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the window with the sound of a bubblebreaking; shrank the sink into itself, caught handfuls of Salma’s hair and pulled them tight as bungee ropes. Margot’s left arm was swallowed to the elbow in something that once was wall and now was loose, flabby. With a dry gasp her legs vanished to the knee. Her right arm was taken at the shoulder. Salma was pushed backwards by the sucking walls, the force of them grubbing forward, filling Margot’s mouth. Edged over stomach and breast and neck until Margot was gone.
    It was done. The walls shrank back, the sink hardened, the window snapped open onto cold air.
    You have to eat, her father said, you have to sleep, you have to get off that sofa and have a bath.
    She could not see the logic in this. She dreamt up breakings: foundations gorged under the heft of yellow diggers, walls pulled from each side until torn, doors splintered under fallen pianos. She wished she could not see it: Margot’s handprints rising on the skin of the doors; her voice coming from the open oven door, emerging from the taps. The house was filled to the rafters with the smell of what had happened. Her father popped all the windows and bought air fresheners for all the rooms but the smell stayed: rock salt.
    Salma brought home boys she found in the pub, in through the attic window, pushing them backwards onto the floor. The house shifted around her like a wound. When the boys orgasmed she lifted her head to hear thesound the house made; a quick exhalation, dust rising in pillows. The house showed its displeasure: her feet bloody, the sound of the boys falling with a whoomph from the drainpipe. The television turned itself on at night and surfed till it found the films Margot had talked and talked about.

HOW TO LOSE IT
1999
    NEVER SEEN A man naked before. Clothes coming apart until – there he was.
    Isabel thought she would remember him whole: standing afterwards at the window checking his messages or standing at the base of the bed looking down at her. Instead she kept only bits of him: the slick of snail trail, the dry skin on his thighs and upper arms, the rake of spine vanishing at its base.
    What was it like? Shields asked her.
    Dunno.
    What?
    I don’t know.
    Shields looked as though she didn’t believe her. Shields had never seen a man without his get-together on.
    But what was it like?
    Isabel knew what Shields was asking. The bulge of it ribbing out the front of his trousers, the eyeing length of it in flat propulsion against his belly. The probing of it at her thigh line and after when it was leached up and he handed it away out of view.
    You know, she said. You know.
    Though Shields didn’t and she felt nasty for not giving her something to take away. Not even something about the hotel. The blonde kid throwing up in the lobby so no one noticed her going in, taking the stairs. How all the corridors looked much of a muchness and none of the room numbers joined together so she ended up wandering a good distance in the wrong direction. Something about the light in the room when he opened the door; stale light. The window didn’t open enough to take even an elbow and with the smell of cigarette butts it needed to.
    If there had been a way not to, she probably wouldn’t have taken off anything when he told her to. Though on the train she’d wanted it and at family parties when he was the only person she wasn’t related to – taking her aside to tell her about Russian literature – she’d wanted it even more. Wanted it bad enough to make all the right motions in the right order and find herself there: down to her pants in a Holiday Inn, return train ticket in her purse to make sure she didn’t stay. He called her Fizzy Izzy the way he always did and she, playing the part, grimaced to make him laugh.
    Well, you did it, anyway, Shields said, swinging herself down off the car bonnet.
    What?
    You got rid of it. Didn’t you?
    Virginity was a half-starved dog you were looking after, wanted to give