Magdalena’s end was as unglamorous as it was well deserved. It was the end of June in 2015, not much past eight am. Sebastian was in the bedroom, lying back on his bed reading that week’s obituary in The Economist (the flat they had rented for these days in Florence, on Via del Oche 2, was a neat and spacious affair – just yards from Santa Maria dei Fiori – with one bedroom containing two queen sized beds. They had not shared a bed for over thirty years; this was the comfortable and customary arrangement). He had picked up the other two pillows that he had pushed onto the floor the night before and set them up behind his head to bolster himself onto a comfortable position for reading. He knocked his head back a couple of times to adjust the fluff of the pillows and tucked his pajama shirt back into its trousers with his left hand, ever so discretely and taking the opportunity to re-shuffle, whilst waving the magazine with his right hand as he searched for comfort. He pushed his glasses up beyond the bridge of his nose, wrinkled it and slightly shook his head to let them slide to where they should be and then wriggled his body into the bed-sheets that little extra bit…

At this point he heard a deafening crash, like shelves collapsing under the weight of all the crockery in the flat, followed by a sickening dull thud. This sat him up and he called to Magdalena with urgency. No answer. Then the unmistakable hiss of running water gushing free under pressure…

Twenty-three and a half years earlier Eric was halfway through his first term at ENSBA and had resolved to pull a “sicky” for the week that Mariana would be there. It was a Friday at the beginning of November and she would be landing in the early evening. He had spent the afternoon sketching street scenes just across the Pont de Sully and around the Institut du Monde Arabe. He was having a hard time staying focused. The day had been overcast and cold and the apertures in the southern windows of the Arab Institute had remained opened at maximum all afternoon. As the sun prepared to set it, broke underneath the cloud barrier and shone a golden beam on the building from askance, for about fifteen minutes, causing all the apertures to contract. At about the time he thought Mariana must have been getting into town, he packed his drawing materials into his pack, dived into the metro and rushed off west towards Victor Hugo to meet Mariana at her cousin’s parents house in the 16th. Laura answered the door and got a peck on the cheek on the fly as he lunged onto Mariana who was standing just behind. The first thing she said to him was “you smell funny” as she tweaked her nose, her fingertips lightly drumming his back. He let the comment pass.

Six weeks earlier he had arrived in Paris on a Sunday evening with his entire luggage and been met at Orly by his uncle Guy. Mariana had been to see him off at the airport along with his mother and he had promised to call her without fail on the following Wednesday. Guy drove him back to theirs where Louise and the girls were waiting with smiles and a hot meal. They briefly sat around catching up on each other’s latest before he was shown the guest room. Guy would be driving him into university halls first thing next morning for registration and induction. The room had a small TV and, as he felt restless and quite wide-awake, he sat up watching American wrestling on late night television – smoking one cigarette after another – until well past four. Three days later he bought himself a 100 Franc phone card and called Mariana, as planned, from one of the phones in the foyer of his halls of residence. It may well have been an unfortunate coincidence but he was surprised to find her croaking voice answering the phone as if she had spent the last four days crying. “Eric! What is going on? Why haven’t you called?”

Over the years Eric had often looked back at the events of that autumn and winter and had learnt to read them with wiser and more accepting eyes. He ceased to remember some particular and painfully vivid moments, as the relationship – soon after November – had begun to crack and splinter into shards, and accepted that its end had always been inevitable. He had been a young man blinded by a first love he would have happily died for, as he knew no better. Even twenty-five years later – after countless other relationships and a divorce he had found particularly taxing – he could not find fault with the purity of his feelings whilst accepting how naïve he had been. Yet there was something about the events of those awful months that he had never managed to rinse from his palate; the taste of necrotic decay – something putrid being squeezed in between the cracks – that seemed imposed from without. Even at that time its interference had been as tangible as it had been incomprehensible to him and its manifestations resulted in the strangest of repercussions he would never have envisioned in the darkest of dreams. The rambling five-page letter he received from Mariana that Sunday in late February, upon his return from an academic trip to London, was the end of it; those so-called “marching orders” that Magdalena had been dreaming of for so long. All that previous week in London something dreadful had resonated within him, night and day, flooding his thoughts with images of what was being performed back home in his absence.

Magdalena was woken up that morning in Florence by a finger of sunlight that had crept under the blinds and poked her rudely in the nose. She sat up, blinking a bit with those pig-like eyes of hers, and looked over at Sebastian in the other bed with habitual indifference. She got up, snatched her cigarettes and lighter from on top of the chest of drawers, and made her way to the bathroom, locking the door behind her, before hiking up her nightgown and sitting down on the lavatory. The nicotine soon loosened her bowls and she sat there, blowing smoke rings and staring blankly at the door, not two feet from the end of her face, as she passed one stone-like turd after another.

In the previous weeks, the owner of the flat had had complaints from other tenants that not only had the cistern been leaking water onto the bathroom floor but it was also balancing rather dangerously at something of an angle and seemed to be in danger of coming off the wall. He sent his factotum to fix it – between one let and another – giving him express instructions to also put a brick in the cistern.

Magdalena dropped the cigarette between her legs and reached back with her left hand, without looking, to pull the chain. It made a tremendous racket but she noticed that not all was gone and that she would need to flush again. She remained seated whist the plumbing coughed and spluttered itself to a stop. The second time she pulled the chain the cistern came clean off the wall and smashed her in the back of the head – breaking into dozens of shards – projecting her forwards and smacking her face against the door. Her lifeless body, facedown with her knickers around her left ankle and her nightdress hiked up above her waist, jammed the door shut. Water gushed everywhere.