Whenever I am up high, looking out over the city, I feel like a character in a movie. Not that I feel myself to be glamorous or interesting the way characters in movies generally are, but rather, when I look down at the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, this experience seems to come to me second-hand. I have had this experience many times before, but at some remove, when watching a film in which a sad female protagonist looks down from a window in a high-rise apartment and observes the lines of traffic and the neon lights flashing in shop windows, and the tiny people hurrying here and there, noting the miniature bustling of the city with great interest because her own life seems to have paused and she doesn’t know, for the moment, how to make it travel forwards again.

I am standing, just like this, at the window looking down when the professor hands me the plastic card that will let me in and out of the building. As I slip the card into my pocket she says, ‘Perhaps you might write a poem or two while you’re here?’ She says this casually, but hardly anyone ever asks about this silence of mine, although all the world knows I haven’t written a poem in years. The professor’s apartment is on the twenty-seventh floor. It is large and sun-filled, furnished with antique rugs and expensive-looking paintings. There are exotic potted plants in every room; butterfly iris and monkey faced orchids, ferns as thick as the mane on a lion. She’s flying to Los Angeles where she’s to give a conference paper and has asked me to stay and care for what she describes as her menagerie.