The tower

She feels heavy and soiled, like a bag of unwashed laundry. But at the same time flat and without substance. Blank paper, on which-just discernible-there's the colourless imprint of a signature, not hers. A detective could find it, but she herself can't be bothered. She can't be bothered looking.

She hasn't given up hope, just folded it away: it's not for daily wear. Meanwhile the body must be tended. There's no point in not eating. It's best to keep your wits about you, and nourishment helps with that. Small pleasures too: flowers to fall back on, the first tulips for instance. No use going distracted. Running down the street barefoot, shouting Fire! The fact that there is no fire is sure to be noticed.

The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one. Sokind, she says to the telephone. But so sorry. I can't make it then. I'm tied up.

On some days-clear warm days especially-she feels buried alive. The sky is a dome of blue rock, the sun a round hole in it through which the light of the real day shines mockingly. The other people buried with her don't know what's happened: only she knows. If she were to voice this knowledge, they'd shut her away forever. Her only chance is to go on as if everything is proceeding normally, meanwhile keeping an eye on the flat blue sky, watching out for the large crack that is bound to appear in it eventually. After which he might come down through it on a rope ladder. She'll make her way to the roof, jump for it. The ladder will be drawn up with the two of them clinging to it, clinging to each other, past turrets and towers and spires, out through the crack in the fake sky, leaving the others down below on the lawn, gawking with their mouths open.

Such omnipotent and childish plots.

Under the blue stone dome it rains, it shines, it blows, it clears. Amazing to consider how all these naturalistic weather effects are arranged.

There's a baby in the vicinity. Its cries come to her intermittently, as if borne on the wind. Doors open and close, the sound of its tiny, immense rage waxes and wanes. Amazing how they can roar. Its wheezy breathing is quite close at times, the sound harsh and soft, like silk tearing.

She lies on her bed, sheets over or under her depending on the time of day. She prefers a white pillow, white as a nurse and lightly starched. Several pillows to prop her up, a cup of tea to anchor her so she won't drift off. She holds it in her hands, and if it hits the floor she'll wake. She doesn't do this all the time, she's far from lazy.

Reverie intrudes at intervals.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.

In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonised, rejoined. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him; finish with that endless, useless longing. At the very least, daily time and the entropy of her own body should take care of it-wear her threadbare, wear her out, erase that place in her brain. But no exorcism has been enough, nor has she tried very hard at it. Exorcism is not what she wants. She wants that terrified bliss, like falling out of an airplane by mistake. She wants his famished look.

The last time she'd seen him, when they'd gone back to his room-it was like drowning: everything darkened and roared, but at the same time it was very silvery, and slow, and clear.

This is what it means, to be in thrall.

Perhaps he carries an image of her always with him, as if in a locket; or not an image exactly, more like a diagram. A map, as if for treasure. What he'll need to get back.

First there's the land, thousands of miles of it, with an outer circle of rock and mountains, ice-covered, fissured and wrinkled; then forest tangled with windfall, a matted pelt of it, dead wood rotting under moss; then the odd clearing. Then heaths and windswept steppes and dry red hills where war goes forward. Behind the rocks, at ambush within the parched canyons, the defenders crouch. They specialise in snipers.

Next come the villages, with squalid hovels and squinting urchins and women lugging bundles of sticks, the dirt roads murky with pig-wallow. Then the railroad tracks running into the towns, with their stations and depots, their factories and warehouses, their churches and marble banks. Then the cities, vast oblongs of light and dark, tower upon tower. The towers are sheathed in adamant. No: something more modern, more believable. Not zinc, that's poor women's washtubs.

The towers are sheathed in steel. Bombs are made there, bombs fall there also. But he bypasses all of that, comes through it unscathed, all the way to this city, the one containing her, its houses and steeples encircling her where she sits in the most inward, the most central tower of them all, which doesn't even resemble a tower. It's camouflaged: you could be forgiven for confusing it with a house. She's the tremulous heart of everything, tucked into her white bed. Locked away from danger, but she is the point of it all. The point of it all is to protect her. That's what they spend their time doing-protecting her from everything else. She looks out the window, and nothing can get at her, and she can get at nothing.

She's the round O, the zero at the bone. A space that defines itself by not being there at all. That's why they can't reach her, lay a finger on her. That's why they can't pin anything on her. She has such a good smile, but she doesn't stand behind it.

He wants to think of her as invulnerable. Standing in her lighted window, behind her a locked door. He wants to be right there, under the tree, looking up. Taking courage, he climbs the wall, hand over hand past vine and ledge, happy as a crook; he crouches, raises the window, steps down in. The radio's gently on, dance music swelling and fading. It drowns out footsteps. There's not a word between them, and so begins again the delicate, painstaking ransack of the flesh. Muffled, hesitating and dim, as if underwater.

You've led a sheltered life, he'd said to her once.

You could call it that, she'd said.

But how can she ever get out of it, her life, except through him?