‘I want to do something for you.’

My fingers come away wet. ‘Okay.’

‘I want to wear some things.’

‘Okay.’

She pulls them out from under the mattress. A baggy long-sleeved sweatshirt in Chroma key green. Gloves and a pillow case the same. The sweatshirt has a cord to tighten it at the waist. She slips it over her head. The gloves are long, velveteen, big enough to hide her wrists, even when she raises her arms above her head. I shake out the pillow case.

‘Put it on,’ she says. ‘Go on.’

I arrange the pillowcase over her head and pull the hood of her sweatshirt over it.

I cross to the chair and sit down, watching her hips, groin and legs move around the bed.

The rest of her has vanished.

The illusion is perfect. The legs step around the bed, deadly and elegant as scissors.

‘Wait.’

She stops for me. I get up from my chair and walk towards her, curious. The closer I come to her, the clearer I can see the obvious and unavoidable glitch. The system has somehow to fill in the body cavity where the girl’s hips leave off and her sweatshirt begins. The wireframe flickers and bends as she breathes – an irregular ellipsis of gridded grey. I stroke the line of her sex. Her small high buttocks, divorced from the curve of her back, are startling in their roundness and power. Her legs tremble as she balances with feet apart, moving against my hand. I feel for the nub of her anus and push a finger inside her, all the while gazing into the blind grey mathematics of her body cavity.

The standard fills are just a blink away. The girl’s body cavity fills with water; instantly I feel my penis engorge. I push my finger deeper into her, stirring the waters there. She groans and bends over, tipping the water away from me. The system isn’t encumbered with much in the way of physics – the watery plane simply tips with her hips, held in place by the gravitational pull of her groin.

‘Conrad.’ The voice comes out of nowhere. It excites me, this disembodied voice so close to my ear, and this extraordinary sexual contraption, at waist-height before me. It stands no higher than my waist. This is what I can’t quite get over: how small she is, reduced to arse and hips and legs. No taller than a child. A cunt and its complicated docking mechanism.

‘Conrad, I want to do something now.’

‘What?’

‘I want you to take your clothes off and lie down.’

I undress, and the legs settle on the bed, facing me. They spread apart. ‘I’m taking off a glove.’

A hand appears. Disembodied, heartbreakingly small, it settles, fluttering, on her sex. A finger uncurls – the tongue of a humming bird – and seeks her clitoris. Her sex is so wet it shines. Her legs flex, lifting her feet off the mattress, parting to reveal her sex more clearly. Her cunt flexes, ensnaring her fingers, chewing on them. Her legs flail like mouthparts. I close my eyes, afraid, listening to her come.

A disembodied hand. Oh God. The other glove comes off. Now there are two. Two white hands, hanging there in space, working at her flesh, feasting on it. ‘God.’

I hunch forward, clamber to my feet.

‘Are you all right?’

The legs right themselves. They snap and rise upon their feet and scythe towards me. I stare at them: the swell and tremble of calves and thighs, up and up to their folded junction. I run.

Beyond the room the house is a wreck, all brick and plasterboard. It’s deserted. There’s usually at least a minder in these places, but there’s no-one. I’m alone with her. Alone. I can’t remember where she said the bathroom is.

‘Hello?’ She’s coming after me. Poor cow. Still trying to do her job. Probably wondering what shitty review I’m going to give her on what shitty website.

‘I’m fine. I just need – I’m fine.’

Very late – stupidly late – it occurs to me to take off my glasses. Without my glasses, the illusion that so frightens me will be broken, and in place of Mandy’s white clown hands there will just be some plain, industrious, vulnerable girl in a hoodie chasing after me. Too late, stupidly late, as my fingers brush my face, I remember that I have no spectacles today. I’m wearing lenses now. I can’t just pluck them out.

A small, uncertain voice: ‘Do you need the bathroom, love?’

If I keep my back to her, I can imagine her as she really is. Whole. Complete. Her voice, after all, is coming from the right height. A normal human voice that says, ‘It’s the door on your right.’

‘I’ll be a minute.’

There’s a toilet. A bidet. The sink is as big as a shower tray. The mirror, decorated with a cut-glass border, fills the entire wall – how in hell did they ever get it in here? It dawns on me that nothing I am seeing need be real. I blink up the preferences pane on my lenses and hunt for Force Quit but it’s buried away in the menus and already Amber’s calling through the door. ‘Are we done, then?’ She tries to sound disappointed but she can’t keep the shiver out of her voice. It’s freezing out here.

‘For God’s sake go put something on.’

She stalks off, her absurd heels clattering the tiled hall. What was this place? Some grandee’s mansion. What’s she doing here?

She’s probably taken offence now. They do so easily, these women, their antennae cocked to detect the slightest hint of disrespect. What is it about working in the sex industry makes people want to be taken so bloody seriously?

In the bathroom mirror, my eyes glitter back at me. These lenses strip all the life from them. However did they catch on? I look like a cheap doll. A doll with my mother’s face.

Look at my face! It only ever took a little make-up, a few strokes of sponge and brush, and Mum and I looked exactly alike. I was her maquette. In four years I will be forty – the age Sara was when she died. The resemblance has not gone away. If anything, it has grown stronger.

‘Fuck you, so I made a mistake.’

He made a mistake, all right. A bloody big mistake.

I lean against the sink, my head buzzing.

I remember Vaux standing before me, his hand on the back of my head, his erection white and hard and as long as a dagger.

Vaux.

Vaux set this up for me. Vaux the rich man, the businessman. Of course the house is big. Why not? It is his house.

I bend double over the bowl. Wrong bowl. Bidet. Christ. It’s suddenly all so bloody obvious. What, after all, did that young, blindsighted invalid see when he saw me, in the murk and leafy confusion of the lane behind the hotel?

He saw Mum.

‘Good afternoon.’ And his hand worked at his fly and his erection slid into the light.

Vaux, blindsighted, navigating his crudely pixellated world, had never intended to assault me. It wasn’t me he pushed onto his knees, or made obey him in the dirt and weeds of a clearing marked out by rusting white goods. In Vaux’s mind it was Mum he forced that day. Or not even forced. Played with. Enjoyed. For all I know, it was a game they had played before. (Gabby said, ‘Who knows what your mum got up to?’)

Later, of course, the truth must have come out, which is why Vaux quit the hotel.

And on the platform of our quiet railway station, as he waited for his train, who did he see standing beside him?

Mum?

No.

Someone like her, but—

Heavy boots. Shorn hair. (‘You feel like a man,’ I’d said to her, pulling away for the last time.)

Vaux mistook her for me!

What happened then? At what point did Vaux realise he had mistaken us again – taken mother for son as, weeks earlier, he had taken son for mother?

Was it Vaux watching me that night, as I pushed my mother’s corpse into the waters rushing by the mill? Who else could it have been?

Click-clack.

‘Are you done in there?’

Abruptly, painfully, I come to. ‘Yes, Poppy.’

‘What?’ Amber rattles the doorknob.

Oh, Jesus Christ. ‘Amber. Yes, Amber. I mean. Yes.’