“Since we entered on Ann Street, it’s knowing when to turn off …” she said. But it wasn’t exactly that there was uncertainty in her voice. Rather, it was that - for a moment - she had ceased to impose her own sense of certainty upon me, and I was instantly conscious of the change; it was like looking suddenly through holes in a broken wall, and I was frightened by how wide the fields stretched in the moonlight beyond it.

“Ann Street,” she repeated, pushing aside the spray of foliage. She said it automatically, remotely, without association; and it was then that I knew I would never have the strength to put a hand upon her and try to stop the motion that was her, try to turn her head and kiss the movement that was her, in this place and on this night.

I realised that though the two of us had been born here, and gone to school together, and scarcely lived two streets apart, she had in fact been born far away in a place whose dimensions did not connect, and it was sand that she shifted with her bare feet where a moment before our shoes had squeaked on the tarmac. Then I saw the desert about her, vast and still, and the little broken waterways of our conversations, with, here and there, a few half-covered confidences that had started to crumble and roll away. Where the trail to the old forest began, there was nothing but a black space well trodden by cattle; but then, the cattle had only alighted there for half an hour at best, before being herded away again into the vans that would take them to a faraway abattoir beneath a greying, molten moon.

Now I was trying to guess the first day of spring that was really summer, when she and I had first broken step with one another; but there was no route back to trace, and my only consolation was that, since we had both entered on a street which went nowhere, at some point we would have to turn off it again; although whatever turning off it was would be too dark to see, and I would only know it had happened because the two of us would be pulled powerfully apart, as if someone had stepped over a cliff without seeing.