There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin to say something in my own voice

      The intercom, buzzing in her bedroom. Insistent. Connie picks it up. Neither greeting nor warmth. ‘Prepare yourself. You have an hour. I’ll be in my office.’

      The voice struts. Ah, the Cliff of old.

      Connie’s hand reaches down, she is a different woman now, she has been hauled into a different life and her body blazes it. She is fuller and softer and looser, hairier; her body less brittle, self-hating, desperate. No, she will do this, reveal herself. It is the start of the new life and Cliff must know it. She stands proud in front of the mirror, marvelling at the fresh self. Reclaimed, returned to nature, the earth.

      The intercom again. ‘Bring your trinket. I want to put it in. I want to snap it shut.’

      Connie does not respond, cannot. The punctures would be closed up now, surely, faint scars all that’s left of her former life. The padlock lies somewhere lost in the dirt near the shed, claimed by the undergrowth. She mustn’t think how much it was worth.

      Connie turns back the mirror, biting her lip; back to her new body and everything it signals about her release. Her husband waits. She will not shave herself, she will not give him what he wants; the fury will be incandescent. Connie is very still, for a moment, stuck. What is she doing? What will be the consequences? Is she mad? She suddenly feels like she’s standing barefoot on oysters, stranded by an incoming tide, can’t move but can’t stay, stuck.

      She must go down.

      Cannot be a fugitive in her own house. She showers, throws on the silken kimono, ties it languidly, ready for a slipping off. Pads slowly down, down the grand staircase, breathing measured and calm, collecting herself.

      Shuts the office door behind her. The screen is down; it runs almost the length of one wall. So, a video, porn, right; and usually as she watches them with Cliff the liquid warmth plumes through her despite herself and she cannot help but succumb, despite herself, widening her legs on her chair and playing as Cliff hands across a vibrator, and another, as he toys with his Mont Blanc pen, the secret signal that begins it all and she is opening out, needing the coming, urgently, the next step. And she is greedy with the looking at these films as long as it doesn’t veer into anything too long, or monotonous; it is all the thrill, the anticipation that she wants.

      Cliff wheels up to her now, vividness in his face, a video camera in his lap; he has sometimes filmed in the past and she has played up to it, trusting, yielding so much; entranced. ‘I need my wife back.’

      Eagerly his Mont Blanc pen tugs the bow of her kimono, loosens it. The silk falls open. Connie drops the gown from her shoulders. Her husband gasps. It is as if a vast gulf suddenly separates them. As if his wife has gone on a strange new journey without him knowing anything of it. He has not controlled it in any way, has not allowed it, she is lost.

      ‘It – it doesn’t mean anything to me any more, Cliff. It’s just … gone.’ She shrugs. ‘Everything we do. All of it.’ She shuts her eyes on hot wet. ‘I’m so sorry.’

      They stare at each other, the two of them who have bared so much, gone on such a journey in tandem, nothing to say because there is nothing to say. The whole scenario worked because it was the two of them together, in an entranced and astonished collaboration. Cliff’s lips tighten. He spins his chair. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ he says, tight. He clicks on the film, a black man with an enormous cock and a white woman with impossible breasts, the ridiculous thrusting, the ugly close-up, the monotony, the bleakness, the utter absence of mystery and beauty in any of it; Connie cannot watch.

      She picks up her robe, puts it back on and ties