes the knife down. It looks as though it will hold its spherical shape forever, then it bursts and rushes down the side of her thigh. She pulls the knife towards her and the stream increases. She is careful to cut straight: she does not want to run into any of the other lines, already permanent. It feels like a paper cut; the pain sings up her body, becoming an itch in the tips of her fingers. But no, she lies, it doesn’t really feel like anything at all. The blood drips onto the jigsaw pieces. It is exactly the same temperature as her skin. She may not be heavy anymore, but at least she knows she is warm.

She wonders what would happen if —. But she stops herself. Andi does not couch his comments in perhapses and what-ifs, and she wants to be as certain. Maybe it is a language thing, this directness, but even so, it is refreshing when considered next to the over-analytical and fatuitous speeches of so many people she knows, including herself. (Knew, she corrects herself. People she knew.) The unfinished sentences, the misuse of prepositions, the nouns lazily disguised as verbs. She longs for complete sentences, for direction and narrative advancement.

Her days and nights feel more real than any have before. Here, in Andi’s apartment, she is living a distillation of her former life. She is, for the first time, living in the present because there is nowhere else to be. Her past and future are far from her reach; she is free from their obligations.

She waits for the blood to congeal, marvelling at the way it copes with being out in this new world, and then she puts the knife back on the table and begins picking up puzzle pieces from the floor and laying them out.

From now on, whenever she takes out the puzzle, she also takes out the knife — it lies on the table as she shuffles the puzzle pieces about. The pieces catch at each other, and she breaks them apart. She siphons off the edge pieces, hunts for the four corners. The puzzle is a palette of indigos and blues; bright oranges and yellows gleam from the pieces’ surfaces. In time she discovers that it is a picture of the Sydney skyline, a view she is not as familiar with as Andi might have supposed when he bought it for her. It is the tiles of the Opera House sails that give it away. She should keep a diary of such moments of recognition. The moment when a place feels like home, when a song becomes familiar, when a lover becomes known, moments that cannot be had again.

The cuts remind her of how, in the space where her blood meets the air, her body still belongs to herself; that Andi may be in charge, but he has not seen her body do this. She stalks about the apartment half-dressed, her legs bare so that she can keep an eye on each line she has made, make sure they are healing in order. She pulls on jeans before he comes home, and if he feels the lines beneath his hands in bed at night, he does not say a word.

In the quiet of the apartment, putting the puzzle together, she is satisfied with the dull cardboard click of the pieces fitting in place, their edges feathered from use. When Andi is due to return, she breaks the puzzle apart, puts it back in the box. She does not want to leave it out, to have him chart her progress or idly shuffle the pieces about of an evening. She does not want to finish the puzzle. What would she want then?

‘I was the age you are now when you were born,’ his father calls up to him. Andi is standing on the kitchen table, taking down the lampshade, and his father is on his hands and knees, looking for one of the screws that has fallen out. The last one refuses to be released. No matter how much Andi rattles it and tries to manoeuvre the shade free, it sticks fast. His arms are burning with fatigue, and he does not answer his father.

‘We hadn’t really discussed having children. Your mother was so much younger than I — there was so much time. So, really, you were quite the surprise.’ His hands brush in wide swathes across the lino floor as though he is feeding chickens.

Andi gives a grunt of acknowledgement and watches his father inch across the kitchen, a blind man looking for the point of his story. Turning his attention back to the ceiling, Andi sharply nudges the lampshade with the heel of his hand. The third screw lands with a tinkle on the floor, and his father pounces on it.

‘A good surprise, I hope?’ He drops his arms, and blood rushes back into his fingers. He waits for his father to clamber to his feet before passing him the lampshade.

‘Of course.’ His father holds the shade in both hands like an offering. ‘I always wanted a child, you know, ever since I was young. I think it came from not having any brothers or sisters. Do you feel the same, Andreas?’

‘No.’ He reaches up to unscrew the light bulb. He had always wanted a sister, a miniature version of his own mother. When other boys would run home from school, leaving their sisters to dawdle along in packs behind, he imagined that he and his sister would walk in step, sharing everything. She would be his shadow; they would be a full-sized family.

‘I suppose when you meet the right person, then you might want children. Are you seeing anyone?’

Andi and his father swap light bulbs, old for new. Should he tell him about Clare? His father would like her; he would see that there is something different about her. He would ask questions about her travels and where she comes from, and he would listen attentively, more questions at the ready. Andi pictures them deep in conversation, food untouched, while his own cutlery taps out a lone jig on his plate.

‘No, I’m not seeing anyone.’ He screws the new light bulb in place and sticks his hand out for the lampshade. In a way, he regards children as a public shame. Left behind as a reminder of broken marriages, their faces are a jumble of borrowed expressions, serving only to haunt parents with memories of the partners they could no longer tolerate. If Andi had not existed, it would seem distasteful that his father had never quite managed to let go of the memory of his mother — an unhealthy obsession with the past. But Andi’s existence makes it okay for his father to hoard a junk room of her belongings, to eagerly anticipate her letters and, now, to unabashedly look forward to her visit.

‘Well, I’m sure you will find someone soon enough. These things happen when you least expect it.’ His father offers up two of the screws, pinched between the thumb and index finger of each hand like miniature maracas. ‘But I have one piece of advice for you, Andreas.’ He holds on to the screws, not letting go of them until Andi looks him in the eye. ‘When you find her, don’t let her go.’

‘I won’t, Papa.’ He directs his assurance to the lampshade as he twists the screws back into position. His father has become so sentimental in his old age; perhaps his mother has, too. He puts his hand out for the final screw.

‘Especially, if you do have children. That’s when you really need to hold on.’ His father passes him the screw and looks at the spent light bulb in his hand as if unsure of how it got there.

Lampshade secure, Andi jumps down from the table, landing beside his father. He has an urge to enclose him in a hug, but as he lifts his arms to do so it seems ridiculous, and he pats him on the shoulder instead. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he says, and they both look at the cloudy light bulb, wondering what to do next.

As her eyes adjust to the darkness, Clare can make out the grey square of window on the wall. In this light it impersonates a blackboard — she wants to practise her handwriting on it, form cursive letters that swoop and join without grace. The wardrobe squats to one side of the room, resentful of the bed taking centrestage. A collection of mugs and glasses huddle on the bedside table, refugees from the kitchen.

‘Clare?’

She directs her gaze towards his voice but cannot make out his face in the dark. Glancing back to the window she catches the shine of his eyes and the outline of his tousled hair in her peripheral vision. She looks towards him again, and he disappears, her eyes unable to coax his shape from the night. She looks away, and he returns, head propped up by his hand. This elusiveness does not concern her: he always makes more sense when she is not considering him directly.

‘Mmm?’

‘Are you awake?’

He must know that she is. His night vision is better than hers. He can probably make out the features of her face. Without trying to alter it, she wonders what expression she is wearing. She cannot feel her lips straining — she must not be smiling. Her top and bottom teeth are touching; perhaps she is pouting. Lately she has been more wary of him, unwilling to incite his temper and hesitant to make her presence felt. But he was so remorseful, and so attentive with his apologies, that she has lowered her guard a little, her resolve has weakened. In short, she does not know how to feel, does not know how to behave. What is someone supposed to do in this situation? She is sure she is getting it wrong.

‘Yes. Are you?’

‘Yes.’ He drops his head back to the pillow. ‘I cannot sleep.’

A gust of air escapes the sheet and passes over her face. It travels so fast. Doesn’t it know there is nowhere to go?

They lie on their backs, staring at the ceiling. She can make out the light globe now, hanging like a ripe fruit on an oversized stalk. Glühbirne. Glow pear. It makes so much sense that she grins. It seems a shame that he isn’t looking at her to notice. He likes to see her happy.

‘Me neither.’

They sigh in unison, happy to share their disgruntlement.

‘I used to try and imagine you,’ he says. ‘I would lie alone in this bed, knowing that one day I would meet a woman I could fall asleep beside every night. And I would try and imagine what she would be like.’

‘Was she anything like me?’ She wishes, just once, to sleep alone for one whole night, starfished across the bed.

‘No,’ he replies. His voice play-acts surprise. ‘She was not like you at all.’

She does not believe this. Most women are much the same.

‘I had no idea what you were like. But now that you’re here, I cannot imagine not knowing you. Isn’t that strange?’

She has become aware of his heat. It has made itself distinct from the rest of the atmosphere. A glaze of sweat lounges between her breasts and around her crotch. She would give anything for a breeze to sweep away the stillness, stir his pulsating heat back in with the surrounding air. She yanks the sheet from her body, and for a moment, as the sweat evaporates, cool teases her body. He takes the sheet and waves it back and forth so that it billows above their bodies like a parachute.

‘It’s too stuffy in here for sleeping.’ He lets the sheet settle and reaches for her hand. ‘Come on.’

In the living room, he switches on a lamp, puts Nina Simone on the stereo. At the window she lights a cigarette, takes a drag and stubs it out. The television tower is unaffected by the misty rain that clings to the city. Clare is disappointed: she’d hoped that it would droop a little.

‘We can make a whole town,’ he calls out from where he sits on the floor. The book of Soviet architecture is open before him, and he is punching one of the flattened buildings from its moorings on the page. She crouches down beside him, and he plants a kiss on her shoulder. She watches as he tears the cardboard along the perforations, careful not to lose any tabs. He has chosen the Palast der Republik. Its shape could not be more simple, and in only a few minutes it stands on the floorboards like a grand shoebox.

‘Your turn.’

She flips through the pages. She chooses the hideous People’s House in Bucharest. Too big for one page, it is drawn across a gatefold — it will dwarf all the other buildings. She folds along each of the lines with precision, tucks the tabs neatly into slots.

‘They had to build the central staircases three times,’ she tells him. Her memory takes her back to the pimply tour guide, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down above his red polyester tie, his skinny arms pointing at the twin staircases like an air steward indicating exits. ‘Apparently Ceausescu wanted to be able to walk down one flight, while his wife walked down the staircase opposite, with them looking into each other’s eyes the whole time. But his wife was taller than he was so the workers had to change the height of his stairs so she wasn’t looking down on him and so that they still arrived at the bottom at the same time.’

‘It’s always the short men that make trouble,’ he says, laughing. She does not agree.

They carry on making the models until there is nothing left of the book, and the floor is littered with buildings. He has mixed mint juleps, and as the morning sun breaks into the room the dregs of mint in the jug and discarded glasses pass green shadows across the miniature metropolis. She watches the way Andi lines the buildings up with the floorboards, creating diminutive streets and boulevards. He looks to her every now and again, as though seeking her approval, and she finds herself giving it willingly. She recognises the emotion that loops itself about her ankles, climbs her legs to her hips, aims itself at her heart. She is content. But it is a feeling so close to happiness that she shakes it loose and goes back to bed.

Clare’s accent is atrocious; it makes him want to laugh.

‘Ich möchte ein Kaffee, bitte.’

‘Nein, ich möchte ein-en Kaffee, bitte.’

‘Einen.’ She repeats his emphasis, smiling. ‘Because it’s accusative, right?’

‘Ja, sehr gut.’ He stands up from the table and bends to kiss her forehead. ‘A coffee it is, or would you prefer a beer?’

‘Hmmm … perhaps a beer. I’ve already had two coffees today — I’m pretty wired.’

‘A beer it is then, we can’t have you climbing the walls.’ He heads into the kitchen and takes two beers from the fridge. He feels as though this day could go tumbling on and on, and he would never want it to be tomorrow.

‘So you’re quite good at teaching German. Is it easier than teaching English?’

‘I don’t know about easier,’ he replies, returning to the table and handing her a beer. ‘But I definitely find it preferable.’

‘Why’s that?’ She takes the beer and clinks it against his own.

‘Because I get to teach it to you.’

‘Right answer.’ She smiles. ‘But I’m confused — how did you learn English? I would have thought they only taught Russian at school?’

‘We did learn Russian, it was compulsory. But, to be honest, no one was really interested. English was offered, and even though nobody thought the Wall would ever come down, it seemed obvious that English was going to be the more useful language.’ He sits and traces his finger, wet with condensation, around her hand. She has such lovely hands. ‘And I suppose it was because of my father being an English teacher — though he was more interested in the literature than the language.’

He remembers his father sitting in his reading chair, lamp on and book open in his lap. He was always reading English books, but Andi never asked what they were about. Novels, he assumes, but cannot be sure. These days his father buys all of his books online and is amazed by the speed with which they arrive.

‘There’s a book on absolutely everything, Andi,’ his father told him, enthused. ‘You type in any topic you can think of and someone will have written a book on it.’ It is as though his father has only just discovered a world outside of his own.

‘That’s how they met, my parents. He taught her English at university.’ Andi takes a sip of beer. ‘Once dinner was finished, they would sit at the dining table and read stories and poetry in English and German to each other.’ He has not thought about it in a long time, but when he describes it, he can almost hear their voices.

‘My mother’s accent was nowhere near as strong as my father’s,’ he recalls. He didn’t recognise it then, but he knows it now. She probably has no accent at all anymore. ‘I suppose she was quite a bit younger than him when she began learning. Well, she was always quite a bit younger than him; he’s more than ten years older. Was it the same with your parents? Or were they the same age?’

When she doesn’t answer, he realises she is probably thinking about how long it has been since she has seen her mother, how her father is of no age now. He makes these slips every time he loses himself, allows himself to think that things are working out okay. Every time that locking the door behind him each morning seems like the most normal thing to do in the world, and when he cannot remember what it was like to fall asleep alone.

‘Perhaps she always felt he was too old. She left him —’

‘The same age,’ she interrupts him. ‘They were born in the same month and the same year.’ She looks at him and smiles. ‘They always had a birthday party together. Mum would make Dad a cake; he would buy her flowers.’ She pushes her chair out and stands. ‘I’m going out for a walk.’ She leaves her beer on the table, and he hears her grab her jacket from where she has hung it next to his in the hallway. There is the sound of the bedroom door closing, and he knows she won’t come out until it’s dark.

She wonders whether he shows these photographs to anybody.

‘Look at me.’

She looks at him.

‘Smile.’

She does not smile. Andi presses the button, and the camera flashes its response. She blinks, and he takes the Polaroid that slips out of the camera and shakes it in the air.

‘I’ll be home late.’ He continues to shake the photograph, addressing Clare’s foggy apparition. ‘Is that okay?’

She nods, and her image surfaces on the Polaroid film, nodding in unison with Andi’s shaking hand. He takes yesterday’s photograph from his diary, puts today’s in its place.

‘Your hair is getting long, Clare.’ He studies the two photographs before closing the diary, leaving one image on the table. ‘I’ll see you later, baby.’

He kisses her on the lips. She kisses him back. She does not want him to leave. He leaves.

She wanders to the window, rolls a cigarette, lights it and waves it in front of her face. She does not inhale. She wishes the tobacco would make her thoughts spin faster, but it does not. The cigarette smoke butts up against the closed window, searching for release as it does every day. She returns to the table and picks up yesterday’s photograph. Her hair is getting long; she will need to cut it soon. She looked happier yesterday. Was she?

She takes the photograph to the bathroom and compares it to her reflection in the mirror. She looks the same. But she cannot be the same. She is a day older and she is no longer just herself. She is pregnant.

She holds the Polaroid next to her face, and her eyes flick from one to the other. She tries to catch her similarities out. Or her differences. In the photograph, she is not looking directly ahead; she is looking to the left. She had been looking at the table when he took the photograph yesterday, trying to see whether the newspaper headline had a ‘c’ in it. She needed a ‘c’. In the mirror her reflection stares straight ahead without fail. She cannot catch it out.

She stubs her cigarette out in the basin and walks back down the hall into the living room. Taking a drawing pin from the tin on the bookshelf, she reaches up to pin the photo to the wall. She started from the skirting board, the Polaroids evenly placed, crawling up the wall like ivy on a lattice. She has grown up past her own waist, beyond her head. She has not counted how many replicas of her populate the wall, but if she should reach the ceiling, she will begin again, filling in the gaps. Each image looks identical to its neighbours, but if she looks at one from the bottom and one from the top, she can see they are quite different. Her hair a little longer, her skin a different colour. The faces from long ago don’t look like her at all. Or is it the faces at the top, the more recent ones, that are unfamiliar?

She steps back to survey the wall. It is like a line-up, a gallery of mug shots. What sort of crime does she look like she has committed? She does not appear drunk and disorderly, perhaps just a little dishevelled. The gallery regards her with reproach. It’s his crime, she pleads with them. But she knows that it is hers, too. The jury waits for her justification, expressions inscrutable. Her face has become thinner. That’s what it is. And her freckles have faded. But which one does she resemble the most?

She looks down at her legs. Her thighs are lined with silvery scars. Her shins are hairy, and the skin beneath is dry. What did she use to look like? Tears well up in her eyes, and the heat of shame creeps up her neck. She takes a deep breath. Why can’t she remember what she looked like? She lifts her arms, examines her hands. They look like her hands. But have the freckles faded there, too? And her muscles? Did she use to have more muscle? She flexes her leg, watches closely. Her muscles flail beneath the surface of her skin then fall back in relief.

She lifts her t-shirt, looks at her stomach. She tries to imagine it growing, the skin stretching, and she cannot. All she can think of is the baby trapped, desperate to get out. Her periods, so regular, have stopped. She feels ill in the mornings. She wants there to be another cause, but she knows that there is not.

She runs into the bathroom. She strips off her clothes. Her pubic hair has grown. She looks in the mirror. Are her shoulders more stooped, less? Her eyes appear panicked — is she? She turns around, tries to catch her back in the mirror. She can see the pink flush of a pimple rising on her shoulder. How many of those has she had and not noticed? It suddenly seems imperative to document herself. She doesn’t want to change, but she knows that in the coming months she will. She doesn’t want to forget what she looks like.

She understands, now, the photographs Andi takes. She thought it was sweet at first. ‘I want the most up-to-date picture of you with me every day,’ he had said. ‘I want to be in love with the you of right now, not yesterday.’

In the living room, she takes the Polaroid camera from the shelf. It has been a long time since she has held a camera, and this one feels like a toy. It has a rainbow stripe running beneath the lens, and the word ‘Presto!’ flags the red button. Her own cameras are still in their bag. They are useless here — no darkroom, no computer. Which is why Andi had been so pleased when he came home with the Polaroid camera. ‘It just makes total sense,’ he said. ‘It takes the photo, and there it is.’

She holds the camera with both hands and aims it at her feet. She presses the button, and the bulb flashes. The paper pushes out from the slot. She bends over further and takes a photo of her knees. It will be upside down, but she does not think that will matter. She straightens up a little and takes a photo of her faded pubic hair. Her stomach, which appears just the same as it always has, so calm on the surface. Her breasts that look as though they belong to someone else. As the photos spew out, she tosses them on the table without looking at them. With one hand she takes a photo of her other hand. Her elbow. She swaps the camera to her left hand and does the same again.

She aims the camera at her arse, presses the button. At the backs of her legs, which is less successful. How to photograph her back? She tries a few possibilities, waves her arms around fitfully. She takes one photograph from below, one from above. She photographs the back of her head. When she is done, she realises she is cold. But she is no longer panicked.

She showers, rubbing soap all over her body. When she dresses, she is thankful that her body disappears beneath the clothes, avoiding further scrutiny. At the table, the Polaroids have all been exposed. She still cannot tell if she has changed, however, because she has nothing to compare the images to. But at least she has this record. She gathers up the photographs; they are such a little stack and yet they are her entire body. She stands in front of the bookshelf and wonders how to choose. Eventually she closes her eyes and picks books at random from the shelf. Into each one she places a Polaroid body part. For Klimt she offers up her breasts — she thinks he would like that.

As she puts the books back on the shelf, she reviews her invisible work with satisfaction. Swinging her arms, she walks to the window where the television tower greets her.

‘Hello,’ she says. Her voice is unfamiliar. It sounds different when she is alone from when Andi is there. ‘Hello, tower.’ She sounds a little forlorn.

She wonders what she sounds like to Andi. People’s voices never sound to themselves the way they do to others. She knows this from the message she recorded on her own voicemail. Her recorded voice sounds lower than — lower than what? Lower than it should? Lower than it sounds to her? What is more true: the sound of your voice to your own ears or to someone else’s? What would it be like to have company, other than the plant? Someone to answer her questions, to listen to her voice and tell her if it sounded wrong.

‘Is this my voice?’ she asks herself aloud. ‘Or is this my voice?’ And when she finds herself waiting for an answer, she shakes her head. ‘Fuck, I’m going mad.’

She is lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. He crosses the room to the stereo. There is no record on the turntable, but the volume is turned to the max. It’s like being inside a conch shell, surrounded by the sound of the ocean. He switches off the amp, and the whisper and crackle of the speakers is silenced.

‘Clare?’

She has not moved. She lies on her back with one hand behind her head. The other lifts a cigarette to her mouth. She holds it there, near her lips.

‘Yes?’

She is dressed in one of his t-shirts and a pair of her own knickers. Two grey woollen socks cling to her feet.

‘What are you doing?’

She lifts one leg, places her foot flat on the floor. Stubs her cigarette out in the teacup beside her and puts both hands behind her head. ‘I’m waiting.’

He stands next to her, his feet by her bent elbow. ‘What for?’

She looks at him, indifferent. ‘For you, Andi. I am waiting for you.’

‘Well, you can stop now.’ He steps over her, one foot on either side. He offers her a hand, but she does not reach to grasp it. ‘Come on, Clare. Get up.’

She doesn’t. This annoys him. He nudges her with his foot.

‘Clare.’ He tries to keep his voice friendly. ‘Clare, come on.’

She won’t move and she won’t look at him. She won’t acknowledge his presence.

He kneels, one knee either side of her. Holding her gaze, he undoes his belt buckle and his jeans. He is already hard; he wants to make sure she knows he is here. He leans forward and puts one hand by her head, uses the other to pull himself free from his underwear. It is an awkward movement, and it irritates him to think that she will have noticed this. Still she has not moved.

He leans down and kisses her neck. Moving his knees further apart, he settles himself down onto her. He cannot see her eyes now and he is glad. He closes his own. He pulls her knickers aside with one hand and finds her wet.

‘You were waiting for me,’ he whispers and he enters her quickly, thrilled with the way her body welcomes him. He pushes against her. His knees are uncomfortable on the floor, but her body is giving. And, too quickly, he lets himself come; he does not try to slow down, he just lets everything go and falls onto her, spent. He lies there, waiting for his breath to catch up to him, listening to the silence of the apartment, and then he stirs himself, lifts up off the floor. He moves to one side of her and stands, doing up his jeans.

She looks at him, and he realises she has not moved from her original position. Her hands are still behind her head.

‘What?’ He throws the word down to her, petulant.

‘Nothing.’ She brings herself up into a sitting position and reaches for her papers and tobacco. He kicks them out of the way, knocking her hand with his shoe.

‘Ow!’ She pulls her hand back with a yelp and shakes it, as though trying to surprise the sudden pain away. ‘That hurt!’

‘You should not smoke so much.’

He wants to pick her up and throw her from the room but he will not. He will not be a part of this anymore. What is wrong with her? She is not the way she promised to be. He slams the front door as he leaves.

He walks to the river, sees the arc of the Ferris wheel above the trees. As he crosses the bridge he is almost running — he cannot get far enough away. He only slows when he reaches a park. From a bench, he watches children pull themselves onto the play equipment and hurl themselves down the plastic slides, shouting to each other.

‘I can do this faster than you!’

‘You can’t catch me!’

He cannot take his gaze from these children. He notices the way they don’t look at each other: they are too busy concentrating on their own trajectory, thinking about what to grab hold of next, what leg to use to launch themselves from a platform.

He must stop staring: people will think he is strange. He leaves the seat and walks away from the playground towards the trees. He lowers himself tentatively to the ground, wonders whether it is damp or just cool. Stretching out on his back, he laces his hands behind his head. He can still hear the children shouting, one of them bossier than the others. He thinks of Clare lying like this on the floor of the apartment. Is she doing it now as she waits for him to return?

Sometimes when he comes home, he unlocks and locks the door as quietly as possible and takes his shoes off in the hallway. Then he steps slowly towards the bedroom and slips inside it. He stretches out on the bed, inhales its familiar smell of sex and washing powder and closes his eyes. He feels like he is alone and no one will disturb him.

‘What are you doing?’ She inevitably finds him there.

He’ll open his eyes warily. ‘Nothing.’

He lies on the grass with his eyes closed. The sun has already gone down, and he hears parents calling out to their children, telling them it is time to go home.

‘Hurry up, Klaus!’

‘Why?’ The little boy answers back to his mother.

‘Because it’s time to go home.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I said so.’

‘Why do you get to make all the rules?’

‘Because I’m your mother.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I love you.’

He hears the thud as the little boy jumps from the play equipment and lands on the ground. The sound of his impossibly light footsteps as he runs across to meet his mother.

Cooling tears pour down Andi’s cheeks. He squeezes his eyes as though to stop them, but it just makes them run faster. The stream of tears trickles to his jaw, first the right side and then the left. He swallows and, clenching his teeth, pulls himself up into a sitting position. He hugs his legs, as though to reassure them, as though they are the cause of his crying.

The playground is deserted. He can see the bright blobs of colour as the children disappear into the dusk, running ahead of their parents. He would like to go with them. To have someone else be in charge, to be gathering him from the playground, putting him in his pyjamas and depositing him in bed.

He is still crying. He is surprised at the tenacity of his tears, they who have arrived unbidden and refuse to go away, though he does his best to ignore them. He has not seen Clare cry in a long time. Either she has become very good at not crying, or she does not have a reason to cry. He is not sure which is the better reason.

He shivers — the ground feels more wet than cold. He should go home. She will be waiting for him.

‘Why?’ he imagines her asking.

‘Because I love you.’

‘That’s your answer to everything,’ she will retort.

‘Because it’s true,’ he will say. But still he does not want to go home.

Once she has decided that time no longer exists, she feels relieved. The sun will rise and set: this is true. But even this has little effect on her because when she wants light, she turns on a lamp, and when she wants twilight, she switches the lamp off.

During those long hours of time when Andi is not there, she thinks about him. She thinks about him so often that in her thoughts he is more present than when he is actually in the apartment with her. At these times, Andi is the subject, and she is not sure what this makes her. Semantics don’t leave much room for feeling.

Bed has become her favourite place to be. Lying against Andi’s warmth she feels at peace. Dreams come to her, parading through her mind like a travelling circus rolling into town. In bed she thinks of people she has not seen in years, of places she is not sure she has ever been. As she drifts off to meet these dreams each night, she thinks that things are not so bad. That wherever she was, she would be dreaming; and no matter who was lying beside her, her dreams would remain the same. Of this she is certain: they are her dreams.

When she is not anchored to her dreams, she finds herself focusing on Andi and having to face the fact of her imprisonment. She tries to avoid this because she hates to see him struggle to articulate his reasons for doing this. She feels sorry for him even as she needles him with plaintive questions. And yet she carries on asking, waiting for the moment of desperation when his eyes lock with hers and he finally answers.

‘Because I love you, Clare.’

There is reason behind the madness.

In return, she catalogues the reasons for which she loves him. She does, doesn’t she? He loves her. He looks after her. And he has gone to such great lengths to have her here. There is something admirable in that; not many people would try so hard.

In the evenings she stands back watching him. Like an audience she follows his every move, tries to read the symbolism of his actions and offers feedback only when required. When pleased, she is vocal; when disappointed, she stays polite. The conversation that they carry out at these moments is stilted. He asks her questions, and she answers them correctly. She likes to be as neutral as possible while she observes him. She is fixing him in her mind, so that at other times, when he seems less like Andi, she can remember him.

He will ask how her day was, and she will answer. She will ask him how his day was, and he will answer. She will ask more involved questions, and he will continue answering. It is like any conversation that people have under normal circumstances. They will both make jokes, usually about words and pronunciation. He will teach her the German word for things, and she will repeat it. He will smile at her when she repeats it correctly, and this is the smile that she will remember when he is not himself. He will stop what he is doing, look up at her, right into her eyes, and smile. She tries to coax this smile into existence as often as possible. She wants as many in reserve as necessary.

Once time has disappeared, patterns emerge. Andi comes home. (She has taken to calling the apartment ‘home’, because that is what it feels like. Home is where the heart is. She supposes there is an element of truth in this but she is unwilling to explore it further.) Andi comes home. One of them cooks. If it is her turn, he alternates between watching her from the kitchen doorway and standing at the stereo, choosing what record to play next. If he cooks, she sits on the bench, trying to entice smiles.

After they have eaten, they settle in the living room. They are like two dogs that have turned and turned, trampling the grass before they lie down to snooze. They sit in the living room and talk. It is these conversations that surprise her the most. They are always different. She is not sure where the new material comes from, considering. It is as though a package arrives every day, and they open it together. They talk about people. Places they have been. Opinions they have had about these things. They talk about characters in books and, tentatively, about their families (usually as though they are characters in books — with slight irony), offhand and at arm’s length, and she wonders how effective hands and arms are at keeping things away.

It is at these moments that she forgets the door is locked, and she suspects that he does, too. These times are like the nights before things became as they are, and her love for him surges forth, and she feels like the boy with his finger in the dyke. Much better than feeling like the boy who cried wolf.

‘How did you know it would be like this?’ she asked one night.

He looked at her, quizzical. ‘That what would?’

‘This. Us. How did you know that if I stayed, then things would be like this?’

‘It is like when a tree falls in a lonely forest. If there is no one to hear it fall, it does not make a sound. I needed you. I did not want to fall in silence.’

She understood then that he was afraid. And that he knew how wrong all of this was.

‘But it’s not all about need,’ she had said.

‘What else could there be?’

Often now she sees that he is trapped within himself and wonders whether he is actually ill, whether his mind has betrayed him. She had thought that perhaps he was cruel or selfish. Or too earnest, overly enthusiastic for his cause and, in the excitement, forgetful of others. Most explanations she applies to Andi involve the traits of small children. She wonders whether his unreliable mind is tipping him into psychosis, somewhere she won’t be able to follow. She does not know whether this makes it better or worse. And if this is the case, then is it love that she feels? Or is it sympathy? Are they not the same thing?

She wants to help him, to tell him that it will be okay, that she understands. And maybe she can help him. Because while keeping her locked in this apartment is wrong (she does know that, she reminds herself of it every day), perhaps she can make it right. If she can help him not to fall, then maybe she is doing good, and this is right. And if this is right then she does not have to worry anymore. She does not have to make it right by getting out because she is helping him to be okay.

At night, when he is quiet, she reaches across in bed, holds herself to his back. ‘You’ll be okay, Andi. We will be okay.’ She wonders why okay is all people ever seem to reach for. ‘We will be better than that. We will.’

She makes promises she hopes she can keep. She is the boy with his finger in the dyke, indeed. She saw the trickle of water and she has stepped in to plug the hole. She will save Andi from himself, from falling in silence, and she will keep back the angry waters.

‘Do you want to have a child, Clare?’ he asks.

She pauses, spoon to her mouth, and her eyes widen, making room for the fear that fills them. He can see it, rolling in across her irises like a settling fog.

‘A child?’

He finds her doing this so often lately. Repeating what he says as though she has never heard the words before. Waiting for him to fill in the gaps, tell her what they mean. It annoys him, this repetition. Why is it that he has to supply everything?

‘Yes, a child.’ He does not want to play her games. He just wants to speak directly. It should not be so difficult.

‘I’ve not really thought about it.’ She drops the spoon to her bowl, and it makes a gentle smacking sound against the stewed apple.

‘Yes, you have. Everyone has.’ He doesn’t want a discussion, he wants an answer. ‘You have that contraceptive thing in your arm. You must have thought about children.’

‘Well, I suppose I have.’ She takes another spoon of apple. ‘No, Andi. I don’t want a child.’

He watches her finger the contraceptive rod that sits at her bicep. It disturbs him when he feels it, alien beneath her skin, but she seems unperturbed by it.

‘I think I do.’ Even as he says the words, he does not know if they are true.

She takes up her bowl, walks across the room to the photos of herself. ‘I don’t really think it’s a good idea, Andi. I don’t really think it’s the right time for that.’ She speaks to the Polaroids; he can see her head shaking as she consults each one.

‘But it’s the perfect thing. We would be a family.’ He can see it now. Walks to the park collecting autumn leaves, reading picture books in the evening. He tries to ignore his mother in the background, laughing as she kicks up leaves or reaches out to turn the page of the book.

‘How exactly would that work, Andi?’ She leans her back against the wall, her multiplied face reiterating all the words. ‘Would you let the child out of the apartment? Or would they have to stay here, too?’

Why must she always come back to this? Those are just details, they could be worked out. Just as he worked this out, just as he managed to make everything the way he wanted.

‘It’s not about that, Clare.’ He crosses the room towards her, takes the bowl and puts it on the floor. Then he holds her hands, pulls her forward, away from the crowded wall. ‘We would be making something perfect together, something new.’ He kisses her lightly on the lips, imagines how a baby’s skin would be even softer. He fingers the rod where it nestles against her muscle. It would be so easy to remove. All it would take is a little cut.

‘Are you trying to replace me?’ She squeezes his hands, leans into his gaze.

For a moment he thinks she is making fun, waits for the crack of her smile.

‘Are you?’ She shakes his hands again as though wanting to dislodge an answer, and he pulls free from her grasp.

‘Of course not.’ He turns away.

‘You could keep the child and let me leave …’ She follows him across the room to where he sits on the couch. She crouches beside him, and her butterfly hands tap across his cheek.

‘No!’ He bats her hand away, and when she doesn’t move, he gives her shoulder a gentle shove so she topples to the floor where she bursts into laughter.

‘It won’t work, Andi.’ She giggles as she sits up. ‘You can’t just make another to add to your collection.’

‘Shut up, Clare.’ He steps over her and leaves the room. Why does she have to make things so difficult?

She does exactly as he says and lies down on the bed. She does not want to argue with him. She is not afraid, but she does not want him to be angry with her. She wants only to keep rolling through these days without friction, glancing off the soft surfaces of each morning and night and waiting for the time she will no longer be here. She wants to tell him that she has decided to stop: that she will not cut herself anymore because she is afraid of what it might do to the baby. But then she would have to tell him about the baby.

She has a gift for causing him frustration; she is trying to keep it in check. He stopped bringing her tobacco (as though he knew she should no longer be smoking), but then her fingers had nothing to do. They wanted to be holding something, needed to be busy. When he saw the latest red line on her thigh, as if a cat had scratched her amongst the scars, he had been so much angrier than she had ever seen him. His face becomes red when he is in a fury, two spots, high on the cheekbones. She likes the way his face reacts so readily to her actions, but she soon feels remorseful, as though she is taunting an animal that cannot contain its very self. It is not a nice thing to anger someone.

She stares at the ceiling. In Melbourne, her bedroom was white with a yellow ceiling rose, as though the sun never set. The first time she went to the Tate Modern, there was an installation that recalled this in the turbine hall. A semicircle, high up on the far wall, was reflected in a ceiling of mirrors, where it became full, an orange harvest moon. People were lying on the ground and looking up at themselves, waving their arms about as if making snow angels. They were forming shapes with strangers (because patterns cannot be made alone); like synchronised swimming teams they bent their arms and legs, crossed their limbs on top of each other. She wishes she had an audience here, to be only one amongst many.

When she feels the cool note of metal on her thigh, her thoughts swerve back to the present. She cannot see the line it leaves but she knows well its mark. She wonders if he is using the same knife that she does.

‘You like it, don’t you?’

Surely she does not. But her body betrays her. The goosebumps pop, and she shivers. Or she shivers, and the goosebumps pop. Her body acts the same way it does when he runs his fingers across her lower back, brushes his lips against her neck. It reacts the same way it always has for any man, which would once have made her feel like a pre-programmed robot. Now she feels like she is malfunctioning. But she does not think she cares. Because it is not her body anymore. It is his. She is relieved she made this decision: it leaves her mind to think on other matters.

Stroking her face with one hand, he runs the knife along her inner thigh from her knee up to her crotch. He has had to spread her legs to do this, yet she feels no shame about her graceless pose. His hand blurs at the edge of her vision. She is amazed at his certainty: he wields the knife like he has done this before. Her neck hurts from watching him so she lets her head fall back on the pillow, throws her gaze back up to the ceiling. She could project a ceiling rose. A different one for every day. Maybe she will ask him for a projector. He could film the sky during the day and bring it back to her, scatter it in pixels across the ceiling.

He draws the knife along her leg again, steadier this time, and she clenches her knees, hisses a sharp intake of breath. The sting is high-pitched; she can feel the warm trickle of blood meeting the air and running down her leg. Tears form, but she does not want to cry. Instead she grits her teeth. It hurts more than when she does it herself. It is just one more way in which her body is siding against her. A sob threatens to engulf her, but she will not let it. She can still be in charge of this. She has to be strong; she has someone else to think about now. She pictures the patterns she would make on the ceiling, if only there were mirrors and members of the public to help her out.

‘Open your eyes.’

She does not want to but she has learned to obey. He is holding a mirror in front of her face. His elbow pins her to the bed, like a stake.

‘Keep them open. I want to show you what you look like when you come.’

He swiftly pulls the knife up her leg; it stings as her misbehaving body is opened to the air. She watches the girl in the mirror, tries to stare at her straight-ahead eyes as they spasm. He is probably right: she probably looks like this — she would not know.

She waits for the release of air, but it does not come. It is as though he is dismantling her body, laying out her parts on an oil-splattered tarpaulin with plans to one day put her back together, a smoothly running machine. He throws the knife to the floor when he stands, the sea-grass matting dulling its expected clatter.

‘If you ever cut yourself again, Clare, I will cut you, too. Every time you do it, I will do one to match. You cannot keep changing yourself like this.’

As he leaves the room, he slams the door behind him. The light globe quivers on the end of its cord. If it fell down, would it burn her? She shuts her eyes and concentrates on her stinging leg, the warm blood trickling to the mattress. She stands from the bed, the blood drying like knotted string against her legs, and follows him into the living room.

‘You shouldn’t do that to me.’

‘You should not do it to yourself.’

But it isn’t the same. How can he not see that? She hates him for taking this away from her, for proving that she is nothing but blood inside.

‘It’s not yours. It’s not your body. I can do what I want.’

‘Is that what you want? To destroy yourself?’ He tries on an incredulous expression but it is ill-fitting. He gestures towards her legs, dismissiveness leaking from his fingers. ‘Is this what you want?’

She looks at those fingers, wishing that she, too, could be so sure, so direct. She shakes her head.

‘You’re just seeking attention,’ he says. ‘But you already have it. Do you think there is any room in my mind for anything but you? You’re all I think about. It’s making me crazy!’

She feels sorry for him; he finds all of this so difficult to understand. ‘I’m going for a walk.’ She waits for him to contradict her, but he does not say anything, so she returns to the bedroom and closes the door.

If she had a projector she could beam entire forests onto the walls. She would dress up in layers, wrap a scarf around her neck and pace against projections of birch trees in a Baltic winter. Strip down to a singlet, cover herself in sunscreen and project gumtrees for an Australian summer. Instead she throws herself on the bed. Lying on her back she leans her legs against the wall. She will never smell either of those trees again.

She cannot feel anything different beneath her hand. She always wondered why pregnant women stroked their bellies, even before the bump had formed. And now she knows. It’s the waiting to feel something growing. She refuses to be surprised; she will be ready for this. The tiredness, the nausea. Did she think it would never happen?

Her breasts grow with each day. She can feel the weight of them: they wish to distance themselves from her; they pull towards the bed as though there is somewhere else that she should be. She will be able to lie on her back until the baby’s weight becomes too much. And then she will lie on her side.

When she stands, her head spins, and she waits for the blackness to pass. She finds the rod in her arm, pinches it between her fingertips. They do not last forever, a few years at most, and now she has proof of the work it was doing all that time, while she thought she was alone. Something she never will be again.

Despite the persistent company of the child growing inside her, she feels an increasing loneliness. Her days in the apartment have become even more listless. The projects she had established to keep her mind busy have fallen away. The newspapers are piling up with their headlines intact; the jigsaw remains a jumble. She finds herself becalmed, as though tides are coming neither in nor out, and there is nowhere for her to catch hold and moor herself.

She wants to blame him for getting her pregnant, though she knows it was only a matter of chance. Or a matter of time, which she has long since stopped believing in. She does not want to tell him, but how can she not? Has he noticed the untouched tampons in the bathroom cabinet, her changing body?

The plant has begun to accuse her of infidelity. It was just me and you, it seems to say to her. You weren’t supposed to bring anyone else in to our days. There’s not room for more.

She has tried to ignore the plant, but it keeps hassling her. Its leaves rustle with disapproval every time she drops her hand to her stomach. She has taken to putting the plant in the bathroom each day, returning it to the living room before Andi comes home. When she goes to the toilet, she throws a towel over it, blocking its views, and she wishes the weight of the towel might reprimand the plant enough to give her peace. But when she lifts the towel, its leaves seem to unfurl even wider, feeding on their disappointment in her. As she hoists the plant in her arms, balances it on her hip and kicks open the bathroom door, she is aware she holds the plant as she will hold the baby. Close by, a secure grip. Not letting it get away.

He rolls over, throws the covers back and traces his hand across her shoulder. She continues to sleep. She may as well be far away, and it irritates him that he is not privy to her thoughts.

‘Dreams are only ever interesting to the people having them,’ she says when he asks. He pleads with her to tell him what goes on inside her night mind, but she refuses. He is afraid she is dreaming of places he has never been to and that he cannot know. Are they places that she would rather be?

‘Is it Australia you dream of?’

‘I’ve told you, it’s nothing. The beach, cliffs. I often dream of a jungle and swinging from vines, like they do in cartoons. There are no real people in my dreams, no meaning. They’re just thoughts, Andi, left over from the day.’

But one night she woke suddenly, sharply puffing as though in a race. ‘I dreamed my teeth were falling out. All of them. And even more than I had. They just kept coming, filling up my mouth, and I had to spit them out. They were spilling all over the table, cascading between my fingers.’

Holding her, he asked for details, eager to climb into this tiny piece of her thoughts. But she had little more to say, her fear subsiding as quickly as it had arrived. Eventually she drifted back to sleep, and the following day she said nothing of it.

Listening to her quiet breaths beside him, he is jealous; he rarely dreams. Instead he often lies in a state of restless wakefulness, his mind ticking over, his body begging to be left alone. He does this now, holding her body against his own as though to infuse himself with her peace. When it does not work, and she does not wake, he gets out of bed and goes down the hallway to the bathroom.

He has begun to think of life without Clare. At moments like this she is so far away from him that her physical presence is more torturous than comforting. He knows that he should release her, of course he does, but he is worried about what would happen next. She would tell the police, and he would go to prison. This is what would happen in such a situation — it is only right. And while he cannot quite abide the possibility, it is life without Clare that troubles him more than life in prison. It would not be enough, the sending of letters, the waiting for visiting hours. It would be so much worse than the long days spent at work, with his eagerness to return home. Would she visit him? But he dismisses this thought. She loves him; she would visit.

In the brightness of the bathroom light, he inspects his face in the mirror. There are dark moons beneath his eyes, and his skin seems loose, as though his skull is shrinking away. He looks more like his father every day, gawky and flustered, as though constantly being taken by surprise. He fears that, let free from their little world, she will forget to exercise the love she feels. And he will be left like his father, alone but for the memories of better times. He cannot let her go.

He has earned Clare’s love; he made it happen. Perhaps this is where his father went wrong. He expected love to simply be something that arose, fully formed, between two people. And when his wife left, it was as though that very thing had been stolen from him and there was nothing available to fill the void. If his father had paid more attention, Andi is sure that his mother would not have gone missing. Nothing should be taken for granted.

He turns off the bathroom light, goes back to the bedroom. He slips under the covers and takes her in his arms.

‘Clare?’

He knows she is pretending to be asleep.

‘Clare?’

He kisses her neck, rubs his hand over her hip.

‘Mmmm?’

‘Clare, I want to talk to you.’

‘I’m sleeping.’ She wriggles as though to accentuate her sleepy state.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I’m not thinking, I’m sleeping.’

‘Clare …’ He pulls her towards him, rolls her body into his.

Her eyes open slowly, look at him, shut.

‘I want to talk to you.’

They don’t talk as much as they used to, and he worries about what comes after silence. For some time there seemed to be nights when they couldn’t stop fucking in order to talk. Or talking in order to fuck. And now they don’t do much of either, and he wonders again whether she is real; he fears that he has been taken in by some elaborate game. Has he tired of her?

‘Don’t you want to talk to me?’

Her eyes open again, regard him with disdain. ‘No, Andi, I don’t want to talk to you. I want to sleep.’

And there it is: he feels the anger twist inside him, a catapult ready to fire.

‘Well, it’s not always about what you want, is it?’ He holds her by the shoulders so she cannot roll away. The light from the hallway is still on, and it makes her hair a red halo around her face. He waits for her to emit a growl like a storybook lion. But she stays quiet, and her eyes stay open. He feels her body stiffen; she is making herself harder and more difficult to embrace.

‘Okay, I’m awake. What do you want to talk about, sweetie?’

Sweetie. He lets go of her shoulders, turns away from her and waits. Her hand creeps over his chest, nuzzles into his folded arms, searches for his own hand and holds it. It feels like a burrowing creature.

‘Andi, what’s wrong?’

Her other hand searches in between his neck and the pillow, her fingers stroke his cheek. He wants to turn and kiss them but he does not.

‘I was dreaming about the snow,’ she says. ‘I was dreaming about the snowman we made when I was very young and we went to the top of a hill that was near our town. The snow was in patches, you could still see the grass everywhere, and it probably had all melted away by the next day. But we gathered enough to make a snowman, and in my dream it was even bigger than me.’

He can picture the snowman, its belly leaning into the ground, its crooked smile. ‘What were the eyes made out of?’

She pauses a moment before answering. ‘Gum nuts. And his mouth was a gum leaf.’ She cuddles up close to him. ‘Maybe we can go to the snow one day?’

Her voice is loud in his ear. He wants to go to the snow. He wants for all of this to be over. He is tired of the care he must take, of the way time refuses to acknowledge their very existence. Nothing has changed or gotten better, it just stays the same; and he wishes he was not caught up in all of this, that he could be free to come and go as he pleases.

So then he tells her about his childhood, talking about snow as it is to her, an imaginary element, not the grey trampled slush he wades through on the way to work in winter. He tells her about tobogganing with his mother, her legs around him, forming a shell like a car body; her squealing voice above his head as they tore down the hill. ‘Faster, Andreas! Fast as the wind!’

And he had worried he couldn’t make it go any faster, but she did not seem to mind, and when they got to the bottom of the run she was laughing so much that she fell off the toboggan, her legs still wrapped around him, bringing him with her into the snow.

‘You must miss her, Andi?’

He is calmed by her voice and he does not want to disappoint her. ‘Of course.’ But the truth is, he does not miss her. There is no point missing something when you cannot have it back.

‘How old were you when she left?’

He thinks about not answering, about feigning sleep. He thinks of all those boxes stacked in his father’s spare room with no address to send them to. Belongings that his mother didn’t want and his father didn’t want to part with. He still has the scrap of paper his father gave him with her phone number, its plus sign indicating an international location; he has not called the number, he does not want to know what country she lives in. But it is almost summer. Soon she will be in Berlin, and he feels as though his world is folding in on itself. He has become an adult, but she has remained the same; she is still mother to his five-year-old self.

‘Five,’ he says at last.

‘What? That’s so young.’

‘I told you about it.’

‘When?’

‘I told you about how I waited at childcare that time,’ he replies.

‘What, when your mother caught the train to visit her grandmother?’

‘Yes.’ He wonders why he hasn’t explained it before. It all comes out so easily — it doesn’t seem like such a big thing now. ‘That was the last time I saw her.’

He hears her intake of breath. ‘She never came back?’

‘She went to visit her grandmother and she stayed.’ He rolls over so he is facing her. Her eyes don’t leave his face. ‘She always wanted to leave East Germany. My father says that was her only chance.’

‘But why didn’t she take you with her? Why didn’t you all go?’

‘We couldn’t all go. They only gave her a visa to visit the West because she left us behind. A husband and child, it was like insurance. They thought she would return.’ His mother used the Wall as an excuse, a reason to never return; and his father used it as a reason not to follow.

‘Did your father know? Did they plan it together?’

It was a question Andi had never needed to ask his father: the answer was as obvious as the boxes piled in the spare room, waiting as if one day she might return to unpack them.

‘My father is pathetic. He just let her go.’

‘But did he know?’

‘She left him a note saying her grandmother was sick, she had gone to Hanover, that she would be back in a few days and to pick me up from childcare. He didn’t know she wasn’t coming back. He even thought she might after the Wall came down. He didn’t hear from her again. And still he waited. Until now.’

‘Until now?’

‘She’s coming to Berlin.’

‘When?’

‘Soon.’ Andi turns away from Clare and stares at the ceiling, tries to make out the light fitting in the dark. He blinks rapidly, counting, not letting the tears leave his eyes. ‘I’m not going to see her.’

Clare doesn’t say anything, and he wishes that she would.

‘I don’t even know her. She’s like a stranger.’ He rolls over to face her, kisses her on the nose. ‘Unlike you. I know everything about you.’

Each day she thinks of new things to show Andi when he comes home, an attempt to take his focus away from her, from her changing body, which is courting disaster. It begins with the books: she lines them up according to the colour of their spines, with height as the second defining category.

She perfects her handstands up against the wall. It reminds her of lunchtimes at school when they would tuck their dresses into their knickers and cartwheel about the yard. There was so much freedom in being upside down, and it was something the boys were never able to do. She dips her hands to the floor and kicks her legs up, but the first few times her legs flail and come down, one after the other. At first she was too tentative: she was not used to flinging her adult body about. But now she just throws her hands down, flicks her legs up behind and lets them hit the wall. She stays there, feels the blood rushing to her face and her arms begin to quiver. Her head against the wall, she arches her back and, finally, when she can hold no more, she lets her feet drop to the floor with a thud.

She handstands in the middle of the room, maintaining her balance as she counts to five, then eight, then ten. She walks about on her hands: quickly at first, the momentum jolting her along, but as she gets better at balancing, her hand steps become slower and more certain.

She practises the handstands every day until her heels have marked her upside-down height on the wall. Her heel marks look abandoned, and she wonders about Andi’s mother, wonders about her own mother, a world away. Why has she not come to find her yet? She has so many questions to ask her mother. It would be awkward to discuss this situation with her, and she doubts that she ever will. But she runs through conversations in her head, answers herself as she expects her mother would. She asks her mother whether handstands would hurt the baby. Her mother laughs and wonders why Clare would be doing handstands anyway.

When her mother has dismissed each of her concerns, Clare removes all the teabags from their tin and puts them in a saucepan. She pours hot water on them and watches the tea steep to a dark brown. Using Andi’s toothbrush she paints with the tea mixture on the wall. It does not take very well: it trickles to the ground. She carries the bowl back to the kitchen and adds cornflour to the tea, stirring quickly. Back in the living room, she draws fighter jets on the wall with fire shooting from their engines, bombs falling onto the ground below. She draws spirals of smoke rising from the floorboards and pilots floating to the skirting boards beneath parachutes. It is the same kind of picture her sister used to draw when they were young. She, on the other hand, would draw landscapes, a river winding through the hills, a sun in the corner of the page beating down. Everything in perspective, leaning with commitment towards the vanishing point. She would pepper the landscape with a cottage, cloudy sheep, a train track, a reed-edged pond, all the requirements of country serenity. But those storybook pictures are too static for the apartment; she wants things that move, so she paints two-dimensional Roger Ramjet planes with bubble windows and wings bent with speed.

In the bedroom, she paints a rainbow across the wall above the bed. She makes a green-tea mixture and one with tomato sauce, but even so the rainbow is quite dismal and she thinks the baby will be disappointed.

He wants to hurt her. He wants to be rid of her suffocating presence. These urges build slowly. He wakes and feels her body by his side. He slides his arms around her and runs his hands over her breasts. She is soft and giving and pliable, and he enters her from behind. She moves in time with him, and when he comes, he wants to push her away. It is too easy. He wants to know where the borders are, how far he can push.

When he returns from work, he moves about the apartment, checking to see what has changed during the day. He considers the paintings on the wall. They are horrific, naive as a child’s, and there is something malicious about them. They are brown and green, faded colours of camouflage. He will wash them off; he should make her wash them off. Whichever way he looks, he can see something of Clare’s. His apartment has nothing to do with him anymore, and he wants to box up all of her belongings, stack them in a corner and paint his walls white again. He stands in front of the Polaroids, pinned out in a grid, and looks at her. He brings a chair from the dining table to the wall. Stepping up onto it, he sees her latest photos at eye-level. Her face has become more square. He goes back to the hallway, picks up his bag and gets out the photograph he took of her this morning. He compares it with the her of now.

‘You’ve cut your fringe.’ He feels the blood rush to his head. Sometime between when he took the photograph and now, she has cut her hair. He was at work all day with an inaccurate photograph. ‘You made yourself different.’ He tries to keep his voice steady. He holds up the photograph. ‘I take this photograph of you so I know how you look every day, and you made yourself different.’

She nods, slowly. The different hair nods, too.

‘Fuck, Clare! All I ask is that things stay the same. Why would you do this to me?’ He grabs her arm, forces her to look at the Polaroid. ‘See! This is how you looked this morning. This is how I thought you looked today. And when I come home, I find you are different. Why are you doing this to me?’

‘I thought it would be nice. A surprise. I thought you would like it.’

‘Show me! Show me how you did it. You got the scissors from the kitchen, didn’t you.’ He marches into the kitchen, holding tightly to her wrist. He pulls open the cutlery drawer, grabs the scissors. He can see a red hair caught between the blades. ‘And then what? You went to the bathroom?’ He strides down the hallway and he can feel her jerking along behind him.

‘Andi! Andi, it’s okay. I can show you. I can show you!’

He pushes her ahead of him into the bathroom and switches on the light. He wants to see exactly what she did, wants to know what she does when he is away.

‘Show me what you did.’ He throws the scissors down into the basin. They clatter about and come to rest. He can see stray hairs in the basin, some embedded in the soap. Hairs that should still be on her head.

She picks up the scissors. With her free hand, she brushes her hair forward. ‘I just wanted to trim it a little,’ she says, her voice wavering. ‘So I got the scissors and cut like this.’ She mimes cutting a straight line across her forehead.

‘Why didn’t you ask me, Clare? I would have done it for you. You can’t just go changing things like that. There are reasons for everything — you should know that by now. This is not just about you.’

She does not look at him; the scissors hang in her hand. ‘It’s just hair. It will grow back. It doesn’t matter.’

He steps forward and grabs the scissors. Standing behind her, he puts one arm around her body and forces her to face the mirror. His body is pressed against hers; his left arm comes up under her arm and his hand holds her chin. He takes in their reflections, their heads side-by-side. He is pleased by the way his body easily covers hers; she is so much smaller than him.

‘See how different you are? See how it changes the way I look at you?’ He stares at the reflection of her wide eyes. They are focused on his moving lips. He regards her fringe, her naked forehead. He would never have cut it that way — it looks too blunt.

He flips the scissors open and lifts them to her face. ‘When your hair grows to this line, then I will cut it for you.’ Her body tightens in his grip. He picks a point on her forehead, presses the blade of the scissors into her skin.

‘Andi!’

He pulls the blade quickly, and the skin puckers then gives way. In one smooth action he glides the scissors across her forehead. Blood wells in the shallow cut, and he is surprised by how smooth the bone of her forehead feels beneath the scissors. He drops the scissors into the basin and watches her reflection. Tears slide down her cheeks, and the blood gathers in one place and swells. He stares at his own reflection. He looks the same as he did this morning after he had brushed his teeth. Her body is shaking, and he pulls her to him.

‘Don’t cry, Clare. Don’t cry. I was just showing you that there are rules. There have to be.’ He holds her close, drawing his fingers through her hair. She shudders; her tears must be coming to an end. He lets her go, grabs her hand. ‘Things don’t need to change.’ He kisses her on the forehead; her blood is sticky on his lips. ‘I love you the way you are. Don’t do these things to yourself.’ Giving her hand a gentle squeeze, he walks out of the bathroom.

This cannot go on. She gets herself up from the floor and stretches. She rolls her shoulders, first one and then the other. They roll more smoothly when she does it backwards than forwards. Joints click and rub inside of her. She wonders whether this is normal but decides it does not matter. Normal or not, it is how it is. Her body appears to be shrinking when it should be growing. Her calf muscles have disappeared, and her knees tremble when she stands up. She tries to stand on one foot and she wobbles.

She is not sure how long she has been in the apartment. The sunlight is brighter than it used to be, and it rains less. But when it does, the rainfall is more substantial. She knows the difference now between showers and downpours. Rain and sleet. The sky is often blue: it must be nearing summer.

She knows it would not be so difficult to find out. She could look at the dates on the newspaper, but she chooses not to. That is a lie. She deliberately avoids them, goes out of her way to fold them over, make them go away. She does not want to know if the halfway point has happened or is still to come. If she is to be here forever, there will be no halfway point. She lifts one arm above her head and then the other. She rises on her toes. She can only stay stretched a few seconds before she falls forward. She tries it again.

The doorbell rings. She did not know there was a doorbell, but she recognises its sound immediately. Who has come to visit her? She drops her arms and crosses to the stereo to turn down the music.

The doorbell rings again. She turns off the music and waits.

‘Andreas?’

A woman’s voice floats in from the hallway.

‘Andreas? Bist du da?’

She walks down the hallway quietly. She stops at the front door.

‘Andreas, ich bin’s, Ingrid. Ich bin’s, Deine Mama.’

She feels sick. Andi’s mother. Her stomach is heavy, and she feels as if she is going to throw up. She puts her hand to the door as though to open it, but of course she cannot. She withdraws her hand, lays her head against the door. It makes a little thud, and hearing this, Andi’s mother’s voice takes on a sense of urgency.

‘Andreas? Hallo? Ist jemand da? Hallo?’

‘Hello.’ The word is out of Clare’s mouth instantly, an unsolicited hello enough to elicit a mimicking response.

‘Hallo? Würden Sie mich bitte hereinlassen? Ich bin Andreas’ Mutter.’

‘Tut mir Leid, aber ich spreche Englisch.’ Apologetic, she hopes Andi’s mother will realise the conversation is futile and leave. He will not want to see his mother, of that she is sure. She cannot stay here; she cannot be here when he returns.

‘You speak English? Is this where Andreas lives?’

Andreas. The name keeps coming back; it is a stranger’s name. Would a man by the name of Andreas be less complicated than one called Andi? She cannot talk with his mother — he will be furious. But she cannot lie.

‘Yes.’

Silence.

‘My name is Ingrid. I’m Andreas’s mother. Can I come in?’

‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t.’

It is a truth. She is pleased with this; she has not compromised anyone.

‘You can’t let me in?’

‘No.’

‘Are you Andreas’s girlfriend?’ A pause. ‘His wife?’

She conjures a wedding where this woman and Andreas’s father would be weeping tears of happiness in the pews, sharing congratulations and hugs with her own mother.

‘Yes, his girlfriend.’ The term is foreign on her tongue.

‘I’m sorry, I do not mean to be rude.’

‘That’s okay.’ She is surprised at the lightness in her voice. She sounds almost cheerful. ‘I’m his girlfriend.’

‘That’s nice. I mean, I’m happy that he has a girlfriend.’ A pause. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Clare.’

‘Clare. That is a lovely name.’

‘Thank you.’ She is pleased with how this conversation is going. She has not said anything wrong.

‘Clare, when will Andreas be home? I would really like to see him. Can I wait for him inside?’

‘I’m not sure when he will be home. You can’t wait here.’

‘Why not?’

She thinks about going back to her seat on the windowsill and asking the television tower exactly what she should do. She cannot remember what she looks like today. It is probably not how Ingrid expects her to look. She is not wearing much, and is certainly not wearing the right thing to be meeting Andi’s mother. She cannot unlock the door.

‘It’s just not a good idea,’ she says. ‘We don’t have visitors.’

Ingrid takes some time to respond.

‘Well … perhaps you can tell him that I came by? I won’t be in Berlin long but I would very much like to see him. And I would like to meet you properly, Clare.’

She thinks she would like to meet Ingrid. After all, she is a mother. And Clare has lots of questions for a mother right now. But perhaps it would be better to just ask her own.

‘I don’t think he will want to see you, Ingrid. And I can’t promise to tell him you visited. I don’t want to upset him.’

‘But he’s my son, Clare. I want to see him.’

‘I know.’

There is silence on both sides of the door. She wonders what time Andi will be home. She runs her hands down the glossy panel of the door, wonders if Andi’s mother is doing the same.

‘You haven’t seen him since he was a child, have you?’

Ingrid takes so long to answer that Clare wonders if she has left.

‘No. It’s been a long time.’

The silence pours out, and she savours it — it is so nice to share something with another person.

‘It was difficult then, with the Wall and … and how things were,’ continues Ingrid. ‘It wasn’t how I wanted it to be.’

‘But you left him behind?’

‘Yes.’ Ingrid sighs, and Clare would like to reach out for her hand.

‘I think you should go now, Ingrid. I don’t think it’s a good idea that you’re here. He’s still quite upset that you left, he doesn’t want to see you.’ Her words run on, she is speaking too much, she shouldn’t be saying anything. Andi would be so angry if he knew.

‘Clare, is everything okay?’

And Ingrid sounds like her own mother, her words swollen with concern, her voice creeping around the edge of the door and streaming towards Clare to bestow a kiss on the cheek. She cannot talk; her throat is closing over and her eyes are too big for her head.

‘Clare?’

She cannot speak with his mother anymore. She is going to say something wrong and she cannot imagine what might happen next if she does.

‘It’s okay.’ Her small voice whispers, and she reins it back in, builds it up and throws it out again. ‘I’m okay, everything is okay.’

‘Well, as long as you’re sure.’

She says nothing.

‘Clare, I’m going to leave Andreas a note. It has my details so he can contact me. You don’t have to say anything, you can just give it to him.’

She listens as Ingrid searches around in her bag for a pen. She can hear the words scratched out on the other side of the door. A scuffling below and the paper is pushed under the door.

‘I’m going to go now, Clare.’

‘Okay.’

A pause. ‘Take care, won’t you? Hopefully I will see you soon.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, Clare.’

She takes the piece of paper into the living room. Ingrid has written her name, the name of her hotel and its address, her mobile number and her email address. So many identifying items. Lieber Andreas, manchmal muss man weit weg gehen, um der Liebe willen. Es tut mir leid. Ich liebe Dich, Deine Mama.

She folds the paper in half and puts it between the pages of a book. In the bedroom she lies back on the bed. It is late in the day, and the ceiling is the same colour as the sky. She shuts her eyes; she wants to sleep.

She dreams about her own mother. That she has come to Berlin to find her. She knocks on the door and apologises. She calls out. But when Clare opens the door, they have nothing to say. She gives her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, asks her if she has any bags, or a coat. They stand in the doorway staring at each other, waiting. The hallway light goes out, and when Clare steps outside to join her on the landing, her mother is not there. She switches the light back on, looks about the landing. She leans over the banister. Nothing. She goes back into the apartment and shuts the door.

It is dark when she wakes, and Andi is not yet home. She gets up off the bed. She walks quietly to the living room and takes Ingrid’s note from the book. She thinks about rolling it up into a cigarette she won’t allow herself to smoke, letting the words burn and float up to the ceiling. They would become impregnated on her fingertips, and when Andi kissed them later, wrinkling his nose at the smell, she would not have to tell him about the letter.

When the train stops at his station, he does not stand up. Others get off, the doors clang shut and the train moves on. He sinks further down into his seat, his knees touching the empty bench opposite. He is more like his father than ever. His father, who is probably right now sitting at home, pouring coffee for his mother, doing everything he possibly can to please her. He imagines his father showing her around his apartment, clearing books from the armchair or couch so that she may sit. He wonders whether his father will show her the spare room, ask her to take away the boxes of her things. But he knows that he will not. Instead his father will show her the boxes, want to lift the flaps and filter through the memories with her. And his mother will watch from the doorway, perhaps she won’t even step into the room, and she will feel nothing but sorry. Not that she went, just that she came back.

The train stops at the next station, and Andi sits up but does not stand. He left work early. The students are on holidays, the exams are marked. Yet he does not want to go home; there is nothing for him there. The train moves on. It is not Clare, it is him. When he sees her, he finds his anger grows. It grasps hold of every thought, and rips it out of his hands. He has no idea of what he is doing; each day is so much like the one before that he feels compounded. His hands want to grab her, to shove her out of the way, to push her up against the wall and make her disappear. There is nowhere to exist without her anymore; every fissure of his mind waits for her. It is as though he cannot act except in retaliation.

When the train stops again, he gets off. He has never been at this station before. Clare has never been here either. It may as well be a different country. As he climbs the steps to the street he looks at his watch: his diversion has taken only minutes from his day, and there is nowhere to go but home.

The Polaroids of Clare reach almost to the ceiling. She has to get on a chair to stick the new one up each day. She pushes the pin into the wall. She looks at the recent images that show the line across her forehead. It is angry and dark on the first image and the next. Then it becomes broken, dotted like a ‘cut here’ line around a voucher. As the images progress, the line fades to pink. If she looks in the mirror she knows she will see it: a line of slightly smoother skin skirting her eyes like a horizon, but it does not come up so clearly on the Polaroids. Film can be forgiving like that. But she knows the line will never completely disappear.

She usually sticks the photo up in the morning but not today. It is late afternoon: Andi will be home within the hour. He comes when it is light now — the days are longer. She gets off the chair, ignoring the dizziness that accompanies her everywhere and walks to the window.

Suicide is something other people do. But now she sees no alternative. She can feel her body being pushed aside, making way for the one that is forming. She cannot bring somebody else into this. She folds herself up on the windowsill. She smells. She is not wearing any socks — it is her concession to the weather. Just a t-shirt. Knickers. He likes her best that way. ‘I like to see as much of you as possible,’ he says. ‘I can see clothes on anyone.’ She likes herself least this way, but it matters little. When she looks at her scarred legs, she is disgusted, repulsed, pleased. She is none of these things and she knows that she should be. She looks at her legs, and she is not even sure they are still her own.

She feels the panic rise. It is so familiar now, the way her stomach twists and turns and the saliva builds in her mouth. Her visual focus narrows, and her armpits prick with sweat. She should not be here. She needs to get out. She cannot get out; there is no way out. She will have to die. She cannot commit suicide. She does not want to die. She is pregnant. She cannot be pregnant. She does not want to leave Andi. What the fuck is wrong with her?

‘What the fuck is wrong with me?’ She tries the words out aloud. They drift away, unanswered. She leans her head on the glass. The ground is five storeys below. It could be one; it could be twenty. She cannot get out.

‘I belong here.’

She wants someone to argue with her, but they don’t.

‘He cannot live without me.’

No response. She looks down at her pale legs, lined with scars.

‘No one will recognise me.’

She walks down the hallway to the front door, touches it, turns and walks back to the window of the living room and touches it. She repeats this over and over, as though she is swimming laps in a pool. She feels increasingly faint, and this is what she wants. To fall over and have it all disappear. Finally, she stops at the front door. It swims up before her, white in the gloom of the unlit hallway. She twists the handle, pulls the door and it opens.

Clare stands with her hand on the door knob looking into the hallway. The safe sits, as she imagined, by the wall. The rest is dark, just a gleam from the varnished banister. She steps onto the landing. The concrete floor is cold beneath her feet. She does not take her hand from the door. It is instinct, to not let a door slam, to not be locked out.

When was the last time she tried the door? She cannot remember. In the beginning she would try it many times a day. As Andi left and then throughout the afternoon, waiting for him to come home. And then she stopped trying; it seemed such a futile gesture. But how could she have ever considered it so, when now the door is open? She feels cheated. How long has he been leaving the deadbolt unlocked?

She must leave. She cannot leave dressed like this. She steps back into the apartment, goes to close the door. She does not trust it so she props the door against her foot, reaches into the hallway and picks up the safe from the landing. She goes back into the apartment, carefully placing the safe between the door and the jamb, preventing the door from closing fully. She must hurry: he will be home soon.

She runs into the bedroom, tugs her backpack from the wardrobe. It looks so ridiculously bulky. She leaves it and pulls on a pair of jeans. Next to her backpack are her boots; it has been such a long time since she wore them, they feel like they belong to someone else.

She keeps stopping what she is doing to look at the door, checking it is still propped open. In the living room, she picks up her camera bag, slings it over her shoulder. Then she puts it down again. She moves the chair over to the wall of Polaroids, climbs up and, without hesitation, pulls one from the wall. Behind it is a folded piece of paper, and she lets it fall to the floor. It is the letter from Andi’s mother. She should have given it to him days ago. Sometimes you have to leave in order to love. She had translated it with the aid of Andi’s dictionary, shuffling the words about to decipher Ingrid’s intention. She thought it was such a terrible thing for a mother to write to her son that she could not bear to pass it on. She wanted to save him from the pain, because she knew that she could. She unfolds the letter and leaves it on the floor and puts the Polaroid in her jacket pocket. The television tower blinks at her. Hurry, hurry. She grabs her camera bag and runs down the hallway.

She pulls the door wide open, still amazed that it has become a moving object, and steps through. She is out. She goes to move the safe aside to let the door slam shut, but she has a moment of fear that she will be locked on this other side, and she lets the door rest ajar. The stairwell is inky. She runs her hand along the wall, feeling for the light switch. Nothing. She waves her hand up and down, broad sweeps on the cool concrete. Nothing. Hurry, hurry. She skitters down the stairs in the dark, stumbling, catching herself on the banister. At the bottom, daylight leaks in through the outer door, and she wrenches it open, throws herself into the courtyard. The linden greets her, a glorious technicolour green, and she is across the yard, through the other door, the passageway and into the street. She turns left. There are people. She is outside. She begins to run, her bag banging awkwardly against her as she sidesteps the people who have no urgency. At the intersection she looks to her left, and there, the television tower. It blinks at her, a friend. Its red and white lights switch on and off — nothing changes their rhythm — and she heads towards it gratefully.

Her ankles threaten to give way on the cobbled streets. She keeps looking in the wrong direction for oncoming traffic; she is afraid her instinct will lead her in front of a vehicle. She wants to slow down but she cannot, and she knows people are looking at her strangely, but she is running and she is getting away and she cannot stop. Her breath is short, and she keeps staring at people, expecting them to be Andi, surprised when they are not.

When she finally makes it to Alexanderplatz, her lungs are burning, her legs shaking. The square is filled with people, their hands grasping shopping bags, lifting takeaway coffees to their mouths, holding mobile phones. They are oblivious to her, and she wants to be one of them. She slows to a walk; she is breathing heavily. She skirts around the department store and sees the S-Bahn sign. Inside, the shopping mall is cool yet the air is close. She joins the crowds jostling down the stairs to the platform and lets herself get sucked up by them and ferried along.

He won’t know where she is. He will worry; she should have left a note. And then she catches herself, realises what she is thinking. She is free. She will not see him again. She knows what she must do. She is away.

Ingrid’s steps slow as she reaches the top of the landing. Each tread feels familiar, the import of her previous visit having committed this stairwell to her memory. She had asked Andreas’s father about Clare. Who was this girlfriend of their son? He had said little. He had not met Clare, and Ingrid suspects that until then he had not even heard of her. She has received no response to her note and has spent over a week distractedly wandering the streets of Berlin, trying to evoke memories as often as she tries to discourage them. She did not want to pressure Andreas, did not want to force herself upon him, but tired of waiting, she has returned to his apartment, decided once more to surprise her son, and do more than talk to a haunted voice through his front door.

She arrives on the top landing and lifts her hand to knock before realising the door is propped open.

‘Andreas?’

No sound comes from the apartment.

‘Clare?’

She wants now to put a face to the voice, wants so desperately to hear soft footsteps coming towards her. Has Clare left the door open for her? An invitation? Is she circumnavigating Andreas’s refusal to see her?

She knocks on the door, calls out the names again. Nothing. She pushes open the door and goes into the apartment. It appears to be a safe that is holding the door open, the kind used by small businesses for petty cash and kept in a desk drawer. Resting the door back against the safe, Ingrid calls out again.

‘Hallo?’

But she is alone in the apartment. Sound bumps off the hard surfaces and sinks into her body. It is a reception she knows well. She walks down the hallway, passing the bathroom and the bedroom. She cannot resist looking into the bedroom, though she feels there is something sordid about a mother seeing where her grown son sleeps. The bed is unmade: white sheets cascade to a floor of sea-grass matting. The curtains are closed, but she can make out a backpack staggering out of the cupboard — it looks like a person slumped there.

At the end of the hallway, she turns into the living room. Summer light floods through large windows framed by white curtains. There is a mural painted across one wall: aeroplanes and parachutes, the kind of thing you paint to amuse a little boy. Does Andreas have a child? Does she have a grandchild? She looks for further clues, wants to know what sort of person he has become. She expected his apartment to be dark and enclosed — the light and the IKEA furniture surprise her. She had wanted him to be miserable. Bright cushions recline on the couch and armchair, records are scattered on a coffee table. She can smell cigarettes in the air, and she hopes that Andreas or Clare will return soon, that they have just walked to the shops or a nearby park.

She crosses the room to the window. Looking at the view seems the only legitimate activity for a stranger waiting alone. She is reminded of her own apartment in Berlin so many years ago. The windows were much smaller, and the television tower further away. But it was the same, in its way, and she is glad that she and Andreas have shared this at least.

She hears a thud. Is it the downstairs door closing? Her heart lurches, and she turns from the window to face the living-room doorway. Where should she stand? How will he react to seeing her? And then she sees the wall.

From skirting board to ceiling, the wall is covered in a grid of Polaroid photographs. It looks like an art installation, each photograph pinned in strict formation with its neighbours. They are all the same image — no — they are all of the same girl, and she knows instinctively who it must be. She moves towards the gallery, aware that footsteps on the stairs are mimicking her own. There are so many photos, perhaps two or three hundred, and in each one Clare regards her. She smiles and she grimaces; she looks into the distance; she looks at the floor; and she looks through the window to the television tower as though greeting a familiar friend. But no matter where her gaze falls, in every single photo she has been captured. Towards the top of the wall, one Polaroid is missing, and Ingrid stands on a chair to look at the ones on either side, urging them to give a clue to Clare’s absence.

The footsteps arrive on the landing, and then she sees. The photo to the left of the gap shows Clare with long hair. In the photo to the right she has a fringe, and an angry line is carved across her forehead.

‘Clare?’ he calls out as he closes the front door.

As she climbs down from the chair, Ingrid hears him turn the key in the lock.

‘Clare, are you in there?’ His footsteps follow his voice down the hallway.

She turns to meet her son.